Barnet Knife Crime Up 22%, the Biggest Rise in London

Barnet recorded 408 knife crime offences in the 12 months to August, up 22 per cent on 334 a year earlier. That is the biggest rise of any of London’s 32 boroughs on our count of Metropolitan Police figures, while City Hall puts the fall across London at 9.7 per cent.

The earlier year was a low point, though. Barnet’s total was 398 in the year to March 2025, so the latest figure is only 10 offences above that.

The figures sit behind an announcement from the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. On 23 October he said his Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) would reach its one millionth Londoner that month, and that hospital admissions of young people for knife assault had fallen by 55 per cent since it was set up in 2019. City Hall’s release does not mention Barnet, so we went to the data underneath it.

Barnet’s figures

These are our totals from the Met’s monthly crime data, for the same period City Hall used.

Ealing had the next biggest rise in knife crime, 6.8 per cent. Nine boroughs rose in all. Those are counts, not rates, and Barnet’s 408 offences were the 18th highest of the 32.

The Met has since added September, and the picture holds. Barnet’s knife crime total for the 12 months is still 408, against 335 a year earlier. Offences with injury stand at 91, against 78, and young victims at 36, against 30. Personal robbery is 629, against 464.

Why the 22 per cent needs care

Rolling the 12-month total forward month by month shows a fall followed by a climb. The Met says it reviewed how it records knife offences from April 2024 onwards, so these are the earliest clean 12-month totals we can give.

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So the total dropped by 70 offences to December 2025, then rose by 80. Across the two financial years, it went from 398 in 2024/25 to 369 in 2025/26. The climb is recent, and most of it comes after the period the council’s latest annual report covers.

Ward by ward

The Met publishes knife crime down to ward level. Burnt Oak and West Hendon account for 38 of the borough’s extra 74 offences.

Ward totals are small, so a few incidents can move them a long way. They add up to 406 for the latest year, two short of the borough figure. They count where offences were recorded, not where the people involved live.

How Barnet compares with its neighbours

Of the five London boroughs next to Barnet, only Brent also rose.

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City Hall measures its longer-term progress against 2018/19, the year before the VRU began. On that test Barnet is down on both measures we can compare.

• Violence with injury: Barnet fell from 2,325 offences to 1,866, down 19.7 per cent. London fell by 15.9 per cent.
• Personal robbery: Barnet fell from 777 offences to 635, down 18.3 per cent. London fell by 28.7 per cent.

The Barnet figures compare 2018/19 with the 12 months to August 2026, using the Met’s older file and the current one. The Met says a change to its crime classifications in October 2025 affected the groupings for violence against the person.

What the VRU has done in Barnet

The release gives no figure for how many of the one million live in the borough. But the 2025-26 annual report on serious violence to Barnet’s Safer Communities Partnership Board names two projects funded by the VRU, and says both have ended.

• My Ends Next Generation, run by Art Against Knives and based in Finchley, combined outreach, mentoring, school work and creative projects. It engaged 234 young people in 2025-26, and the report says 86 per cent of them referred themselves or came through a friend. “This VRU-funded project has now concluded,” the report says.
• Secure My Stuff aimed to cut robbery affecting young people between 3pm and 6pm, using safety education, mobile CCTV and property registration. It ran 46 outreach sessions and 36 community pop-ups, and the report counts more than 11,000 engagements. It “has now concluded following the end of the funding period”.

We found no published figure for what Barnet currently receives from the VRU. The report says the borough has refreshed its Violence Reduction Plan for 2026-27 in line with the unit’s requirements, and strengthening responses to knife and weapon-related harm is one of its priorities.

What the council’s report found

The report covers the year to March 2026, before most of the recent climb, and describes violence trends as “broadly stable”.

• Serious incidents: Barnet recorded 21 serious incidents involving 25 young people, one incident fewer than the year before. Half involved a knife or bladed article causing injury. None caused life-threatening or life-changing injuries.
• Who was involved: 18 of the 25 were victims. All but two were male. The report says 21 were open to Children and Family Services at the time, and 56 per cent were looked after children.
• Where: Edgware and Finchley had the most, with three each, and five took place outside the borough. Nine of the 21 happened on a high street.
• Burnt Oak: the report says it had no such incidents involving young people, and credits place-based policing and partnership work there and in Colindale. That does not contradict the Met’s figures, which count every recorded knife offence at any age. Burnt Oak’s total went from 23 in 2024/25 to 44 in 2025/26.
• Outreach: a separate project paid for through the Serious Violence Duty delivered 1,811 hours of outreach, reaching 1,873 people under 25. Recent work has focused on Finchley, Burnt Oak and Golders Green.
• Victim support: the borough’s Victim Care Hub took 147 referrals and supported 121 victims.

Barnet also has two knife surrender bins, and the report gives the year’s totals. The bin at Mary Immaculate and St George the Great on Union Street took 503 knives, 18 of them classed as weapons including 2 swords, plus one suspected firearm. The Bunns Lane bin in NW7, installed in June 2025, took 80 knives, 4 of them classed as weapons.

What City Hall is claiming

The headline number needs unpacking. The release says the VRU has reached one million “young Londoners”, but its breakdown is three-quarters of a million young people plus 250,000 parents, carers, youth workers and professionals who have had training or support. That covers just over seven years and more than £140m of investment.

City Hall’s analysis of violence in London sets out the London figures:

• Hospital admissions of under-25s after assault with a knife or sharp object: 260 in the 12 months to July 2026, down 55.6 per cent on 2018/19. The fall for England outside the Met’s area was 48 per cent.
• Violence with injury: 65,678 offences in the 12 months to August 2026, 12,429 fewer than in 2018/19, although it rose by 1.3 per cent in the latest year.
• Gun crime: 1,725 offences, down 27.8 per cent on 2018/19.
• Personal robbery: 22,760 offences, down 28.7 per cent on 2018/19.
• Knife crime: 13,648 offences, down 9.7 per cent on the previous 12 months. City Hall says knife crime cannot be compared with the years before the VRU, because the Met changed how it records the data from April 2024.

The NHS admissions figures are published by police force area, so there is no Barnet number.

The release also lists hospital-based youth workers, who City Hall says have guided 75 per cent of young people away from further harm; youth workers in custody suites, who have connected with nearly 17,000 young people; 60,000 targeted interventions through MyEnds; and London’s Inclusion Charter on school exclusions. City Hall says exclusion doubles a young person’s risk of being involved in violence within 12 months.

What they said

Sadiq Khan said: “I set up the Violence Reduction Unit just over seven years ago because of a clear and long-held view that we cannot arrest our way out of violence. Violent crime is preventable, not inevitable.”

He added: “Hospital admissions of young people for knife assault are down by more than half, and there are thousands of fewer victims of violence and gun crime, but I’m clear there is more to do to reduce violence and exploitation.”

The release blames national cuts to youth services between 2010 and 2019 for the rise in violence that followed, and the Mayor wants ministers to commit to consistent, multi-year funding. He said: “We are turning the tide in our efforts to tackle violence and look forward to working with the Government in order to realise our shared national ambition of halving knife crime, supported by a long-term, multi-year financial backing that our communities deserve.”

Lib Peck, the VRU’s director, said: “History shows what happens when you cut the very services working to prevent violence and so it’s crucial that we keep the momentum up so that every young person in London is safe and supported to thrive.”

Martin Griffiths, a consultant trauma surgeon at Barts Health NHS Trust and Clinical Director of the Violence Reduction Network for the NHS in London, said: “A 55 per cent fall in young people admitted to hospital for knife assault is welcome news. Every one of those injuries is a tragedy however, but behind this fall are young Londoners who are safer and families spared the worst day of their lives.”

What it means for you

London’s trend is not, at the moment, Barnet’s. The borough still records fewer knife offences than most of its neighbours, and its violence and robbery totals remain below 2018/19, but knife crime here has climbed through most of this year and offences with injury are up too.

City Hall’s figures cannot tell you what the VRU has achieved in Barnet, and neither can ours. A rise after two funded projects ended does not show that their ending caused it, and we have no evidence either way.

Barnet’s Safer Communities Partnership Board is due to receive an update on the Violence Reduction Action Plan on Friday 27 November. The Met updates its borough figures each month, so anyone can check these numbers as they change.