Rejected petition: To ban and block grey markets/illegal knife websites in the UK
Rejected on
The government must use skilled IT and non-generative AI to regulate grey markets/illegal sites. Ensure that these illegal websites are thoroughly checked to make sure that they are gone for good.
Do not restrict social media as it is not the issue. The real issue is that there are many illegal websites that young people can access to purchase illegal knives, so removing these grey markets will reduce knife crime and make the UK safer to live in.
Why was this petition rejected?
It’s about something that the UK Government or Parliament is not directly responsible for.
We can only accept petitions about things the Government or Parliament are directly responsible for.
It is the responsibility of the police to enforce the law on the online sale of knives, not the UK Government or Parliament.
If there is something that you would like the UK Government or Parliament to do to prevent young people buying knives online, you could start a petition about that.
You may be interested in what the Government has already done in relation to the online sale of knives.
The Government commissioned an independent review into the online sale of knives in 2024. Its report was published in 2025: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-end-to-end-review-of-online-knife-sales
After the report, the Government introduced stricter rules for the online sale of knives: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ronans-law-to-see-toughest-crackdown-yet-on-knife-sales-online
The Government consulted on introducing a licensing system for the online sale of knives from December 2025 - February 2026: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/licensing-for-knife-sales/licensing-for-knife-sales-accessible
The Minister for Policing and Crime made a statement on knife crime on 14 April 2026. During the debate, the Minister said:
"The brilliant investigative police officers at the new National Knife Crime Centre will be investigating the sale of knives online. That will be a focused piece of policing work, and the Government are providing £1.7 million for it. Those officers will look at the sale of knives online and go after the people who are selling them illegally. Increasingly, we are seeing young people in the grey market buying knives in bulk and selling them to each other. We are going to make that very difficult for people to do, but where it does happen—where knives are coming in from countries that they should not be coming from, where age verification checks are not being done, and where companies are making money in a way that is not legal—we will come down on them like a ton of bricks."
You can read the full statement and debate here: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-04-14/debates/D653ADFD-F14B-4162-A34A-0B5C92FEB1D4/KnifeCrime
You can find out more about the National Knife Crime Centre here: https://www.npcc.police.uk/our-work/work-of-npcc-committees/Crime-Operations-coordination-committee/national-knife-crime-centre/
We only reject petitions that don’t meet the petition standards.