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Knife Crime

I was tempted to intervene earlier, when the hon. Gentleman traduced Liberal Democrat policy on stop-and-search. However, it is obvious that community sentencing will not be effective unless it is properly supervised, and we need a probation service that does that. Surely that is a more sensible way of spending taxpayers' money than short-term custodial sentences. There seems to be general agreement between hon. Members of all parties that they are ineffective, lead to high reoffending rates and can be counter-productive if those serving them learn skills that we do not want them to have.