Bladed articles and offensive weapons

This targeted data collection ran in two waves before and after the publication and launch of the Bladed articles and offensive weapons definitive guidelines in June 2018.

The pre guideline data collection ran between 1 November 2017 and 30 March 2018 and the post guideline data collection ran between 23 April 2019 and 30 September 2019. Sentencers in all magistrates’ courts in England and Wales were asked to fill in a form when sentencing offences of possession of a bladed article or offensive weapon, where this was the principal offence. The data collection was mostly administered online via the Council’s website, although a small number of paper forms were circulated and filled in for the pre-guideline data collection, in an attempt to boost response rates.

This publication contains two cleaned datasets for the pre and post guideline periods, which have been checked for disclosure issues.

This data has been analysed and presented in the guideline evaluation for bladed articles and offensive weapons, which has been published alongside these data. There are also several documents which are published alongside the datasets to help users understand them.

The documents contained in this publication are:

If you require any of these documents in an alternative format, please contact research@sentencingcouncil.gov.uk