More than £18m extra is to be spent on tackling knife crime and gun and gang culture over the next two years, the home secretary, Theresa May, announced today.
She said the funding was being made available "on the back of" a report into knife crime, published today, by former EastEnders actor Brooke Kinsella, whose brother, Ben, was stabbed to death at the age of 16 three years ago.
The report by Kinsella, who was appointed as an adviser on knife crime to the home secretary last year, calls for anti-knife crime presentations in schools and more preventative work to stop teenagers getting involved in knife and gun crime and a scheme to tackle the "fear and fashion factor" of carrying knives.
"Brooke Kinsella has done a great job in highlighting what works and what could work better in trying to achieve that," the home secretary said today.
"Off the back of Brooke's recommendations, we will invest money into changing attitudes and behaviour, alongside being tough on those who persist in being involved in senseless crimes."
At the London launch of her report today, Kinsella said: "People aren't shocked any more by the stabbing of a child, and that is not right. There is no more time for talk. I really believe the problem of knife crime has escalated in the past few years, and the impact it has on communities and families is devastating."
She said local knife crime projects needed more stable funding so they could plan ahead with fewer box-ticking regulations.
The former EastEnders actor said prevention was the keyword, and schools needed to take the problem more seriously with children as young as 10 given anti-knife crime awareness lessons in schools.
Kinsella said: "While seven may be deemed too young for some of the content I experienced in the projects I visited, it seems to be the majority opinion that education and awareness needs to start at primary school level, particularly in the last year before they move up to secondary school and become more susceptible to peer pressure and influence."
There were also "gaps" in the projects available, she said, and more work to tackle knife-wielding girl gangs was also needed.
She was particularly impressed by a "Fear and Fashion project" run in London, which used workshops and games led by young people with experience of knife crime to get young people to explore and understand the reasons why they might carry a weapon.
She also said the negative portrayal of young people in the media as if they were all criminals meant it was also important to give them better things to aspire to with an awards ceremony for young people.
May, announcing the details of the extra £18m, said that at a time of tight budgets, some issues such as knife crime were too important not to fund.
The money includes £10m to prevent teenagers being sucked into knife and gun gang culture, £4m for a "communities against gangs, guns and knives' fund", and £3.75m for the worst-hit areas in London, Manchester and the West Midlands, which account for more than half of all knife crimes.
A further £1m is to be spent on developing anti-knife crime materials for schools and £250,000 will go for one further year to the Ben Kinsella fund set up in memory of Brooke's brother to help teenagers set up anti-knife crime projects.
He died in June 2008 after a fight in a bar spilled out onto the streets of Islington. Kinsella began working on the knife crime project with the Conservatives before the general election and spent July and August talking to project workers and community leaders about the problem.
At the weekend, a teenager became the UK's latest victim of knife crime when he was fatally stabbed in front of a stationary bus full of passengers in south London.
Daniel Thompson Graham, 18, was repeatedly knifed near East Dulwich railway station in the early hours of Saturday morning.
The latest crime figures show the number of incidents involving knives fell by 6% to 29,288 over the last year but showed there were 202 fatal stabbings, the same number as the year before.