The Criminal Justice Act 1988 (Offensive Weapons) (Amendment, Surrender and Compensation) Order 2024 is a Statutory Instrument that was made on 30 April 2024 to tackle knife crime. Parts 1 and 3 of it came into force on 26 June 2024, Part 4 came into force on 26 August 2024 and Part 2 will come into force on 24 September 2024. Part 2 contains two references to measurement. One refers to the length of a weapon’s blade and the other refers to the distance of the serrated cutting edge from a blade’s handle. And they are both in inches.
Part 2 contains the amendment of the Criminal Justice Act (Offensive Weapons) Order 1988. It defines the specific amendments to the Act. Here is the relevant text that uses inches in the amended legislation. This section inserts some text into the Act and includes the following text:
(iii) a blade of over 8 inches in length (the length of the blade being the straight-line distance from the top of the handle to the tip of the blade)
In another section in Part 2, the following text is also inserted:
(a) a serrated cutting edge (other than a serrated cutting edge of up to 2 inches next to the handle)
In July 2024, the Government also published the guidance for the Statutory Instrument that amends the Act. This is called the “Guidance for surrender of ‘zombie-style’ knives and ‘zombie-style’ machetes and claiming compensation”.
It seems that the Government is following the convention of using inch-based descriptions of knives and machetes. Why are they not leading by example and using metric units? It would cost nothing to banish all uses of imperial units from all legislation by replacing them with metric units through statutory instruments. Why is there a lack of commitment by British politicians to use metric units exclusively in legislation? It would help the UK to move to a single system of measurements that is used for all purposes in the UK and remove the need for Britons to cope with two competing systems of measurement.
Metric Views 
Ronnie, you are quite right about metric units that should be in all legislation.
The one thing I would add is that the population has more contact with road signs than legislation. I do hope there is a way to convince Labour to quickly switch distance signs to metric, all warning and advisory signs to metric only as well, and then come up with a plan to convert speed limit signs in a single go.
Hope springs eternal? I hope to live long enough to see that in the UK. As for my own country, well, that will likely happen after I am gone. 😦
Ezra aka punditgi
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