The surge in knife crime, described by senior police officers as a national emergency, has prompted calls for troops to be deployed and fuelled a political row about government cuts.

Is knife crime at its highest level ever?

After 2007, when 48 children and teenagers were killed by blades in England and Wales, the annual number of deaths subsided until 2014. Since then figures have risen again, with 39 deaths in 2017 and 37 last year. So far in 2019, 11 teenagers have died from stabbings, six of them in London. Most of the killings have been in big cities – in the capital and Birmingham. (Greater Manchester and Sunderland have each had one such death to date this year.)

Why is knife crime rising so fast?

Reasons for the increase are disputed. Cuts to police numbers, reduced funding for youth clubs and services, higher secondary school exclusion rates and the growth of county lines drug dealing operations have all been cited as contributory causes. The number of police officers has fallen by more than 20,000 since 2009, though crime rates were higher back then. Nick Davison, an assistant chief constable in Norfolk, has identified the concept of “ultra-violence”, where younger recruits enhance their status within gangs by executing acts of increasingly outrageous savagery.

Is knife crime moving up the political agenda?

The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has chaired a meeting with chief constables at which they indicated they were drawing up demands for £15m in emergency grants to help tackle the crisis. Javid has previously pledged to do everything he can to provide police with the necessary resources. The chancellor, Philip Hammond, has so far resisted calls for fresh money, arguing that police should redirect existing resources into tackling knife crime. The Local Government Association says grants that fund the work of youth offending teams have been halved from £145m in 2010/11 to £71.5m in 2018/19.

What can be done to prevent more deaths?

There have been calls for stronger stop and search powers to deter knife-carrying among youths, although many say this could alienate black youths who have been disproportionately targeted by officers in the past. The supermarket chain Asda said at the weekend it would stop selling single kitchen knives by April; they are the most commonly stolen items, the store said. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has suggested that by following Glasgow’s example it could take 10 years to change street culture among the next generation of children and persuade them that carrying knives is unacceptable.

• This article was amended on 14 March 2019. An earlier version said most teenage stabbing deaths were in big cities – in “the capital, the West Midlands and Yorkshire”. That has been corrected to: the capital and Birmingham.