Key points

Theresa May spoke about knife crime and said the deaths of two teenagers at the weekend had shocked everyone. More needed to be done to tackle the causes of violence and ensure young people’s safety, she said. She will hold a summit at No 10 to address the issue.

Jeremy Corbyn began by talking about International Women’s Day and said Labour would make the case for closing the gender pay gap. He congratulated the former Labour MP Luciana Berger, now part of the Independent Group, on giving birth to a son.

Corbyn paid tribute to the two stabbed teenagers, Jodie Chesney and Yousef Makki, and said knife crime was at its highest level ever. He asked what extra funding would be made available to fight it.

On the subject of Women’s Day, May said she hoped the MP Rachel Reeves’s book Women of Westminster would inspire more women to go into politics, and she congratulated the England women’s football team on beating Japan.

May said too many young lives had been cut short. Root causes must be addressed and police must have enough powers, drug crime must be tackled and young people must be turned away from violence. That was what the government was doing, she said.

Corbyn quoted the police chief Sara Thornton, who said the government should show more leadership. He asked why the defence secretary had suggested sending in the military to tackle knife crime.

May noted that Thornton had said the police could not arrest their way out of this. She summarised government initiatives on knife crime and said the government was ensuring the police had the right resources. More money was being spent on the police, she said, but it was also about understanding the use of drugs.

Corbyn said police clearly did not have the resources they needed, and he listed measures that had been cut. He said May should listen to the former chief prosecutor in Manchester who said police cuts meant there was not the intelligence to stop crime happening. Would May restore police numbers? May said the government was spending more money on the police and asked why Labour opposed this.

Corbyn said constituents were telling him about a lack of police on the streets. When would towns get the resources they need? May said it was also about increasing police powers, something she said Corbyn had voted against.

Corbyn said crime had gone down under Labour. Officers had told him there were simply not enough of them on the streets. He also said crimes by offenders on parole had risen since probation was privatised. Did the government accept that privatising probation had been a disaster and should be reversed? May said the level of reoffending was being reduced and the government had introduced measures that were working.

Corbyn said violent crime had doubled, driven by austerity. Police numbers had been cut, youth and children’s services were in crisis, schools and colleges had closed and exclusions were rising. He asked whether May could see that she could not keep communities safe on the cheap.

May said the government was putting more money into schools, local authorities and the police. She said Corbyn talked about austerity but his policies would take Britain back to square one.

Snap verdict

It is hard to see how the government can win on knife crime – it is a story that understandably and rightly dominates the news headlines, and where parents are easily persuaded there is a clear link between a rising risk to their children and government cuts – so today’s exchanges offered something of a free hit to Corbyn.

He did not exactly wipe the floor with May, but he was comfortably ahead on most of the exchanges and he succeeded in his key goal of linking knife crime to austerity and hanging responsibility around May’s neck. When he was elected as Labour leader, even his most ardent supporters would have hesitated before predicting he would outperform the Tories on law and order, but it happened at the general election when terrorist attacks made police cuts a headline issue, and it may well be happening again.

Perhaps he could have gone harder on May’s responsibility for falling police numbers because of decisions she took as home secretary. It was hard to tell whether he chose not to because he did not want to personalise this too much, or whether it was because he just wasn’t being forensic. For May, it could have all been a lot, lot worse.

Downing Street’s decision to refine its line on Tuesday meant May did not really get the hammering on “no direct correlation” between police numbers and violent crime some might have expected, and her summit announcement and patient explanation of the linked-up factors explaining knife crime deserved a hearing. She was advocating just the “holistic” approach Corbyn was demanding in his final question.

Her points about Labour’s voting record struck home too. But she was less persuasive on her general claims about spending going up: Labour MPs were jeering loudly because in some respects she seemed to be referring to little more than standard, inflation-driving spending increases, not real-terms ones. (Government spending is always going up, in other words.)

In her final response, May launched into a wider attack on Labour’s economic plans. But her argument that “spending more to end austerity will cause more austerity” needs a bit more work. You know what she means, but as she set out this case on Wednesday it just sounded contradictory.

Memorable lines

Jeremy Corbyn:

You cannot keep communities safe on the cheap, by cuts and privatisation. You have to invest in all of our communities, in every part of this country – something this government is incapable of doing.

Theresa May’s response: