THE Government's latest plans to tackle youth knife crime were criticised as "half-baked" as it emerged that some of them were first outlined over a month ago.

The announcement of a new "get tough" policy against knife criminals was made by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith yesterday.

It came just hours after Paul Gilligan, aged 31, was stabbed to death at the Pepper Alley pub in Crown Street, Bolton, early on Sunday morning, putting the town in the media spotlight.

It was one of five stabbing incidents in Bolton over the weekend.

Ms Smith said that those caught with a knife would be confronted with stab victims on A&E wards and taken on prison visits to meet inmates jailed for knife offences.

These measures were introduced in a Home Office press release on "tough new sanctions to tackle knife crime" last month.

Lib-Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said US research had found that showing teenagers the consequences of other people's crimes did not work.

He said: "Jacqui Smith is coming up with half-baked ideas because the Government has been in denial about the scale of the knife crime problem.

"Only a month ago, the Home Secretary denied that knife crime had got worse despite hospital admission figures released to the Liberal Democrats showing a shocking rise in teenage victims.

"Now she has been panicked into suggesting a plan that has already been tried and has failed in the United States, as the criminological evidence clearly shows.

"When offenders are confronted with their own victims, such restorative justice can have a real impact in creating remorse and changing behaviour.

"But general programmes to show teenagers the consequences of other people's crimes do not work and, indeed, have proved to be counter-productive."

He called for more police in high-risk areas, intensive policing of knife crime hotspots and police visits and videos for schools to discourage pupils from carrying a blade.

On June 5, Ms Smith and Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a series of new measures to tackle knife violence. Among them was a proposal for youth offending teams to look at working with hospitals to create "day-long courses for young offenders convicted of knife-related offences, led by health professionals, to educate them about the injuries caused by knife crime".

Youth offending teams would also "explore prison visits as a new element to youth referral orders, to bring home the potential consequences of being caught and prosecuted for knife crime".

Ms Smith yesterday rejected calls from the Conservatives for anyone found carrying a knife to expect to receive a custodial sentence.

Enver Solomon, deputy director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College London, welcomed her stance. "I think she's right about the fact that just putting kids in prison for carrying knives is not really a solution," he said.

l Knife attacks are becoming more vicious, while both victims and assailants alike are getting younger, the senior police officer charged with tackling the problem has warned. Scotland Yard Deputy Assistant Commissioner Alf Hitchcock said that while offenders and their victims were once typically in their late teens or early 20s, now they were more likely to be in their mid or even early teens.

At the same time, he said that police were seeing an "intensification in the severity" in the attacks being carried out.

The new measures will be focused particularly on eight "hotspot" police areas - Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside, London, West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Essex and Thames Valley.