Crime and policing
Christmas tree or Easter egg, it’s quite a bill
The Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has presented her long-awaited Crime and Policing Bill to parliament. As you might expect from a bill of 137 clauses and 17 schedules, its long title is very long indeed:
There are also explanatory notes running to 168 pages. These begin with an overview:
The Crime and Policing Bill supports the delivery of the government’s safer streets mission to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls in a decade and increase public confidence in policing and the wider criminal justice system.
It aims to support neighbourhood policing and give the police the powers they need to tackle anti-social behaviour, crime and terrorism, whilst introducing reforms to ensure that law enforcement agencies perform to the highest standards expected by the public and focus on front-line policing.
The bill gives effect to or supports the implementation of the following specific commitments in the Labour Party’s 2024 manifesto to:
• “[introduce] new respect orders”;
• “scrap the effective immunity for some shoplifting… and create a new specific offence for assaults on shopworkers that will protect them from threats and violence”;
• “introduce a new offence of criminal exploitation of children, to go after the gangs who are luring young people into violence and crime”;
• “strengthen the use of stalking protection orders and give women the right to know the identity of online stalkers”; and
• “introduce a new criminal offence for spiking to help police better respond to this crime”.
But readers may prefer to start with a government press notice that promises to “take back our streets” after “powers to combat antisocial behaviour and shoplifting have been weakened” over the past 14 years and “the justice system has been allowed to grind to a halt”.
The Home Office has published an overarching factsheet which acknowledges that some of its measures build on parts of the Conservatives’ Criminal Justice Bill that were supported by the present government while Labour was in opposition. That bill never got as far as the House of Lords and lapsed when the general election was called last summer.
There are also individual factsheets dealing with
antisocial behaviour (including fly-tipping);
child criminal exploitation and “cuckooing” (taking over a dwelling);
child sexual abuse material (with new Border Force unlock powers);
counter-terrorism and national security (limiting access to knives);
recommendations by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse;
international cooperation (including data sharing);
Ministry of Justice issues (sexual activity with a corpse);
knife crime (cutlery may be seized from your kitchen);
management of offenders (restrictions on some name changes);
police powers (AirTag obviates magistrates’ search warrant);
policing accountability and integrity (chief constables can appeal);
proceeds of crime (SIM farms to be banned);
public order (no monument climbing, flares or masks);
retail crime (perceived immunity for theft under £200 to be abolished);
reducing violence against women and girls (protection against stalking)
serious crime (suspension of domain names and IP addresses); and
spiking (including offensive substances).
Then there’s an 88-page memorandum explaining how the bill complies with the human rights convention; an impact assessment estimating the cost of the criminal law measures at £97m over 10 years (some of which will be spent on providing “an additional 13 to 55 prison places”); another impact assessment (much cheaper); a delegated powers memorandum and four economic notes.
A bill like this is often called a Christmas tree because ministers hang all sorts of baubles on it before it’s unveiled. But, as I’ve suggested, it also contains a few Easter eggs — unheralded surprises that you may have to hunt for.
I plan to examine some of the bill’s detailed provisions in the coming weeks.