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The government has published its long trailed Crime and Policing Bill which sets out how it will deliver the Safer Streets Mission to reduce anti-social behaviour, knife crime and violence against women and girls while boosting neighbourhood policing.
The 332-page bill started its parliamentary journey this week and because of its extensive scope, it is likely to take at least a year before it will become law.
The bill includes ‘respect orders,’ a court mandated, time-limited approach to deal with anti-social behaviour. This amends existing anti-social behaviour legislation previously introduced in 2014. In addition to this, the bill also includes measures to tackle fly tipping and a ban on possessing or distributing electronic devices used to carry out vehicle theft. It will also introduce a new offence of assaulting a retail worker.
Halving knife crime within ten years is a Labour Party manifesto commitment and the bill brings in range of measures to reduce access to knives, including introducing a new criminal offence of possessing a bladed article with the intent to cause harm.
As part of a drive to increase neighbourhood policing, the government made a manifesto commitment to recruit a further 13,000 police officers, PCSOs and call handlers dedicated to dealing with domestic abuse calls. Last week, the government announced a pilot scheme called Raneem’s Law where domestic abuse advisors are now working in police forces in the West Midlands, Northumbria, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Humberside.
The Labour Party manifesto pledged to do more to tackle violence against women and girls and through the bill the government is introducing a raft of measures that include criminalising the taking of intimate images, strengthening stalking protection orders and reforming the ability of the police to manage registered sex offenders. Drink spiking will become a criminal offence under the new law.
Child criminal exploitation will become an offence and the bill will target what the government says is an ‘alarming’ rise in the use of AI-models optimised to produce child sexual abuse material by banning the possession of AI tools to create, share or distribute sexual images of children.
The wide-ranging bill covers powers for the police to enter premises to search for and seize electronically tracked stolen goods and a range of measures to tackle economic crime. It also includes new public order powers, with a provision to ban the deliberate use of face coverings to conceal a person’s identity during a protest.
The bill applies to England and Wales with some impact on Scotland and Northern Ireland where policing is a devolved matter. The impact assessment published alongside the draft bill suggests that the cost of implementing all the measures is £48.65m per year, with ‘benefits of ‘estimated monetised annual benefit is £11.81 million.’
Responding to publication of the bill, Association of Police and Crime Commissioners‘ Chair Emily Spurrell focused on funding. She said: “PCCs support the government’s Safer Streets mission but increased powers must be matched with resourcing if policing is to deliver a better service to the public. We acknowledge the financial challenges the government faces, but if the measures in this bill are to prove effective, resourcing must extend to the courts and prisons which are buckling under the strain of increased demand and a broken justice system.”
Read the government’s factsheet on the bill here – Crime and Policing Bill: overarching factsheet.
