The Crime and Policing Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 30 April. Ministers have been queuing up to claim credit. The Home Secretary calls it the biggest overhaul of policing powers in a generation. The reality is far more modest — and far less comforting to the millions of Britons who feel that law and order has quietly slipped away.
What the Act Actually Does
Strip out the press releases and the new Act contains a handful of genuinely sensible measures: a specific offence for assaulting retail workers, "respect orders" allowing police to ban repeat offenders from town centres, and new tools to tackle online stalking. There is also a pledge to recruit 13,000 additional neighbourhood officers by the end of this parliament. None of that is bad. But almost none of it tackles the actual problem.
The problem is not a shortage of laws. It is the near-total collapse in the enforcement of the ones we already had. Shoplifting under £200 is, in practice, decriminalised in most of the country. Burglary clear-up rates sit in single digits in some forces. Whole categories of antisocial behaviour go unrecorded because residents have given up reporting them. Passing another Act of Parliament does not change a single one of those facts.
Symbolic Politics, Real-World Crime
"Respect orders" sound robust until you ask the practical question: who will enforce them? The same overstretched, demoralised neighbourhood teams who already cannot respond to crimes that are happening in front of them? Police forces across the country have been gutted by years of poor pay, paperwork creep and political interference. Adding another civil order to their workload does not solve that.
The new offence of assaulting a retail worker is welcome. But it should never have been needed. A baseline-functioning state should not require fresh primary legislation every time it becomes clear that the existing law is no longer enforced. The fact that Parliament is having to spell out, in 2026, that you should not punch a shop assistant tells you everything you need to know about how far the bar has fallen.
13,000 Officers — Promised By Whom?
The 13,000 new neighbourhood officers pledged in the Act sound impressive until you remember that successive governments have promised tens of thousands of officers and then quietly disappeared them again through retirements, transfers and reassignments to non-frontline duties. Labour has not committed the funding that would make this number credible. It has not addressed the recruitment crisis or the dropout rate. It has not said where these officers will be based or what they will actually do.
If you live in a town where the local police station has been closed, where the response time to a domestic burglary is measured in days, and where antisocial youths control the high street after dark — this Act will change nothing in your life.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would treat law and order as the first duty of government. That means restoring proper, visible neighbourhood policing. It means ending the use of police time on non-crime hate incidents and speech offences and redirecting it to the burglaries, robberies and assaults that ruin ordinary lives. It means making genuine, full-fat prosecution the default response to repeat offenders, not the exception.
The British public is not asking for clever new orders. They are asking for the basics: a copper they recognise, a station that is open, a justice system that punishes criminals, and streets they can walk down at night. Labour's new Act gestures at all of that. Reform UK would actually deliver it.