The Crime and Policing Act 2026 received Royal Assent earlier this month. It is a sprawling 300-clause piece of legislation that promises new powers on anti-social behaviour, offensive weapons, sexual offences, stalking, retail crime, and public order. Some of it is overdue. Some of it is troubling. And the most important question of all — why the police treat some protests and protestors differently from others — is not addressed anywhere in the Act.
What Is Genuinely Good
Credit where it is due. The Act creates new offences for organised shop theft, which has exploded in towns like Preston and Lancashire's market towns over the last three years. Every shopkeeper I speak to has watched gangs lift hundreds of pounds of stock with effective impunity. A specific offence, with serious sentencing guidance, is welcome.
The provisions on offensive weapons — specifically the new restrictions on ninja swords and zombie-style knives — are also sensible. Tightening the rules on sales platforms that allowed these blades to be shipped to teenagers' bedrooms was a long time coming. The Act also strengthens stalking protection orders, which any MP who runs a surgery will tell you saves lives.
The Quiet Expansion of Public Order Powers
The trouble starts in Part 7. The Act gives police new discretionary powers to manage "protest activity likely to cause serious disruption." The definition of "serious disruption" is broad. Too broad. It is the kind of language that, in the wrong hands, ends up being applied to a peaceful demonstration outside a council chamber and not to a coordinated road block on the M25.
This matters because we have just lived through two years of two-tier policing. The country watched, week after week, as one set of protestors were waved through while another set were arrested for silently holding a sign. The new Act does not fix that. It just gives the same chief constables more discretion. More discretion exercised by the same culture produces the same result.
What the Act Doesn't Do
It does nothing about non-crime hate incidents — the bureaucratic invention that has police officers ringing pensioners over Facebook posts while burglaries go uninvestigated. It does nothing about the College of Policing's diversity training programmes that consume officer hours that should be on the street. It does nothing about the fact that, in 2025, more police time was spent policing speech than policing shoplifting.
Above all, it does nothing to restore neighbourhood policing. There is no statutory requirement for a minimum officer presence per ward. No commitment that a 999 call gets a response within a defined window. The Act gives the police more powers without forcing them to use the ones they already have.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would scrap non-crime hate incidents in their entirety. We would mandate that every burglary receives a police visit and a forensic attempt at investigation — not a crime number issued over the phone and a closed file. We would restore properly funded neighbourhood policing teams with named officers per ward, accountable to the local council and the local public.
We would also legislate explicitly against two-tier enforcement. The same rules, applied to the same conduct, regardless of the cause being protested. That is what equal treatment under the law actually means.
The Crime and Policing Act 2026 has some good ideas in it. It is also a missed chance. Until policing in this country is depoliticised and refocused on the basics, no Act of Parliament will fix the gap between what the public expect and what they get.