The Crime and Policing Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April. There is plenty in it that Reform UK has been calling for, and I want to give credit where credit is due. Specific offences for assaulting retail workers. An explicit statement in law that there is no £200 shoplifting threshold. New powers around knife possession with intent. These are sensible measures.

They are also, by my count, somewhere between five and ten years overdue. The £200 shoplifting threshold should never have existed in the first place. The fact that successive governments tolerated a country in which corner shop owners had their stock walked out the door in broad daylight, with no realistic prospect of police attendance, is one of the great civic failures of the last decade.

Welcome To Where We Already Were

Anyone who has run a small business, lived above a parade of shops, or worked behind a till in the last five years has been telling Westminster the same thing in increasingly desperate tones: the rule of law on our high streets has been quietly suspended. Police forces, told to focus on "priority" crime, simply stopped attending. Theft under £200 became, in practice, decriminalised. Whole networks of organised shoplifting gangs sprang up to exploit the vacuum, hitting the same shops three and four times a week.

The new Act says — out loud — that no such threshold exists. Good. But the threshold never legally existed in the first place. What existed was a practice, a culture, a set of operational priorities inside chief constables' offices that treated property crime as someone else's problem. You do not fix that with a clause in a Bill. You fix it with leadership.

Knife Crime: The Bigger Picture

The new offence of carrying a knife with intent to injure is, again, sensible. It addresses a gap that allowed police to watch a suspect carry a blade through a town centre with no realistic basis to act until the assault had already happened. Seven years maximum sentence on conviction.

But here is the harder truth. Knife crime in the UK rose for over a decade. It rose under the Conservatives. It will not fall under Labour because Labour has done nothing to address the underlying decay: a school system that has lost discipline, a family structure under attack from a tax and benefit system that punishes intact households, and a youth diversion offer that has been gutted by twelve years of council austerity. New offences are useful at the margin. They do not substitute for a functioning society.

The Police Funding Lie

None of this works without officers on the beat. The Metropolitan Police lost over 1,000 officers to attrition last year. Forces across England and Wales are running below establishment. Response times to 999 calls in some county areas now run to over 90 minutes. A clause in an Act does not arrest a shoplifter. An officer does — and there are not enough of them.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would recruit an extra 40,000 frontline officers and abolish the layers of HR-coded distraction that have grown up around modern policing. We would scrap the entire "non-crime hate incident" regime that has consumed millions of officer-hours over the last decade. We would mandate police attendance at every burglary and every shop theft, full stop. And we would back stop and search where the evidence justifies it, irrespective of which campaign group disapproves.

The Crime and Policing Act 2026 is welcome. But it is a half-measure passed by a government that has not yet grasped the scale of the rebuild required. You cannot legislate your way out of a discipline crisis. You have to mean it. Reform UK means it.