After eighteen months of broken windows, looted aisles and frightened shop staff, Labour has finally caught up with reality. On 29 April 2026 the Crime and Policing Act 2026 received Royal Assent. The infamous £200 shoplifting threshold — the rule that effectively told organised criminals "anything under two hundred quid is on the house" — has been scrapped. Assault on a retail worker is now a specific offence. Welcome to the policy positions Reform UK has been arguing for since 2023.
What Took You So Long?
Let's not pretend this is a triumph of bold reform. This is Labour grudgingly accepting that the policy framework they inherited and then failed to fix has produced a generation of Britons who have learned that there are no consequences for low-level crime. Last year alone, 5.5 million shoplifting offences were recorded. That's roughly fifteen thousand thefts every day. Industry surveys recorded 1,600 incidents of violence and abuse against shop workers daily. Every single one of those incidents was someone's working day turned into a hostile, frightening encounter — and in too many cases, a hospital visit.
I've spoken to shop workers in Preston, Chorley, Blackburn and Burnley. The story is identical. Repeat offenders walk in, walk out, repeat. Police, when they come at all, do paperwork. Courts, when they sit, hand out community orders. The £200 rule was the legal codification of "we don't really care." Removing it doesn't fix the system. It just removes one of its many absurdities.
The Knife Crime Theatre
The new Act also introduces mandatory two-step verification for online knife sales. Photographic ID at point of sale and at delivery. On paper, it sounds tough. In reality? The teenagers stabbing each other on London buses are not buying their knives from Amazon. They're stealing them from kitchens, picking them up from drug dealers, or buying them for cash on encrypted apps. The two-step verification is the kind of policy that is designed to be announced rather than to work.
The Labour government's "halve knife crime in a decade" pledge is the same. A decade is a long time. Children currently in primary school will be old enough to vote before that target is even theoretically tested. A decade of "we will reduce knife crime" is what governments say when they want to look serious without actually being serious. Reform UK believes knife crime should be tackled in this Parliament, not the next one, with stop-and-search restored to where it works, mandatory custodial sentences for second offences, and a proper youth diversion programme that doesn't pretend rap workshops will fix what poverty, family breakdown and lawlessness have created.
The Two-Tier Policing Problem
While Labour's new Act is busy creating new offences for retail violence, the same legislation continues to chip away at free speech. Online "communications offences" remain. Non-crime hate incidents have technically been abolished, but the College of Policing's guidance still allows officers to record speech they disapprove of. You can't make Britain safer by criminalising thought while letting actual thieves walk. That is the two-tier policing problem in microcosm.
Across England and Wales, police arrest more than 30 people every day for things they say online — tweets, Facebook posts, WhatsApp messages. Meanwhile, some 90% of burglaries result in no charge. We are arresting the wrong people for the wrong things. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 doesn't fix that. It tweaks at the edges and calls it reform.
What This Act Won't Do
It won't put more police on the streets. The funding settlement attached to the Act is broadly flat in real terms. It won't address the chronic problem of police forces being weighed down by recording requirements rather than crime-fighting. It won't fix the courts backlog, where serious cases now take 18 months to come to trial. It won't reverse the early-release policies under the Sentencing Act 2026 that are putting prolific offenders back on the streets weeks after sentencing. You cannot legislate your way out of a justice system that no longer believes in justice.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would pass a Police Reform Act in our first 100 days. We would create a National Police Service to break the postcode lottery of dramatically different forces with dramatically different priorities. We would mandate that no person convicted of a violent crime against a retail worker, an emergency service worker or a teacher receives anything less than an immediate custodial sentence. We would scrap recording of non-crime hate incidents in any form, in any database, by any force. And we would restore proportionality: serious crime gets serious consequences, minor crime gets dealt with quickly, and policing focuses on actual policing, not on managing political sensitivities.
Royal Assent is not justice. It's just the start. The hard work begins when the government decides whether it has the spine to enforce the laws it just passed. The early evidence from Labour suggests it does not.