A Bill That Misses Its Own Target
The Crime and Policing Act 2026 is now law. Labour's headline reform is a sweeping expansion of corporate criminal liability: any senior manager acting within their authority can land their company in the dock for almost any offence. Fraud, money laundering, environmental breaches, data offences — the lot.
Compliance lawyers will have a great year. The British public, who actually called for action on crime, will not.
Because while the Act expands paperwork for British businesses, it does almost nothing to address the things people in Preston, Burnley, Bolton, and Blackpool actually complain about: shoplifting, bike theft, antisocial behaviour, knife crime, and a justice system that treats sentencing guidelines as a maximum rather than a minimum.
Shoplifting Is Still A Free Hobby
The Act raised the shoplifting threshold to a level that, in practice, still keeps repeat offenders out of prison. A serial shoplifter can rack up nine offences a year and never see a custodial sentence. Retailers in my own ward have stopped reporting thefts because they know the file goes nowhere.
The signal sent to the next generation of would-be offenders is unmistakable: low-level theft is essentially decriminalised. Then we wonder why high-street footfall collapses and shutters go up over good shops.
Punishing The Wrong Britain
The pattern of this government's law-making is becoming impossible to miss. Pursue the law-abiding. Pursue the small-business owner. Pursue the senior manager who ticked a box wrong. Meanwhile turn a blind eye to organised retail crime, online speech is policed harder than knife crime, and a tweet gets a knock on the door faster than a burglary gets a fingerprint kit.
Two-tier policing isn't a slogan. It's the lived experience of British shopkeepers. The Crime and Policing Act doubles down on it.
What Reform UK Would Do
Mandatory custodial sentences for repeat shoplifters. A Sentencing Council reset that puts public protection above prison-population management. Police officers back on the beat — not behind a desk processing online speech complaints. Real consequences for serial offenders rather than novel statutes targeting people who already comply.
Crime fighting starts when the criminal believes they will be caught and punished. Britain stopped delivering on either side of that equation a decade ago. Reform would fix it by making the law about criminals again.