A closer look at the King’s Speech

With the election of a new government and, following the latest King’s Speech, the announcement of a new Crime and Policing Bill, those who remember the fraught passage of the Police, Crime Courts and Sentencing Act 2022 and Public Order Act 2023 under the last government may find that their heads are spinning as they try to keep up.

To be sure, the police and criminal justice estate writ large is in a parlous condition. Although the King’s Speech only gave broad outlines of what we can expect, there are welcome announcements. Any promises to ‘tackle knife crime’ and otherwise deal with violent offending ought to be a good thing, though of course the devil will be in the details of any such strategy.

Likewise concerning the delivery of higher standards in policing. It is correct to point out that confidence in the police is at a historic low ebb. There may well be sound reasons for the public to be warier than before of a body whose members enjoy such power over their lives and who have, of late, become increasingly known for abusing that power. A catalogue of recent findings from the Casey Report to the Angiolini Report rises up to confront anyone who observes the recent history of the Metropolitan Police alone.

No doubt, this accounts for the proposals to increase the power of HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and introducing higher mandatory national vetting standards, as well as rebuilding neighbourhood policing through officers that know, and are known by, the communities which they serve.

How this is meant to be squared with the demand for ‘efficiency savings’ is another question. Arguably much of the recorded deterioration in standards across policing in recent years can be attributed (at least in part) to pressure from above, to do more with less, which resulted in corner-cutting and missed opportunities to deal with misbehaviour by officers, until it was too late.

This also has implications for the proposal to provide a ‘specialist response’ to gender-based violence; again, in the shadow of Wayne Couzens and others it is hardly surprising if many people, particularly women, feel that they cannot trust the institutions that are supposed to protect them. Ask them if granting greater powers to the police would make them feel safer, and you may receive a very firm answer. Without root-and-branch restructuring of these bodies, as well as more widespread social efforts to educate boys and men out of violent behaviour, these measures may be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.

Indeed, any attempt to understand crime without understanding its wider social roots and causes is likely to run aground in the same way. The government should bear this in mind when contemplating new, specific criminal offences like assaulting a shopworker, or tackling anti-social behaviour through new Respect Orders (which themselves sound suspiciously similar to the last Labour innovation in this area, the Anti-Social Behaviour Order).

It may be that the government is banking on the public wanting order and stability first and foremost after the chaos of more recent administrations, and not being all that concerned about whether or not some parts of society must deal with increased and more punitive policing in order to get there – who wants to stand up for the anti-social, after all?

If so, they may find such a calculation is short-sighted. Years of crime statistics, including in a 2022 report from the Sentencing Council, show that there is no obvious correlation between harsher policing and punishment, on the one hand, and decreased incidents of crime, on the other. If being ‘tough on crime’ were enough, then the shape of our society, and our prison estate, would be very different.

Not just the last government but arguably the last thirty years have been an education in how trying to simply ‘get tougher’ on crime without investment in society at large does nothing to create a society in which everyone is safer. The government should avoid falling into the trap of redoubling their efforts in a cause which ultimately takes them further away from their purported goal.