Among the barbed remarks by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch in the House of Commons on Wednesday, May 13, in the debate after the King’s Speech, was this line: “Labour did not spend its time in opposition thinking deeply about the country’s problems.” She went on: “Its manifesto was just a set of misleading promises …. It made promises without knowing how anything works.”
As for crime prevention (to turn from Mrs Badenoch) Labour sought to halve violence against women and girls; and to act on anti-social behaviour in the name of ‘safer streets’. The Labour Government has set out policing reform, as reported in the March 2026 edition of Professional Security Magazine; and among the Bills aired in the King’s Speech in the House of Lords on May 12 was one to turn the police reform into law. But changes to the organisation of policing, and to state aims, or the more dynamic sounding ‘missions’, is not necessarily the same as actually achieving any outcome (for better or indeed for worse).
Alternative
If Kemi Badenoch’s line stung, then, it was because of its truth. You might imagine, that if the Conservatives put forward anything while in opposition, they would avoid that charge of not ‘thinking deeply’. Alas, that appears precisely the problem with the Tories’ ‘Alternative King’s Speech’ and their ‘Take Back the Streets Bill’ in particular. That line about Labour not having thought and planned before they took power in July 2024 is repeated in a foreword to the ‘Alternative’. You cannot fix anything without detailed plans, she wrote. Under the ‘take back our streets’ rubric is a promise for ‘10,000 additional police officers on the streets’. Previous Tory prime ministers, and the incoming Labour government, each made much of promising thousands more police, oblivious to the reality that the police have difficulty in recruiting enough suitable candidates (as do the armed forces, and prisons for similar difficult, uniformed roles), as found during PM Boris Johnson’s notorious ‘uplift’ of 20,000 officers. And what is the point of more officers, which implies more arrests, if the prisons are full? ‘Take Back The Streets’ does propose ‘Immediate Justice’ assignments, whereby the police would have the power to issue ‘timely community sentences’, for criminal damage, minor or common assault, or [being] drunk and disorderly’, to clean graffiti and clear up parks and public spaces. Again, the trouble is, past Conservatives when last in power, Theresa May as Home Secretary and Rishi Sunak as PM, made much of the same idea. It came to nothing because of practicalities – you would need an army of supervisers, health and safety assessments, toilet facilities, safeguarding checks (do you want criminals tidying your local play area while your children are playing there?!) and so on. Whether out of or in office, politicians also grasp at the next piece of tech. In the 1990s it was closed circuit television, now it’s Live Facial Recognition. The Tory ‘Alternative’ calls for ‘routine’ LFR in ‘the 100 highest crime areas’ to make thousands of arrests (to repeat, the prisons are full!). Labour would reply, they are rolling out LFR.
Hotspots
Those extra police would do ‘intense hotspot patrolling’ of ‘2,000 crime hotspot’ areas. Again, it’s not new. Under Rishi Sunak, central Government money went on that very thing; either spent on police who grabbed at the overtime (and maybe doing the shifts in an area not local to them, so any hotspot was lost on them), or; hired SIA-badged patrollers. From Loughborough to Bideford, Bath to York, private security with or without the hotspot pots of money have become an uncontroversial part of high street policing, as featured in Professional Security Magazine since before covid. The ‘Alternative’ could have picked up on this trend.
NBCC survey
A recent police National Business Crime Centre (NBCC) survey of businesses found they want above all a police presence. Yet the example of Bath (in the May edition of the magazine, pictured) and Nottingham (June) is that businesses are perfectly happy with private patrollers, whether put on the streets by a business improvement district or a council, or (as the Reform UK police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire, Rupert Matthews has proposed) a PCC. Businesses truly want any uniformed presence to deter and (in the police jargon) ‘disrupt’ a handful of scrag-ends who steal from shops and are habitually anti-social. Private patrollers are at least as able to achieve that (and costing less) than police with arrest powers (that the police don’t want to use for low-level theft, urination and swearing in public, and so on, because uneconomic use of resources – and, to repeat, the prisons are full!!). If ASB is by youths, you have the risible situation that police threaten them by saying they know their names and where they live and if it happens again they’ll get a visit from social services – what’s unsaid there is that the criminal justice system is entirely unable to deter or punish wrong-doing that stays below a threshold of not being worth the criminal justice system’s time and trouble. Perhaps social workers threaten their clients with the equivalent, a visit from the police?
Consistency
These realities are entirely absent from the Tory ‘Alternative’. Politicians are routinely accused (as was said in the King’s Speech debate) of being out of touch. High streets would benefit not from more police, but a systematising of the mixed economy of public and private patrolling, and an end the patchwork of provision. In a word consistency, and police and private security making the most of one another; as proposed by the S12 group of security guarding leaders. Why cannot a Conservative Party, that prizes private enterprise, acknowledge the work of private security on ‘safer streets’?
Reform cliches
Not to suggest that the Conservatives’ rivals for the anti-Labour vote, Reform UK, are any better. Indeed, their ‘full policy’ on how to ‘make law-abiding citizens feel safe’ (which implies that they can be made to feel so) on their website is a laughable 110 words of vague cliches (‘an uncompromising approach to crime and antisocial behaviour’, ‘victims will come first, not criminals’). By comparison it has a separate document for making the UK a hub for cryptocurrency, a topic which is raging in pubs, laundrettes and at school gates at 3pm.
