The surging Reform Party could have a story to tell about crime prevention; why hasn’t it yet? Mark Rowe asks.
Permit me a stereotype. The stereotypical supporter of and voter for Reform is a bloke, middle-aged, drives a van for a living, an electrician or someone who maintains fire alarms. He lives in and comes from a town in a county that used to have coal mines. He has a pair of daughters who have just left school. One got a job in one of the shops on the parade in town that’s partly boarded up and is a shadow of what he knew when he was his daughter’s age. The shop is plagued by antisocial behaviour. One night last winter he got a call from her, afraid with a colleague to leave the shop at closing time because of youths hanging around. The manager on the end of the phone was no help, the advice was to ring the police. She did, and no units were available. In the end dad drove there and gave lifts to two frightened women. The shop has had security guards at times, which his daughter doesn’t like for a different reason; the guards are always men, and the young ones always try to chat her up. He knows from online forums of other tradesmen who have had their vans broken into and their tools stolen, which you can do without.
Crime, then, could resonate with the Reform stereotypical voter. That’s something the Conservative and now Labour governments have sought to address, whether with the Retail Crime Action Plan of autumn 2023, or the campaign against violence against women and girls (VAWG). Yet in the second reading debate in March of Labour’s Crime Policing Bill, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and two other Labour MPs remarked on the fact that Reform MPs were not in the Commons chamber, let alone contributing to the debate.
Now that numerous councils are Reform-controlled, for the first time Reform have to take a stance on law and order – to be more precise, community safety, as local government has a responsibility for it under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. How can Reform square their policies: to cut crime, and have lower tax and a smaller state? Will Reform have anything distinctive to say on public space CCTV. Labour and Conservative when in power in local government have not taken a uniform policy; either political party may invest in CCTV as a priority, or do without it altogether, or something in between. Is local government the best place for public realm CCTV, or should police and crime commissioners have it, as Thames Valley’s Conservative PCC Matthew Barber has worked towards, to name only one of a few? Although the last PCC elections were only in May 2024, Labour and Conservatives carved up the posts in England and Wales between them. Given that British politics has become so fast-changing and unpredictable, who can say how strong Reform will be, or whether it will even be around, for the next PCC elections in May 2028.
