Labour appears poised to win a historic election victory on 4 July. In the series Life under Labour, we look at Keir Starmer’s five key political missions, and ask what is at stake and whether he can deliver the change the country is crying out for.
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Last week, in a party political broadcast with the former England and Manchester United player Gary Neville, Keir Starmer gave a glimpse into how Labour would fulfil one of its five headline missions to “take back our streets”.
Strolling down a country lane in the Lake District, the former human rights barrister said he would start with an achievable goal of recruiting police officers to clamp down on aggressive, noisy or abusive conduct.
“We are dealing with antisocial behaviour, 13,000 neighbourhood police, we can start on that project straight away,” he said.
The party’s mission statement sets a target to “halve serious violent crime and raise confidence in the police and criminal justice system to its highest levels in a decade”. The manifesto offers first steps towards that goal, including promises to tackle street crimes, introduce new penalties for offenders, halve knife crime, halve violence against women and girls, introduce specialist rape units in every police force and bring in a form of Sure Start centres for teenagers.
Experts say that the mission statement’s goals to cut serious crime levels are an ambitious but achievable goal. But will the party be able to halve those figures and reinstate faith in the criminal justice system with limited extra resources?
Starmer’s attitude to antisocial behaviour, including a “middle aged intolerance for yobbery”, seems to have evolved since he entered politics both because of his experience as a constituency MP and his travels round the country.
“His opinions on this subject are these days pretty far removed from the kind of lefty human rights lawyer as he has sometimes been portrayed,” said Tom Baldwin, author of Keir Starmer: The Biography.
Baldwin suggests that Starmer’s experience as director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013 had already made him much more sympathetic to victims. The experience of Penny and John Clough, whose daughter was killed outside the Blackpool hospital where she worked, had a profound effect on Starmer. Jane Clough was murdered by her ex-boyfriend while he was out on bail for raping her and Starmer later took up her case to campaign for a change in law.
“Tackling violence against women and girls is a deeply personal priority for Starmer, who has gone out of his way to visit women’s refuges since being leader,” said Baldwin. “It’s a subject that seems pretty visceral for him.”
The scale of problems within the criminal justice system is daunting, Labour staff acknowledge and will have to be addressed to achieve the mission.
Courts, the police and prisons are stretched, crumbling and understaffed and there is little hope of a major injection of short term cash under Rachel Reeves’ Treasury plans. Police response times for victims are getting longer and charge rates fell to a new low of 5.6% in 2022.
Confidence in the police has fallen to new lows after Wayne Couzens was convicted of abusing his powers as a Met officer to kidnap and murder Sarah Everard, and which included the unmasking of his colleague David Carrick as a serial sexual attacker.
If Labour takes power on 5 July, within days prison governors are expecting jails to be so overcrowded that they will struggle to accept any more inmates. Labour has plans to build more prisons, but this could take years.
Experts warn that a crime crackdown necessary to achieve the promised cut in serious crimes – particularly one that involves recruiting more police officers – will inevitably lead to a rise in the number of people being charged and prosecuted.
Cathy Haenlein, the director of organised crime and policing studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said when a government increases the number police officers, it can result in longer court backlogs and another prison crisis.
“Police, courts, prisons – all of these areas are inter-related. The challenge is to make sure actions don’t have unintended consequences, such as exacerbating backlogs in courts or pressure on prisons. We’ve already seen police recently asked to arrest fewer offenders.
“Swiftness and certainty of punishment are the important factors in terms of deterrence. If the whole system is not working this is unlikely to be achieved,” she said. A Labour source said that the party would seek to use alternatives to prison sentences such as tagging and curfews.
Starmer’s mission will rely on some of the polices once championed by Tony Blair under the slogan “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, criminologists have claimed.
New Labour introduced the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act and their taste for tough policies could be seen across a range of policy measures; the recruitment of more police officers and the introduction of civil penalties such as antisocial behaviour orders (asbos) as well as increased surveillance.
Labour under Starmer will introduce a crime and policing bill in the first king’s speech if elected, the Guardian has been told.
This is expected to pave the way for the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to recruit neighbourhood and community support officers to patrol town centres and estates. Each resident will be given a named officer to turn to when things go wrong, the manifesto says.
These new recruits will be paid for by tackling waste through a new efficiency programme across England and Wales, the party has claimed, mandating all forces to sign up to shared procurement and services.
Richard Garside, the director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, said the party had not provided a breakdown of how they would make the necessary savings. “Every government talks about efficiency savings, but they can be extremely difficult to implement and often end up releasing far less cash than promised,” he said.
Labour also plans to clamp down on antisocial behaviour by introducing new respect orders – civil powers to ban persistent adult offenders who drink in public, take drugs, fly-tip or are biking off-road. If breached, the orders can result in a criminal offence and a custodial sentence.
Critics have claimed that the respect orders are effectively a re-introduction of Blair’s asbos, which were criticised for being used to disproportionately criminalise non-white communities.
Garside said the plans still needed to be fleshed out before their full effect could be analysed would join an existing plethora of civil penalties. “It does feel as if they are being introduced into a very crowded space of existing civil orders, many of which have a chequered history,” he said.
One of the most eye-catching proposals is to set up a £100m “tough love” youth programme to help tackle a knife crime epidemic and a mental health crisis among UK teenagers.
The “young futures” programme will target 92 communities with a “youth futures hub” – a type of Sure Start centre for teenagers – to bring together mental health specialists, youth workers and neighbourhood police officers “to prevent young people from being drawn into violence”.
Both Starmer and Cooper are personally invested in plans to halve violence against women and girls in a decade.
As well as establishing specialist rape and sexual offences teams in every police force, Labour is promising to fast-track cases at specialist courts, have domestic abuse experts in 999 control rooms, and legal advocates in every police force to advise victims from the moment of report to trial.
Schools will be asked to address misogyny and teach young people about healthy relationships and consent.
On Monday, Starmer said he wanted ministers, victims and tech firms to work together to tackle the sale of weapons online and cut crime on the streets.
Crimes involving knives or sharp instruments in England and Wales stood at 49,489 in 2023, up 7% from 46,153 in 2022, but 3% lower than the pre-pandemic total of 51,206 offences in the year ending March 2020. The number of offences involving possession of an article with a blade or point rose slightly in 2023 to 27,672, up 1% from 27,463 in 2022.
Garside said Labour’s mission was, in theory, achievable, but would face major logistical challenges in a creaking criminal justice system and with no guarantee of extra cash.
“Halving serious violence within a decade is a big, and welcome, idea. To achieve it, a Labour government will need to move swiftly beyond the first, small steps it sets out in the manifesto,” he said.
Additional reporting by Ava Houston-Sidhu
