Both the Tories and Labour look to seize the agenda on crime ahead of the locals

Is it ever not crime week these days? Yvette Cooper has declared that vandals are “getting away scot-free” under the Tories, citing new analysis from Labour that found that the charge rate for criminal damage has fallen by almost half over the last seven years. The Shadow Home Secretary said: “Under the Conservatives, our town centres are being hit by growing levels of vandalism, with people smashing shop windows, graffitiing public spaces and trashing our high streets, yet nothing is done.” Cooper reiterated Labour’s pledge to put 13,000 additional police and police community support officers into community teams. Labour has also previously outlined plans to tackle town centre drug dealing – including introducing powers for police to shut down crack houses and setting up local neighbourhood drug teams to patrol town centres – and announced that the party would establish clean-up squads for fly-tippers, which would see offenders clear up litter, fly-tipping and vandalism. The party also plans to expand the use of parental sanctions for parents whose children repeatedly engage in antisocial behaviour, forcing parents to attend parental classes.

Keir Starmer yesterday accused the Tories of having “wasted” a decade over strengthening protections for children after the government announced it was introducing mandatory reporting of suspected sexual abuse – a move Starmer called for in 2013. Continuing its own focus on crime, the government outlined plans to tackle grooming gangs, including establishing a new grooming gangs taskforce, which will see specialist officers brought in to support police forces with child sexual exploitation and grooming investigations. But the government has faced criticism over the focus it has placed on the ethnicity of the gangs, with Suella Braverman claiming over the weekend that one of the “critical facts about the grooming gangs phenomenon” is that “the perpetrators are groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani, who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values”. The Home Secretary also accused certain Labour-run councils of failing to act on grooming gangs because of “not wanting to come across as racist, not wanting to call out people along ethnic lines”.

Responding to Braverman’s comments, Lisa Nandy acknowledged that, in the cases of Rochdale and Rotherham, the official reports “were clear that there were politicians and [police] officers who didn’t report, sometimes for fear of political correctness”. But the Shadow Levelling Up Secretary criticised the government’s record in this area, telling viewers: “If anybody could be accused of turning a blind eye to what is a very real problem in this country, across all backgrounds and ethnicities, it’s the Home Secretary.” Starmer pushed back on the government’s focus on British Asian gangs in his appearance on LBC, acknowledging that “it is right that ethnicity should not be a bar and political correctness should not get in the way of prosecutions”, but adding: “The vast majority of sexual abuse cases do not involve those of ethnic minorities.” And the government’s own research fundamentally undermines Braverman’s claims. A Home Office report on group-based child sexual exploitation – published in December 2020 while Priti Patel was Home Secretary – concluded that, “beyond specific high-profile cases, the academic literature highlights significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and this form of offending”.

That the government appears happy to play politics on this most sensitive of subjects is evidence of how important ministers feel it is to seize the agenda on crime ahead of the local elections in May. Labour’s own focus on antisocial behaviour suggests a similar preoccupation, given how often issues like fly-tipping are raised on the doorstep. Polling from Opinium for the Observer – published ahead of the government’s announcements on grooming gangs – makes unhappy reading for Rishi Sunak, revealing that only 20% of voters have confidence in the government to successfully tackle and reduce crime, while 71% are not confident. The research found that, on crime, 30% trusted a government led by Starmer over a Tory government led by Sunak. But separate polling by YouGov for the Times suggests the opposition still has work to do to get its message across to voters in this area, with the research finding that 44% of respondents were unclear about what Labour’s policies are on crime.