Antisocial offenders in England will receive tougher penalties and face having to clean up their acts of vandalism under a Labour government, the opposition party has said, as it seeks to claim the mantle of law and order.
In a speech on Friday, shadow justice secretary Steve Reed will call for “fresh thinking to tackle the scourge of antisocial behaviour”, warning that it can leave “communities feeling broken and powerless”.
Reed will also unveil plans for “end-to-end” reform of the criminal justice system, which will deliver the “world’s first trauma-informed” model using science to examine some of the causes of offending in individuals’ early years.
His announcement comes as Rishi Sunak’s government prepares to launch a national antisocial behaviour strategy and follows a report which argued that curbing such activity was important in boosting “left-behind” areas.
Labour’s proposals include stronger penalties for fly tippers as well as “clean-up squads”, whereby offenders would remove their graffiti and clear up their vandalism through the use of Fixed Penalty Cleaning Notices.
More community sentences would be handed out, while so-called payback boards would be set up to give local people the chance to assess the use and efficacy of those punishments.
“As justice secretary, I will strengthen community sentences to tackle antisocial behaviour and petty crime,” Reed is expected to say. “Under this government their use has fallen by a half because courts no longer have confidence sentences will ever be carried out.”
“Labour will address that by giving victims and community leaders a prominent role in the oversight of the system. Sitting on community and victim payback boards, they will help choose the work low-level offenders carry out to put right the wrong they’ve done.”
Yvette Cooper, Reed’s shadow cabinet colleague, said on Thursday that there had been a “complete collapse in Home Office leadership on crime” as she outlined wide-ranging policing reforms.
The shadow home secretary said a Labour government would recruit 13,000 extra neighbourhood police officers and introduce a new neighbourhood police guarantee, to increase patrols in town centres.
Arguing that successive Tory governments had “totally failed to deliver a . . . justice system fit for the 2020s”, Cooper also set out changes to police vetting sparked by high-profile cases of misconduct.
“We will introduce new mandatory requirements on vetting, standards, training and misconduct underpinned by new legislation,” she said, citing the cases of David Carrick and Wayne Couzens, two former Metropolitan Police officers jailed for sex offences against women.
“Thirty years ago this year, Labour shadow home secretary Tony Blair said our party would be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. It was right then, it’s right now,” Cooper added.
The Home Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
