Labour axes funding for scheme that made shoplifters do community work 

Labour has decided to axe an “immediate justice” scheme which saw shoplifters and those who commit antisocial behaviour forced to do unpaid work in their community such as cleaning up graffiti, weeding and working in charity shops.

The immediate justice scheme was on trial in ten police force areas after it was announced as part of Rishi Sunak’s antisocial behaviour action plan last year. Under the scheme, those found committing low-level offences were punished by being forced to carry out unpaid work such as repairing fences, cleaning graffiti, weeding and working in charity shops.

The Home Office was set to roll out funding for the remaining 33 police forces in England and Wales to introduce their own immediate justice schemes, with each receiving about £1 million from October. However, according to recent reports, the Home Office has cancelled the scheme after concluding it did not offer value for money. The Home Office blamed the poor state of public finances for the decision.

A Home Office spokesman said, “The previous government’s immediate justice pilots demonstrated that it takes significant time to get projects up and running, and only six months of funding was available to other police forces new to the scheme.

“This would not have been an effective nationwide programme for tackling antisocial behaviour, nor would it offer value for taxpayer money — even more so in the light of the state of public finances which this government has inherited.”

The department added that any success stories and findings will be used to inform policy development under Labour’s new neighbourhood policing guarantee, which was a key election pledge. Labour had pledged to deploy 13,000 extra officers to patrol the streets and each ward given a named police officer whom people could contact about antisocial behaviour in their area.

Labour’s move is however being questioned by policing leaders. Katy Bourne, the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Sussex, said the immediate justice pilot that ran in the county had helped cut the reoffending rate among participants.

“This government has made a lot of noise about cracking down on crime but the reality is that their actions just don’t fit the rhetoric,” Bourne said. “They claim that antisocial behaviour is a top priority, yet the first action they take is to cancel the funding for immediate justice in all police force areas.

“This is both disappointing and shortsighted, especially as our pilot in Sussex is working. We’ve applied immediate justice to over 230 cases so far, with an 85 per cent compliance rate and over two thirds of offenders not reoffending after six months.

“Given that the government are now releasing prisoners who’ve served just 40 per cent of their jail sentence, how on earth do they expect police to tackle the levels of antisocial behaviour which are bound to rise — is this what they mean when they warn that our lives will become more miserable?”

Sussex received funding under the pilot for the scheme that helped to widen an existing programme called Putting it Right that was established in Brighton by local businesses who had become frustrated at the lack of enforcement against shoplifters in the city.