The Crime Prevention Website

Share:

UK Government’s 2015 Plan of Action for Fighting Crime in the UK

I thought it might be useful to list the 37 Manifesto commitments made by our newly elected Conservative Government. The crime section of their manifesto is entitled ‘Fighting Crime and Standing up for Victims’

I’m placing this list in the References section of the website for easy reference

Plan of Action

If you read the original manifesto you’ll see that I have extracted the commitments from it to create this easy to read list. Please note that it includes a couple of additional commitments made in the preamble to the Plan of Action.

Policing and Police Reform

  • Carry on making every community safer, even when resources are tight
  • Ensure proper provision of health and community based places of safety for people suffering mental health crises to save on police time and stop vulnerable people being detained in police custody
  • Speed up justice, extending the use of police-led prosecutions
  • Continue reducing paperwork
  • Allow police forces to retain a greater percentage of the value of assets they seize from criminals
  • Improve response to cyber-crime with reforms to police training and an expansion in the number of volunteer ‘Cyber Specials’
  • Enable fire and police services to work more closely together
  • Develop the role of Police and Crime Commissioners

Police Public Relationship

  • Improve the diversity of police recruitment – especially of black and ethnic minority officers – by supporting the development of new direct entry and fast-track schemes such as Police Now, which offers top graduates a new route into policing.
  • Overhaul the police complaints system
  • Use the Police Innovation Fund to accelerate the adoption of new technologies, including mobile devices, that will transform the service the public receives
  • Legislate to mandate changes in police practices if stop and search does not become more targeted and stop to arrest ratios do not improve

Crime Prevention

  • Develop a modern crime prevention strategy to address the key drivers of crime
  • Publish standards, performance data and a ranking system for the security of smartphones and tablets, as well as online financial and retail services

Breaking the Offending Cycle

  • Overhaul the system of police cautions and ensure that offenders always have conditions, such as victim redress, attached to their punishment
  • Create a blanket ban on all new psychoactive substances to protect young people from ‘legal highs’
  • Make sobriety orders available to courts in England and Wales, enforced through new alcohol monitoring tags
  • Intervene early to prevent troubled young people being drawn into crime

Prison Reform

  • Make savings by closing old, inefficient prisons, building larger, modern and fit-for-purpose ones and expanding payment-by-results
  • Introduce widespread random testing of drug use in jails, new body scanners, greater use of mobile phone blocking technology
  • New strategy to tackle corruption in prisons

Sentencing and Offenders

  • Continue  to make sure that prisons are places for rehabilitation and  to reform the way prisoners are rehabilitated
  • Deploy new technology to monitor offenders in the community to keep them on the straight and narrow
  • Bring persistent offenders to justice more quickly.
  • A new semi-custodial sentence to be introduced for prolific criminals, allowing for a short, sharp spell in custody to change behaviour
  • Tackle cases where judges get it wrong by extending the scope of the Unduly Lenient Scheme, so a wider range of sentences can be challenged
  • Review legislation governing hate crimes, including the case for extending the scope of the law to cover crimes committed against people on the basis of disability, sexual orientation or transgender identity.
  • Improve treatment of women offenders, exploring how new technology may enable more women with young children to serve their sentence in the community.
  • Increase sentence lengths for the most serious offences

Victims and the Vulnerable

  • Strengthen victims’ rights with a new Victims’ Law that will enshrine key rights for victims, including the right to make a personal statement and have it read in court before sentencing and before Parole Board decisions on prisoner release
  • Give all vulnerable victims and witnesses greater opportunity to give evidence outside court and roll out pre-trial cross examination for child victims nationally

Violence against Women and Girls

  • Will now work with local authorities, the NHS and Police and Crime Commissioners to ensure a secure future for specialist FGM and forced marriage units, refuges and rape crisis centres
  • Ensure all publicly-funded advocates have specialist victims' training before becoming involved in serious sexual offences cases
  • Set up an independent statutory inquiry into child sexual abuse, and make sure it can challenge institutions and individuals without fear or favour, and get to the truth
  • Continue the urgent work of overhauling how police, social services and other agencies work together to protect vulnerable children, especially from the kind of organised grooming and sexual exploitation that has come to light in Rotherham and other UK towns and cities

Human Rights and Legal System Reform

  • Scrap Human Rights Act and introduce British Bill of Rights making the Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter of human rights matters in the UK
  • Continue the £375 million modernisation of the courts system to reduce delay and frustration for the public
  • Continue review of legal aid systems, so they can continue to provide access to justice in an efficient way

Terrorism

For terrorism please follow this link to the full manifesto where you will find the Government’s specific references on pages 61 – 63

Source: Conservative Manifesto 2015 https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/manifesto2015/ConservativeManifesto2015.pdf

Updated 12 May 2015