Ian Acheson

Kemi Badenoch is right to argue that the Public Sector Equality Duty should go – and I say that as someone who used to help police it. Her wider point in today’s speech at the Institute for Government is even more important: not every disparity in outcome is proof of racism, and we have built an entire bureaucratic religion on pretending that it is. On paper, the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) looks innocuous. It tells public bodies that, when exercising their functions, they must have 'due regard' to eliminating discrimination, advancing equality of opportunity and fostering good relations between people with and without protected characteristics such as race, sex, disability or religion.

Henry Nowak died in handcuffs on a cold December night. In his university room, his advent calendar still hung on the wall, only the first three doors opened. He was 18 years old, a university student, a beloved son and a friend. In the final minutes of his life, the officers who found him treated him as a problem to be managed rather than a victim in mortal distress. There is something almost unbearable about that small detail from his bedroom. It places Henry back where he belongs: not in the language of policy, race management or ham-fisted institutional self-protection, but in the ordinary life of a teenager in early December, marking the days to Christmas.

Justice Secretary David Lammy is planning an overhaul of the youth justice system that would see the parents of young offenders more likely to be fined or even jailed for failing to deal with their children's behaviour. The Ministry of Justice is planning to strengthen the power of parenting orders issued by the courts in the hope it will help prevent children from embarking on lives of crime. Lammy is right: parents do bear moral responsibility for the conduct of their children, and the state must not be embarrassed about saying so.

Prevent was created in 2003 as part of Britain's national strategy for countering violent extremism; its purpose is to spot and stop tomorrow’s terrorists. Instead, as the Home Affairs committee quietly concedes in a report out today, it has become a catch‑all dumping ground for every troubling young man with a TikTok habit, a nebulous grievance and no clear ideology at all. That is not a technical glitch. It is the logical endpoint of a system that has forgotten its purpose, inverted its threat picture and now measures success in referrals rather than disrupted plots. Buried in the committee’s sober prose is an extraordinary admission: there has been an 'escalation in Prevent referrals involving no clear ideology and no clear signs of radicalisation to terrorism'.

I was in London recently carrying a simple piece of kit I never thought I would need: a lanyard tethering my phone to my wrist. This would make it harder for my mobile to be snatched from my hands on the street by latest scourge plaguing London: gangs of masked young men on e-bikes targeting pedestrians for their phones. This phenomenon has threatened to make our capital’s premier shopping destinations no-go areas for worried pedestrians. Only 1 per cent of reported phone thefts from hotspots like Oxford street result in a conviction. In recent years, the Met police have been accused of indifference to the crime, which had reached record levels, increasing 84 per cent between 2021 and 2024.

David Lammy had a good outing yesterday – they are as rare as hen’s teeth when you’re leading the Ministry of Justice – so he ought to take the win. The Deputy Prime Minister was in the House of Commons to make a statement on a report by Jonathan Hall KC into prison terrorist separation centres, following a horrific attack on officers at one of these units in HMP Frankland last year. Convicted Islamist Hashem Abedi, responsible for the Manchester Arena bomb atrocity in 2017, allegedly attacked prison staff in the separation unit last October, attempted to murder three officers  by stabbing them with improvised weapons and scalding them. It was a ferocious and unprovoked assault in what should have been one of our most closely supervised and secure pieces of prison real estate.

This afternoon, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveiled a set of sweeping police reforms. These include increased police response times, the reduction of constabularies from 42 across the country to 12, a new licensing regime for officers and a new centralised agency, the National Police Service, created to deal with national challenges such as organised crime, terrorism and cyber fraud. A national centre for policing will also be created to centralise and rationalise training, equipment and IT. These proposals will require a huge amount of (mostly performative) change and a years-long transition to a new policing model that will likely outlast Mahmood's tenure.

Local monitors at Britain’s newest £400 million ‘super prison’, HMP Millsike, have written to ministers to raise the alarm about plunging standards there. Millsike, a medium security category C prison in the Vale of York, opened in March last year and run by Mitie Custodial Services, has a capacity of 1,500 prisoners. It’s not clear how many prisoners it currently houses, but it’s very obvious from this red alert to prisons minister Lord Timpson that they – and not the prison custody officers – are already the ones in control.  Mitie was awarded a contract worth £329 million to run the prison in the spring of 2024. Let’s see what the taxpayer is getting in return since it opened last March.

In the shadow of recent scandal, the Metropolitan Police's tougher vetting regime promised a cultural renaissance. Yet the admission yesterday that thousands of recruits slipped through without proper vetting, breeding predators within, reveals a force still haunted by its own institutional rot. After the conviction of PC Wayne Couzens for the rape and murder of Sarah Everard while a serving officer five years ago, the Casey report into the force described an organisation that was culturally and operationally incapable of stopping very bad people from becoming warranted police officers. Tough new measures were introduced that doubled refusal rates for applicants and nearly 100 officers and staff were dismissed as a result of a re-vetting process.

In 42 months’ time we will be at the start of yet another summer that Andrew Clarke will never see. That’s the amount of time the law has decided Mr Clarke’s killer Demiesh Williams, convicted of manslaughter, should spend in custody before being released on license. Our sentencing guidelines and the judge interpreting them have failed to deliver justice that is recognisable to many people outraged at that leniency. That is a dangerous place to be in an already low-trust society. The facts are that Mr Clarke and Williams got involved in an altercation at a south east London Sainsbury’s in March this year after Williams pushed into a queue in front of him. The location and context could not be more banal in contrast to the devastation that followed.

The Home Secretary is feeling the collars of our 43 chief constables. Shabana Mahmood has let it be known that she favours a dramatic reduction in police forces in England and Wales to as few as 12. Her comments come ahead of the publication of a white paper on policing in the new year. The white paper has, in typical fashion, been delayed because – in a style now familiar to both her admirers and detractors – Mahmood wishes to be bolder than the many previous attempts to reform policing which have become stuck in the bureaucratic glue over the past few decades. We do need urgent reform in policing but not simply in the dead language and terminology of the bean counter.

Should cops spy on kids? The revelation that police are including surveillance of young people in their expanding use of live facial recognition (LFR) systems to detect criminals and deter crime has upset the civil liberties lobby and a few MPs. Should we take these concerns seriously? LFR was introduced in south Wales in 2016 and was rolled out nationwide in England and Wales from 2020 onwards. The operating principles have evolved during pilot schemes but are now built around cameras in liveried vans passively scanning crowds and comparing the faces of citizens against a database. Artificial intelligence scans the biometric details, alerting the operator to ‘hits’ against a curated ‘watchlist’.

So farewell then, Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs). The government has just announced that this weak and useless experiment in local democracy will be terminated. Few people will notice outside the cottage industry of ineffectual crime busters who will be receiving redundancy notices. That’s part of the problem. Elected PCCs were introduced in 2010 as a flagship Conservative commitment to get police chiefs to respond to local priorities on crime. Instead, they become symbols of wasteful bureaucracy, partisan meddling and bungling oversight. They were set up to replace opaque and often toothless policing authorities composed of local councillors.

Our state counterterrorism strategy ‘Prevent’ is overwhelmed. This is the strand of our national plan, ‘Contest’, to defeat extremism. Prevent is charged with spotting and stopping tomorrow’s terrorists, but the official data on its operation over the last reporting year, released yesterday, paints a picture of mission creep and distraction and an organisation and that can’t do this job. Far from identifying people who want to kill for ideas, Prevent has become a repository for vulnerable and often dangerous young people who have been failed by every other state agency. Its net is cast so wide that very bad people have fallen through it and into atrocious crimes.

You’d need a heart of stone not to feel sympathy for Alex Davies-Jones. Labour’s minister for victims was on human sandbag duty for the Justice Secretary David Lammy this morning – tasked with explaining to the media why there had been another two accidental releases of convicted prisoners. The fact these blunders came only days after an another illegal migrant sex offender was released instead of deported was difficult enough to defend. But her response – which amounted to some waffle about sending in ‘tech experts’ – might make Lammy reconsider deploying junior ministers who seem to know even less about our chaotic penal system than he does.