The first duty of government is to protect its citizens and
communities, keep them safe and to ensure that they can get on
with their daily lives peacefully and without unnecessary
interference. The measures in the Act are directed to this end.
They:
- protect the police and other emergency workers and enhance
the wellbeing of police officers and staff
- protect the public by giving the police the tools needed to
tackle crime and disorder, and by addressing the root causes of
serious violent crime using multi-agency approaches to prevention
- uphold the right to peaceful protest while providing the
police with the necessary powers to stop disruptive protests from
disproportionately infringing on the rights and freedoms of
others
- strengthen police powers to tackle unauthorised encampments
- ensure serious criminals spend longer in custody, including:
ending the automatic halfway release point from prison for an
additional cohort of serious sexual and violent offenders and
making a Whole Life Order the starting point for the premeditated
murder of a child
- make community sentences more effective so that they offer an
appropriate level of punishment and address the underlying
drivers of offending, including: piloting a problem-solving court
approach for certain community and suspended sentence orders and
extending the use of Electronic Monitoring
- strengthen alternatives to custody for children who have
offended which promote rehabilitation, and raise the threshold
for custodial remand, while at the same time ensuring that
children who commit serious offences and pose a risk to the
public receive sentences that reflect the seriousness of their
offending
- empower future providers of Secure Schools, which represent
our vision for the future of youth custody: schools with
security, rather than prisons with education; with education,
healthcare and purposeful activity at their heart
- extend the football banning orders regime so that persons
convicted of online abuse offences can be made subject to an
order
- modernise our courts and tribunals by updating existing court
processes to provide better services for all court users and
underpin open justice
- extend the scheme whereby individuals who hold historical
convictions or cautions for same sex sexual activity can apply to
have such convictions or cautions “disregarded” so that they are
not disclosed on criminal record certificates and to receive a
pardon
