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Britain is on the brink of experiencing a significant crime surge, the Conservatives cautioned today, following revelations from an official report that exposed the repercussions of Labour’s lenient justice strategy.
Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick pointed to a comprehensive new analysis by the National Audit Office (NAO), indicating that probation officers will struggle to manage the influx of criminals receiving community sentences instead of imprisonment.
The NAO’s report, released today, suggests that Labour’s initiative to reduce the number of offenders in prison will intensify demands on the already strained service, potentially heightening public risk.
This report aligns with recent crime statistics, published on Thursday, which revealed an increase in offenses such as shoplifting and drug-related crimes during Labour’s initial year in office.
According to spending watchdogs, the probation service is projected to face a staffing deficit exceeding 3,000 employees next year, a situation exacerbated by the government’s sentencing policy changes.
Adjustments in the supervision of offenders within the community “may threaten the service’s objectives of ensuring public safety and rehabilitation,” they further noted.
Responding to the NAO’s warnings, Robert Jenrick said: ‘It’s clear the Probation Service won’t be able to cope with the mass release of dangerous prisoners.
‘They are being asked to do an impossible task.
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‘The warning lights are flashing red: this Bill puts the British people in significant danger.
‘The consequence of Labour’s Sentencing Bill will be a massive crimewave of more sexual assaults, rapes and violent crime committed in our communities.
‘It has to be avoided at all costs.’
The £1.45billion-a-year probation system was struggling with ‘continuing poor performance’, the government’s official auditors said.
For example, the Probation Service only met 26 per cent of its own performance targets in 2024-25, down from 50 per cent in 2021-22.
The service – part of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) – estimated last year it needed 5,400 additional staff and even after a recruitment drive will have a shortage of 3,150 in 2026-27, the report said.
Many of Labour’s justice reforms will see responsibilities passed from the prisons to the Probation Service, as ministers struggle to tackle the jail overcrowding crisis and slash the record Crown court backlog.
The NAO report said probation is facing ‘uncertainties’ such as the Government’s Sentencing Bill.
CCTV footage showed how Algerian national Yakob Harket grabbed a replica Patek Philippe rose gold aquanaut watch from a female police officer’s wrist in Mayfair in October 2024
The legislation, which is currently going through Parliament, is expected to lead to tens of thousands fewer criminals sent to jail each year, while others will be freed earlier.
The auditors said offenders ‘will be released and managed outside of prison at an earlier stage in their sentence, increasing the size and risk profile of the probation caseload’.
They went on: ‘Changes to the supervision of offenders may pose a risk to the service’s aims of public protection and rehabilitation.
‘Some practitioners we spoke to raised concerns about the potential risk of schemes … leading to adverse outcomes for public safety or effective rehabilitation of offenders.’
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood masterminded Labour’s soft justice masterplan in her previous job as justice secretary, when she said increased use of community punishments would create a ‘prison outside prison’.
The Bill will introduce most of the recommendations of an independent sentencing review carried out for Labour earlier this year by former Tory justice secretary David Gauke, who estimated his plan would free up 9,800 jail spaces by 2028.
The NAO said the Gauke reforms ‘will likely increase pressures on probation further’.
In addition, Labour is pursuing reforms of the criminal courts that will let offenders off more lightly.
A separate review by retired senior judge Sir Brian Leveson, also commissioned by Ms Mahmood, proposed heftier jail discounts for criminals who plead guilty and far wider use of ‘out of court’ punishments.
After being promoted by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer last month, Ms Mahmood is now responsible for overseeing the police’s efforts to catch crooks while her former department introduces softer punishments.
The NAO said the Probation Service remained under ‘significant strain’ after a botched privatisation under Tory justice secretary Chris Grayling in 2014, which was reversed seven years later.
The report said a new reform programme launched by HMPPS in February had a ‘high risk appetite’.
But bosses and the MoJ had ‘not fully assessed the practical consequences of taking on a high level of risk nor set clear thresholds for how much risk the service can tolerate’.
While at the MoJ Ms Mahmood let more than 26,000 criminals out of jail early to free up space in just the first six months of a controversial early release scheme.
There were distasteful scenes at the start of the scheme as lags popped champagne corks outside prison gates and vowed to become lifelong Labour voters.
An MoJ spokesman said: ‘This Government inherited a Probation Service under immense pressure and this has placed too great a burden on our hardworking staff.
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‘We are fixing it, with 1,000 trainee probation officers recruited last year and plans to recruit at least 1,300 more by April.
‘We are also increasing the probation budget by an extra £700million over the next three years and investing in new technology to reduce admin so staff can focus on work that reduces reoffending, helping to protect the public as part of our Plan for Change.’
It comes after official crime figures published on Thursday showed shoplifting incidents jumped to more than half a million in the Government’s first year in power.
Official figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said retail crime spiked by 13 per cent in the 12 months to June, reaching 529,994 recorded offences.
In a further example of rampant crime in Wild West Britain, theft from the person rose by five per cent to 145,860 offences in England and Wales.
The number of sexual offences recorded by police jumped nine per cent to 211,225 offences, the ONS data showed.
It included a six per cent increase in reported rapes, to 72,804.
Although robbery of personal property was down 12 per cent, there was a sharp rise in the number of commercial premises being robbed.
Fightback: Security guards eject a thief from a Greggs in Hammersmith, West London. Coke bottles went flying as the man resisted security guards as they tried to evict him from the premises
This category was up a dramatic 55 per cent to 18,534 offences.
The ‘theft from the person’ category, which will include mobile phone snatches, was up five per cent to just under 146,000 offences.
It comes after the number of police officers in England and Wales fell by 1,300 to 146,400 in March, from an all-time high of 147,700 a year earlier.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said: ‘The rise in serious crimes like rape, sexual offences, shoplifting and robberies – as well as a fall in police numbers – prove Labour are too weak to restore public order and have no plan to cut crime.
‘In a single year, Labour have turned Britain into a soft touch for criminals and a nightmare for victims.’
The ONS said the rises in sex offences reflected ‘general increases in police recorded sexual offences over the last decade, largely because of improvements in police recording practices’.
Racially or religiously-aggravated harassment leapt by 11 per cent in the year to just over 10,000 incidents, the data showed.
The rise is likely to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim incidents triggered by the Gaza-Israel conflict and the July 2024 Southport attack.
Overall, police recorded 6.6million crimes during the year, down one per cent on the previous 12 months.
It included an 18 per cent jump in drug offences to just under 217,000 incidents, including a 39 per cent rise in drug trafficking incidents.
Recorded fraud and computer misuse rose one per cent to 1.3million incidents.
Other categories were down, including knife crime (down five per cent) and gun crime (down 16 per cent).
Homicides – murders and manslaughters – fell six per cent to 518, the lowest number since current recording practices began in 2003.
Separate data published by the Home Office showed police are making slow progress on increasing the proportion of crimes which lead to an offender being sent to court.
Footage filmed inside a Tube shows a man in a brightly coloured carnival costume scuffling with a group of other revellers
The data said 7.6 per cent of crimes recorded by police led to a charge or summons, up from 6.7 per cent in the previous year.
But performance is still far below levels seen a decade ago, when it stood at 15 per cent.
There was a fractional increase year-on-year in the number of reported rapes which led to a charge or summons, up from 2.7 per cent to three per cent.
Liberal Democrat justice spokesman Jess Brown-Fuller MP said: ‘This rising surge in shoplifting is becoming worryingly normalised.
‘Frankly, our communities and our high streets deserve better than this.
‘The Government has made big promises when it comes to tackling crime, but they are failing to deliver.’
Lucy Whing of the British Retail Consortium said: ‘Retail theft is a major issue for retailers, costing over £2.2billion a year.
‘While ONS figures do not reveal the true scale of the issue as it only tracks reported incidents, it chimes with our own statistics which show shoplifting soaring in recent years.
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‘The causes are manifold, but the rise in organised crime is a particular concern, with gangs systematically hitting stores one after another, all over the country.
‘Theft is also a major trigger for violence and abuse against staff. Incidents of violence and abuse have risen to over 2,000 per day.’
The Government’s forthcoming legislation to remove a £200 threshold for police to investigate shop crime will ‘send a clear signal that all shoplifting is unacceptable and will not be tolerated’, she added.
Crime and policing minister Sarah Jones said: ‘Levels of shop theft and street crime that this government has inherited are utterly unacceptable.
‘That is why we are putting 3,000 new neighbourhood officers on the beat to fight crime, catch criminals and protect communities as part of our Plan for Change.’
