Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of larger police presence in neighbourhoods on rates of (a) retail crime and (b) anti-social behaviour.

This Government is committed to tackling anti-social behaviour and retail crime and its causes, as a key part of our Safer Streets Mission. Key to this is our plan to transform neighbourhood policing through our Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee. We will deliver 13,000 more neighbourhood police by the end of the Parliament, whilst also ensuring each community has a named, contactable officer to turn to.

To help tackle retail crime, we will provide £5 million over the next three years to continue to fund a specialist analysis team within Opal, the national policing intelligence unit for serious organised acquisitive crime.

We will also invest £2 million over the next three years in the National Business Crime Centre which provides a resource for both police and businesses to learn, share and support each other to prevent and combat crime.

Further, the National Police Chiefs' Council will receive funding to give further training to police and retailers on prevention tactics. The training will aim to empower retailers to develop and implement tactics to prevent retail crime.

Finally, the Home Office is providing funding through the Hotspot Action Fund programme to all 43 Police Force Areas in England and Wales in 2025/26, of £66.3 million. This funding is to implement additional, high visibility patrolling and problem-solving policing in serious violence and anti-social behaviour hotspots.