Justice and Policing

Runs prisons, courts and probation. Currently best known for prisons that are full and courts that are not.

From 1 October, the government says offenders leaving prison will face the toughest supervision in British history, with expanded tagging, new location restriction zones and access to data in near real time for probation staff. Two days earlier, HM Inspectorate of Probation warned the system risks creating a "false sense of assurance" if technology is not matched by effective practice. The National Audit Office said in July that further expansion "will not be effective or efficient" without fixing weaknesses in governance and data quality that the department has already identified.

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the London Fire Brigade are among the organisations referred to the Crown Prosecution Service following the Metropolitan Police's Grenfell investigation. MHCLG said it was notified in 2023 that it was under investigation, a fact not previously made public. RBKC is understood to face potential consideration of corporate manslaughter as well as health and safety offences; MHCLG's statement specifies only a Health and Safety at Work Act offence.

The government published a £208.9 million cost estimate for criminal law measures in the Crime and Policing Act five months after the legislation received Royal Assent in April 2026. The figure is more than double the £97 million estimated at Bill stage. The document published at enactment carries a blank date field and no ministerial signature.

Every Crown Court in England and Wales will get a specialist rape courtroom with fixed trial dates, private waiting areas and facilities for recording evidence in advance. Many of those measures were piloted at Leeds, Newcastle and Snaresbrook from October 2022. The Ministry of Justice published its assessment on 3 September 2026; it was qualitative only and produced no figures on whether cases at those courts were completed more quickly or the backlog fell. The announcement does not reference the pilot or its findings.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced on 15 September that the government will fund more than 500 additional enforcement specialists for economic crime, as part of its £550 million Anti-money laundering and asset recovery strategy: 2026 to 2029. The strategy does not attach a number to how much extra criminal money the new investment is expected to recover.

Around 5,000 prisoners are expected to have their release dates brought forward under revised sentencing rules beginning in October, after the government excluded rape, serious sexual offences against children and grooming offences from the changes. The Ministry of Justice's latest capacity model predates those exclusions and no updated version accompanied the announcement.

British Transport Police used live facial recognition at seven London railway stations on 17 occasions between February and July without producing a confirmed match to anybody on its watchlists. One person was stopped after the system generated an alert. Police established that they were not the person being sought. No arrest resulted from facial recognition during any of the 17 deployments.

HM Prison and Probation Service wrote off almost £24 million from its prison expansion programme after construction projects were reduced in scope and a supplier failed. The published accounts do not identify the three losses individually: no names, no amounts for each project, no prison places affected. The losses sit inside a programme already running four years late and nearly double its original budget.

More than 5,000 people subject to electronic monitoring orders had no monitoring equipment assigned to them at the end of June. Another 1,596 had equipment installed but it had not communicated with the monitoring system for at least 14 days. The figures were published after the National Audit Office warned that the government did not know accurately how many people who should have been monitored were not being monitored.

MBR Acres breeds beagles intended for use in laboratory research. Since 12 February, it falls within a criminal offence originally created to protect infrastructure including railways, airports, oil and gas facilities and electricity generation. The government did not name MBR Acres in the legislation. Ministers changed the definition of "key national infrastructure" by adding a new category covering life sciences premises. The High Court has now given permission for a challenge to whether they had the legal power to do so.

In March this year, Greater Manchester Police was asked what Operation Hexagon's official scope was. The force did not provide a document setting it out. It replied that the information was already in the public domain through a Google search. The same Freedom of Information request asked whether Hexagon had ever been reviewed for its legality, conduct or effectiveness. GMP's answer was no.

Companies that fail to comply with Britain's modern slavery reporting rules could face substantial fines under legislation now before Parliament. The proposed rules are considerably tougher than the existing system. They still would not require a company to carry out due diligence on human rights in its supply chain. Under the Immigration and Asylum Bill, a business could state that it had carried out no assessment of whether forced labour risks existed, explain why it had not done so, and still comply with the reporting requirement.

In June 2020, a senior MI5 officer told a BBC journalist that Agent X was an MI5 informant. Less than two years later, MI5 gave the High Court a witness statement saying that had never happened. The statement was false. An investigation of 213 pages, published on 16 July, has now established that the officer who made the original disclosure knew throughout that he had done so and later fabricated an account denying it.

The Crown Court ended March with 80,061 open cases, 37 fewer than three months earlier, but still 5 per cent higher than a year before. The more serious movement was inside that total: 22,124 cases had been open for at least a year, the highest number in the current series, up 24 per cent in twelve months. More than half involved violence or sexual offences.

The Home Office opened a consultation on 7 July on new rules governing police access to driving licence records. The government says explicitly that this is not a proposal to allow police to search the driving licence database using facial recognition. Neither the Crime and Policing Act 2026 nor the draft regulations published alongside the consultation contain an express prohibition on using DVLA images for facial recognition searches.

On 15 June, the National Crime Agency said police forces had been ordered to reopen previously closed child sexual exploitation cases in eight force areas because reviewers had found possible lines of inquiry that had not been exhausted. The cases form part of Operation Beaconport, the national police review created after Baroness Louise Casey's 2025 National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.