The Government is determined that robust action should be taken to prevent robbery from happening and ensure swift justice for perpetrators.

The central aim of our police reform agenda is to protect and revitalise neighbourhood policing. We are lifting national responsibilities off local forces, so they focus on tackling local issues.

The Government has already taken steps to boost the neighbourhood policing response, ensuring that every neighbourhood has named, contactable officers dedicated to tackling crime and anti-social behaviour locally, and forces have increased patrols in town centres and other key locations based on local demand and intelligence.

By the end of February 2026, forces had delivered more than 3,100 additional police officers and PCSOs into neighbourhood roles since March 2025, strengthening neighbourhood teams as part of our Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee to deliver 13,000 more by the end of this Parliament.

Total funding to police forces will be up to £18.4 billion, an increase of up to £834 million compared to the 2025-26 police funding settlement. This equates to a 4.7% cash increase and a 2.7% real terms increase in funding.

All forces will receive a real terms increase in funding this year.

Through the Knife-Enabled Robbery Group, we are working with Chief Constables to roll out proven-to-work interventions targeted in the places where knife crime is highest, including large urban areas. Through this Group we have turned a 14% rise in knife-enabled robbery in these places into 15% reductions overall.

This Government established a Knife-Enabled Robbery Taskforce in October 2024 to respond to surges of 14% of this violent form of robbery in the year before the General Election, a significant proportion of which involves young people. We brought together Chief Constables and policing partners from the seven areas which collectively accounted for approximately 70% of the national problem.

The Taskforce scrutinised police performance in real time and identified common solutions to shared operational challenges, including a specific focus on under-18 knife-enabled robbery along school routes and transport hubs.

The Knife-Enabled Robbery Group now continues this relentless effort, achieving promising results, with knife robberies now down by 15% overall across these seven areas (Oct 2025 vs year to June 2024). Knife robberies are also down nationally by 10%. These results demonstrate the impact of our targeted and evidence-led approach.

Our new Plan to Halve Knife Crime ‘Protecting Lives, Building Hope’ sets out how we will support young people and stop those at risk from turning to crime. This includes the roll out of over 50 Young Futures Panel pilots across England and Wales to identify thousands of children at high risk of knife crime who were falling through the gaps.

Mark is of course a hero and deserves our support. I am following this case very closely.

In a world where so many people walk on by or look the other way, I believe it is vital to the rule of law that our whole society gets behind people who are willing to stand up and be counted. We are joined in the Gallery today by one such person—Mark Hehir, a bus driver. Mark leapt to the aid of a passenger who was robbed, and the police said everything he did was entirely lawful, but his employer, Metroline, sacked him. More than 120,000 people have signed my petition giving their full support to Mark. Does the Justice Secretary agree that Mark is a hero who deserves our support?

These issues have a bearing on the Department for Business and Trade, so we necessarily have to work across Government. However, in a bipartisan manner, I and my Ministers will of course be happy to work with the hon. Gentleman on this issue.

I welcome those remarks, and I am sure the public will want us to work across the parties on these issues, but this is not an isolated case. I have heard from employers themselves, shop workers and bus drivers that they want to do the right thing, but the law inhibits them from doing so. The Conservatives will be bringing forward proposals to introduce good samaritan protections in civil law for both employers and employees. Will the Secretary of State work with us to get that on to the statute book?

The information requested is provided in the attached excel tables. These tables include data covering the period 2020 – 2024 on the number of offenders who were convicted of a specified offence but did not receive an immediate custodial sentence, by the number of previous convictions for that specified offence.

This data is not regularly published or held in an easily accessible format. The information supplied has been sourced from a bespoke retrieval from the Police National Computer database.

Sentencing in individual cases is a matter for the independent judiciary. When deciding what sentence to impose, courts must consider the circumstances of the case, including the culpability of the offender, the harm they caused or intended to cause, and any aggravating and mitigating factors, in line with any relevant sentencing guidelines, developed by the Sentencing Council for England and Wales.

Previous convictions are already a statutory aggravating factor, with Sentencing Guidelines being clear that sentencers must consider the nature and relevance of previous convictions, and the time elapsed since the previous convictions.

The Government recognises the serious impact that robbery and theft from the person offences have on public safety, both in terms of the harm caused to victims and the wider implications for communities.

Through our Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee we will place thousands of additional police officers and police community support officers in neighbourhood policing roles. This will provide a more visible and effective service to the public, with each neighbourhood having a named, contactable officer dealing with local issues, including robbery and theft from the person.

A significant proportion of these offences involve the theft of a mobile phone which is why the Home Secretary brought together police, the National Crime Agency, the Mayor of London, leading tech companies and others in February to drive greater collaboration in breaking the business model of mobile phone thieves. The Summit resulted in clear commitments from attendees to work in partnership, including to significantly boost the sharing of data and intelligence on mobile phone theft to build a comprehensive picture of the problem, better understand the role of organised crime networks and identify the most effective means of tackling this criminality.

Police recorded crime for England and Wales showed a 30% annual rise in shoplifting offences and 8% in robbery offences for year ending March 2024. Hertfordshire Police Force saw a 25% rise in shoplifting and a 35% rise in police recorded robbery offences in the same period.

In cases of shoplifting, more and more offenders are using violence and abuse against shopworkers. We will not stand for this. This Government will introduce a new offence for assaulting a retail worker to protect the hardworking and dedicated staff that work in stores. We will also end the effective immunity, introduced by the previous Government, granted to low-value shoplifting of goods under £200.

Tackling serious violence, including robbery, is a priority for this Government. One of the ways we are doing this is through close working with the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s Personal Robbery Steering Group.

The Government has developed a Criminal Justice Dashboard (CJS) Dashboard to bring together data from across the CJS starting at the point at which a crime is recorded by the police, through to completion in the Crown Court. The Dashboard aims to increase transparency, support collaboration and drive improvement at a local level.

The dashboard publishes information on the median number of days taken, from a crime being recorded, to reach an investigative outcome, including charges, for offences recorded by the police in England and Wales. These can be broken down by Police Force Area, and by ‘Victim based crime’, ‘State based Crime’ and ‘adult rape offences’. The latest data can be accessed via the Criminal Justice Dashboard, available here:

https://cjs-dashboard-production.apps.live.cloud-platform.service.justice.gov.uk/quality-justice/police

The Home Office does not hold information on the time between an arrest and a charge, or on the time between a charge and a trial. However, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) holds information on the average number of days taken from charge to main hearing for rape, fraud, murder, burglary, robbery and drug offences at the Crown Court in i) London and ii) the rest of England. These are provided in the table. Data are not available for Slough and data for domestic abuse are not held centrally by the MoJ.

This Government is committed to tackling reoffending, and we are investing in the areas which the evidence suggests can help an individual turn their back on crime, including accommodation, employment and substance misuse treatment.

We are delivering a new Prison Education Service, we are supporting ex-offenders into housing, we have changed the law so prisoners can take up apprenticeships and we are introducing Incentivised Substance-Free living wings for drug recovery.

The proven reoffending rate for offenders who had an index offence of burglary and served a custodial sentence for this offence has been updated since the Answer of 18 January 2024 to Question 9527. The rate for the latest period available, the January – March 2022 cohort, now stands at 45.6%. This is a decrease of 2.7 percentage points.

The proven reoffending rate for offenders in the January – March 2022 cohort who had an index offence of shop lifting (“theft from shops”) and served a custodial sentence for this offence was 80.7%.

The proven reoffending rate for offenders in the January – March 2022 cohort who had an index offence of robbery and served a custodial sentence for this offence was 21.7%.

The overall proven reoffending rate for the January – March 2022 cohort was 25.5%.

The overall proven reoffending rate has decreased from 31.3% in 2011/12 to 25.2% in 2021/22.

The Police issue all postal requisition letters following Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) advice to charge, and have sole responsibility for decisions on, and issue of, postal requisition letters. The CPS does not hold the relevant data.

The percentage of cases where prosecution offers no evidence because the victim or witness no longer supports prosecution for theft, fraud, robbery and possession of weapons offence can be found in the below table.

The table details the cases in which the victim or witness no longer supports prosecution on the day of trial (%) by selected offence group, England and Wales, 2014-2023 (data for 2023 covers only the period from January to March, the latest available).

The data presented covers trials which do not go ahead on the listed trial data as the "prosecution offers no evidence because the witness/victim no longer supports prosecution". This is measured as a proportion of all listed trials in that period, excluding trial vacations.

The data is first published as part of the National Statistics series ‘Criminal Court Statistics Quarterly’, latest data available to March 2023. The data is only available from 2014 onwards.