Theresa May’s stop-and-search shake-up is costing lives

Theresa May has a very big failure to her name, but strangely few people seem to want to pick her up on it. The latest crime figures show a sharp increase in recorded offences in England and Wales, especially in knife crime, which rose 21 per cent to 37,443 incidents. This continues a trend which began four years ago, since when the number of recorded knife offences has risen by half.

It reverses an equally sharp fall in recorded knife crime between 2010, when Theresa May became Home Secretary, and 2014. What happened to bring about the end of what looks like a very successful period of tackling knife crime? Obviously, there are multiple factors involved in crime, but it is impossible to ignore a speech made by Theresa May on 30 April 2014, in which she ordered police to observe new rules on stop and search powers, inspired by a review which had revealed that people from a black or other ethnic minority background were seven times more likely to be stopped and searched.

‘Nobody wins when stop and search is misapplied’, she said.