Of course the police should have the power to enter homes and seize stolen phones...

There’s no question in my mind that Yvette Cooper’s new ‘tough on crime’ law is needed, writes John Rentoul. But in order for it to work, it will need to be properly funded

We are all Blairites now, said home secretary Yvette Cooper as she launched the huge Crime and Policing Bill on its journey through parliament. Those weren’t her exact words, but we got the gist.

Her demeanour was reminiscent of Tony Blair’s frustration at the rise in street crime in 2002 – which newspapers at the time called a “crisis” driven by “mobile phone theft among young people in major cities”. He was determined to put himself on the side of anxious citizens, as he railed privately at the lack of urgency on the part of police leaders in getting to grips with the problem.

Cooper did the same today, saying: “You’ve got victims saying ‘I can see where my phone is, I can track it, and yet the police can’t act’.” This has been a problem for years. People have complained on social media that they know where their stolen phone or laptop is but that the police refuse to act.

So one of the 35 measures in Cooper’s bill is to give the police a new power “to enter premises to search for and seize electronically tracked stolen goods” without having to obtain a search warrant.

This is long overdue, and Cooper deserves praise for overcoming the resistance of senior police officers to a change in the law. But the new power may not be the solution. The reason the police are reluctant to break into places to try to recover tracked devices is not so much the need for a search warrant, but the cost in officers’ time of such operations.

The new law might send a signal to police forces about the need to reorder their priorities. Cooper is well aware of the danger to the government of stories of police officers knocking on the doors of people who have exercised their right to free speech on Facebook – even if the police claim, for example, that they were only “informing” the woman in Stockport that she had been accused of harassment. The difficult part will be when local police forces say that they need more funding if they are to go after every snatched phone.

Which is why it is worth going back to 2002, the last time there was a sharp increase in “snatch theft”. Twenty-three years ago, Blair and then-home secretary David Blunkett got on top of the problem by the means of getting police leaders into a room and exhorting them to divert resources into dealing with street crime. Blair had recently discovered Cobra, the thrilling acronym for the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (there was no “A”), which was a way of convening bosses across public agencies with a sense of urgency.

But what solved mobile phone theft in the early years of this century was the phone companies designing it out. By rendering handsets useless if stolen, they destroyed the incentive to steal them, and for the best part of two decades, phone thefts ceased to be a significant problem.

In the past two years or so, though, the tech arms race between the phone companies and the criminals has tilted in favour of the thieves, as they have found ways round the security. Which means that phones can be reused and are worth something if they can be taken out of the country – which is why the police have to act quickly to recover phones before “Find My iPhone” locates them on their way to the airport.

Cooper summoned law enforcement agencies and representatives of the phone companies to a meeting three weeks ago to “discuss what more could be done to break the business model of mobile phone theft”.

This is the hope of “taking back control”, as Cooper put it, in the longer run, but in the meantime deterring phone thefts will be labour-intensive and therefore expensive police work.

Given the long list of new police powers and new offences created by the Crime and Policing Bill, all of them with implications for police resources, let alone for the need for more prison places, some scepticism about how this will all be paid for is justified.

Blair and Blunkett were able to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime because tax revenues were rising during the New Labour years. Keir Starmer and Cooper have no such visible means of support.