What has Boris Johnson promised on law and order?

Since becoming prime minister under a month ago, Boris Johnson has made a number of law-and-order announcements affecting England and Wales.

But what exactly is being proposed?

20,000 more police officers

The plan: Hire an extra 20,000 police officers by 2022. Mr Johnson says the policy will cost £1.1bn.

What it means: There are currently 123,171 police officers in England and Wales, down from 143,000 in 2010, when the Conservatives came to power and Theresa May became home secretary.

So if Mr Johnson delivers on his recruitment plan, it will put officer levels to around where they were nine years ago.

There has been some dispute about the link between police numbers and levels of violent crime, with Theresa May saying there was not a direct link.

But Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick has said there is “some link” between the two.

10,000 prison places
The plan: Up to £2.5bn funding to create 10,000 new prison places.

What it means: The government already had a target, announced in 2015, of creating 10,000 places in new prisons by 2020.

However, this target was to create new places in order to shut old, outdated prisons, not to increase the overall capacity of the prison system.

And the government has now reduced this target to 3,360 by 2023.

But Mr Johnson has now set a new target of another 10,000 by “the mid-2020s”.

This will see a 10,000 increase in capacity, rather than just create new places in order to shut old ones.

This new target will partly be achieved by expanding HMP Full Sutton, in Yorkshire, although expansion at this site has been planned since 2016.

Currently, the prison population in England and Wales is almost 83,000, which is 8,700 above the prisons service’s own overcrowding limits.

Prison security
The plan: £100m to be spent on improving prison security. The money will fund airport-style security, including X-ray scanners and metal detectors, as well as technology to detect and block mobile phones.

What it means: The Ministry of Justice says the money will target crime, including violence and drug smuggling as well as dishonest prison staff.

Violence in prison has reached a record high in England and Wales. There has also been an increase in drug use and self-harm incidents.

Read the full story here: (BBC News)