The Home Office has issued a narrowly drawn amending instrument that delays part of the Crime and Policing Act 2026 before it was due to start. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 (Commencement No. 3 and Saving Provisions) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 were made on 21 October 2026 and signed by Sarah Jones, Minister of State at the Home Office. According to the instrument and Explanatory Note published on legislation.gov.uk, the amendment removes regulation 4(f) and regulation 4(i) from the earlier Commencement No. 3 Regulations. The immediate effect is straightforward: section 6 and Schedule 3 of the 2026 Act will not come into force on 26 October 2026, as previously planned.
The delayed provisions deal with anti-social behaviour case reviews. The Explanatory Note states that section 6 creates a new process for a further review of anti-social behaviour case reviews carried out by relevant bodies under section 104 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Policing and Crime Act 2014. Schedule 3 provides the operating detail. According to the same Note, it sets out supplementary rules on how those further reviews are to be conducted and what procedures must be put in place, including consultation requirements. In policy terms, the Government has delayed not only a headline power, but also the procedural framework needed to run it.
This distinction matters because commencement regulations decide when an Act moves from enacted law to operative law. In this case, the parent Act remains unchanged, but the legal start date for section 6 and Schedule 3 has been removed from the existing timetable. For policy and legal readers, that means the reform has not been cancelled. The amendment does not repeal the new anti-social behaviour review framework and it does not alter the substance of section 6 or Schedule 3. It means only that those provisions stay dormant until ministers make a further commencement instrument setting a replacement date.
For practitioners, the short-term position is that the current section 104 framework under the 2014 Act remains the live route. Relevant bodies that had been working towards a 26 October 2026 change do not, on the face of this instrument, need to apply the new further-review process from that date. The immediate practical effect is likely to be seen in local procedure, training and consultation planning. Any preparatory work linked to the removed commencement date may still be useful later, but the statutory basis for the new process will not exist until a fresh commencement date is made.
The instrument offers very little by way of policy explanation. The Explanatory Note states only that the delayed provisions will be brought into force at a future date. It does not set out why the Home Office decided to postpone commencement less than a week before the original start date. The Government has also not produced a separate full impact assessment for this amending instrument. Instead, the Note says an impact assessment was prepared for the wider package in the Crime and Policing Act 2026, and that no impact, or at least no significant impact, is expected from this amendment itself across the private, voluntary or public sectors.
For Policy Wire readers, the wider point is that legislative passage and commencement are not the same event. Even after Parliament has enacted a reform, departments can still adjust the start date through secondary legislation where implementation is not yet ready, although this instrument does not give a reason for the delay. The next formal step will be another commencement instrument setting a fresh date for section 6 and Schedule 3. Until that appears, the legal position is settled: the anti-social behaviour further-review provisions are enacted, but they are not due to start on 26 October 2026 and are not yet in force.