Labour would overhaul the approach to antisocial behaviour with plans to allow victims to choose how offenders are punished, it has been reported. The shadow justice secretary, Steve Reed, has said he will update Tony Blair’s “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” slogan and put prevention at the heart of their approach, the Times reported. Freedom of information requests showed nearly 2m reports of antisocial behaviour went unattended over the past three years, while the number of community sentences halved over the last decade from 185,265 in 2011 to 72,021 in 2021, the paper reported. Reed said increasing and strengthening the use of such sentences would tackle reoffending rates and give “a voice directly to victims”. He told the Times: “Victims will be able to select the unpaid work that offenders carry out, so victims will be seeing justice done.” Labour wants to widen the scope of community sentences work beyond tasks such as clearing wasteland, decorating community centres, repairing churches and removing graffiti. It also proposes that victims sit on new community payback boards overseeing sentences and ensuring they are completed. Reed said he wanted to update Blair’s 1990s slogan by reviewing how to put prevention at the heart of the criminal justice system. The review will look at how countries such as New Zealand have adopted an approach of providing specialist treatment to prevent reoffending by those living with domestic violence or parents with serious mental health problems. Reed said: “Rather than just giving up on those people or letting them get out there and offend, I want to keep people safe and keep our community safe. You can do that by tackling the effects of the trauma that leads them to offending. By doing it, you make them much less likely to offend again. “So if you really want to keep people safe, we’ve got to update Labour’s old slogan: ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ and make it fit for the future. This whole science around trauma in early years didn’t exist in the early 1990s when Tony Blair came up with that phrase. So I want to update it for today.”