Boris Johnson has come under fire from a leading businessman over plans to humiliate offenders by making them work in “fluorescent-jacketed chain gangs”.

The prime minister unveiled plans to put more people doing community service into hi-viz jackets as they cleared rubbish and graffiti.

At the launch of his new crime crackdown plan, Johnson said that he wanted a more visible way of showing offenders working in the streets.

“If you are guilty of antisocial behaviour and you are sentenced to unpaid work, as many people are, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be out there in one of those fluorescent-jacketed chain gangs visibly paying your debt to society,” he said.

“So you are going to be seeing more of that.”

But James Timpson, who runs the Timpson’s shoe repair and key cutting chain that is one of the largest employers of ex-offenders in the country, hit out at the PM’s plan on Twitter.

“Instead of making offenders wear high viz jackets in chain gangs, how about helping them get a real job instead?” he wrote.

“In my shops we employ lots of ex offenders and they wear a shirt and tie. Same people, different approach, a much better outcome.”

Timpson’s brother Edward is a Tory MP and the firm has frequently been cited by the government for its social enterprise work.

Campaigners and some Labour MPs also criticised the plan, which Johnson first floated when he ran for Mayor of London in 2008 but didn’t implement.

Civil rights group Liberty said the proposal would not make communities safer but was designed “to create more stigma and division” and was “a short-term stunt that will cause long-term generational harm”.

The Home Office itself had not used the phrase “chain gangs” in its announcement.

It preferred instead to say it would be “making unpaid work more visible by getting offenders to clean up streets, alleys, estates, and open spaces, and ensuring justice is seen to be done”

Johnson’s “Beating Crime” plan, which also included proposals to expand controversial Stop and Search powers, follows Labour’s own campaigns to highlight rising levels of anti-social behaviour across the UK.

During the launch, the PM appeared to admit that the problem was getting worse, but partly blamed Covid lockdowns.

Speaking at Surrey Police HQ, he said: “I do think that the lockdown has driven some anti-social behaviour and we need to deal with it. That’s why we are backing the police in the way that we are.”

Fans are crestfallen that Simone Biles had to withdraw from the gymnastics team final at the Tokyo Olympics on Tuesday.

Simone, the face of not only gymnastics but perhaps of the entire summer games, awkwardly performed a vault and walked off the floor.

USA Gymnastics said she had pulled out of the competition “due to a medical issue” and will be assessed daily.

Labour’s Wes Streeting has returned to frontbench duties after being given the all-clear by cancer doctors.

The Ilford North MP revealed in May that he would be stepping back from frontline politics while he underwent treatment for kidney cancer.

Streeting, seen as one of the party’s rising stars, was promoted to the shadow cabinet just one week earlier by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer as shadow secretary of state for child poverty.

But the 38-year-old confirmed on Tuesday that his operation to remove his kidney was successful and that he is feeling well enough to return to work.

In a new video posted on social media, Streeting thanked NHS staff at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, north London, for supporting him through his treatment.

He also praised Ilford’s King George and Queen’s Hospitals for detecting the “cancer really early”, after he went into hospital for a check on a kidney stone.

“Without that early action the conversation we would be having might be a very different one,” he said.

“So, I just count my lucky stars really. I’ve lost a kidney but I’ve also got rid of the cancer. No chemotherapy, no radiotherapy. I’m just really lucky.

“So, I’m back, back in action here in Ilford North working for my constituents and back in action in Labour’s shadow cabinet too.

“You’ll be hearing lots more from me in the coming days, weeks and months and I can’t wait to get cracking.”

A former president of the National Union of Students (NUS), Streeting was an outspoken critic of former leader Jeremy Corbyn over his failure to tackle antisemitism in the party.

During Labour’s leadership race last year, he wrote a pamphlet in which he warned that if the party continued “Corbynism without Corbyn” it risked disappearing from the political map.

“The next leader of the Labour party needs to hit a big reset button and to do so loudly enough that the voters notice,” he wrote in the Fabian Society paper.

Streeting was originally campaign manager for Jess Phillips before she dropped out of the leadership contest, and later backed Starmer.

He was one of the shadow ministers who toured the broadcast studios to defend Starmer following Labour’s poor showing during the “Super Thursday” local elections in May.