Its a typical misstatement by a Press seeking to make an issue out of nothing, and its been taken up by the usual idiots here to make their usual, utterly wrong, points.
An explanation:
Before this legislation came in - legislation which had been through Parliament for at least a year prior to it coming in (so you think the Press might have noticed, especially as its been mentioned repeatedly by various politicians) - the situation was that there were several "powers of arrest" based on the Police and Criminal Act 1984.
Section 24 said that, basically, any offence where the sentence was five years or more, or where there was no maximum sentence (eg life sentence), or where the sentence was fixed by law (eg murder) was an arrestable offence.
Section 25 said that you could be arrested for ANY offence (including littering) if one of the following conditions applied:
These conditions are as follows:
(1) They cannot establish your name or they think you have given a false one, OR
(2) They cannot establish an address suitable for the service of a summons or they think you have given a false one, OR
(3) They have reasonable grounds to believe arrest is necessary to prevent you from doing any of the following:
(i) causing physical injury to yourself or any other person, OR
(ii) suffering physical injury; OR
(iii) causing loss of or damage to property; OR
(iv) committing an offence against public decency, OR
(v) causing an unlawful obstruction of the highway.
Section 26 contained a list of offences which had their own power of arrest contained within the legislation, like begging, indecent exposure etc.
This was the state of play since the end of the common law / sus powers which had been sort of unchanged since the inception of the Police in the 1820s.
What SOCAP has done is removed section 24 and almost all of section 26 and instead unified all the powers of arrest under an expanded section 25, adding two powers allowing arrest in order to effectively investigate an offence and if there are reasonable grounds to suspect the perp would not attend court if dealt with there and then.
So in short you still need an offence, or suspicion of an offence, to have taken place or be suspected of imminently taken place. You have to have one of the section 25 grounds or believe an arrest is necessary to effectively investigate the offence or have reasonable grounds to suspect that the perp wont attend Court if dealt with by way of ticket or summons. YOU CANNOT BE ARRESTED ON PSYCHIC GROUNDS AS THE ARTICLE SUGGESTS.
The bulk of the legislation hasnt changed since PACE came in as long ago as 1984; and the parts that have changed have been announced and debated well in advance. Sloppy, scaremongering journalism is unacceptable normally but even more so in this case - reading the Torygraph and its kin you would think that HMG dropped this on people as they woke up on January 1st...