Do we need fewer police forces in the UK?

Police chiefs and crime commissioners are “at war” over their different reactions to government plans to reduce the number of forces in England and Wales from 43 to as few as nine, said The Telegraph.

Many are aghast at the plans but others think there are the only solution to a broken system. Britain’s most senior police chief, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, said, in a speech last week, that “43 overstretched forces trying to do too much with too little” are losing the fight against national criminal networks, often operating online. The current “fragmented, bureaucratic, top-heavy spaghetti model” needs replacing with “a simpler, leaner service” that has “less duplication” and “better technology”.

What did the commentators say?

The new plans, first set out by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in a white paper in January, would be “the biggest shake-up of the police since 1964”, when the number of police forces, then 100, was more than halved, said The Telegraph’s home affairs editor Charles Hymas. A new National Police Service would focus on counter-terror and serious, organised crime; existing constabularies would merge into bigger regional forces, with hundreds of local commands set up within them to deal with “everyday crimes”, such as shoplifting and anti-social behaviour.

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But creating larger forces “risks weakening local accountability, disrupting local partnerships and distancing policing from the communities it serves”, Emily Spurrell, Merseyside’s Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) and the chair of the Association of PCCs, told the paper.

I note that Rowley called his speech “The cost of standing still is that criminals will win”, said Matthew Scott, PCC for Kent. But this reorganisation is going to cost £1 billion “and that is £1 billion we could have spent catching criminals”.

But the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, Stephen Watson, has said the case for reform is “unanswerable”. He told other police chiefs that “we have got to do better” than tying up resources in 43 separate headquarters, chiefs, deputies, departments and computer systems. “There is money to be liberated through economies of scale” which will let us “bolster” what we can do “at the local level”. The alternative is “decline by design”.

“Two recent events have consolidated” the case for merger, said Danny Shaw, a policing specialist at the Institute for Government. In August, Cleveland Police asked for the assistance of neighbouring forces to deal with an investigation into criminal gangs after a “shocking collision” on the A66 in Middlesbrough, in which seven people died, including two police constables. The following month, Kent and Hampshire forces “were called upon to respond with barely any warning” to anti-migrant protests in Dover and Portsmouth. The “intimidating scenes” of masked demonstrators blocking roads illustrated “shortcomings in police intelligence, as well as the need for greater flexibility in resourcing”.

Given the “enormous scale and complexity“ of “sophisticated crime cartels”, it’s “little wonder” that Rowley “feels under pressure and in need of a little help”, said The Yorkshire Post’s editorial board: you’d be “hard-pressed to find a chief constable who does not feel the same way”. But condensing 43 police forces into “a handful of super-forces is not the solution”. What we need are “properly-funded, well-resourced local constabularies, led by talented police chiefs who know and care about their communities”.

What next?

Mahmood is currently reviewing an independent report she commissioned from former Metropolitan Police commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe, which recommends how current police forces could be cut, merged and reorganised. A Home Office spokesperson said the reforms would deliver “strong local policing”, as well as “more resilient forces providing specialist capabilities to tackle serious and complex crime threats”.