Britain’s most senior police chief has warned that the 43 “overstretched” police forces in England and Wales are “trying to do too much with too little” as they fight a losing battle against criminal networks. The “fragmented, bureaucratic, top-heavy spaghetti model” needs to be replaced with “a simpler, leaner service”, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley said in a speech last week.

But government plans to reduce the number of forces to as few as nine have left police chiefs and crime commissioners “at war”, said The Telegraph.

What did the commenters say?
The plans, unveiled by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in January, would be “the biggest shake-up of the police since 1964”, when the number of police forces was more than halved from 100, said The Telegraph’s home affairs editor Charles Hymas. A new National Police Service would focus on counter-terror and organised crime, while existing constabularies would merge into bigger regional forces, with hundreds of local commands within them to deal with “everyday crimes” such as shoplifting.

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 and chair of the Association of PCCs, told the paper. The reorganisation is going to cost £1 billion, said Kent PCC Matthew Scott, “and that is £1 billion we could have spent catching criminals”.

All the same, “we have got to do better” than tying up resources in 43 separate headquarters and systems, said Greater Manchester’s Chief Constable Stephen Watson. “There is money to be liberated through economies of scale”, which will “bolster” what we can do “at the local level”.

Given the “enormous scale and complexity” of “sophisticated crime cartels”, it’s “little wonder” that Rowley “feels under pressure”, said The Yorkshire Post’s editorial board. But condensing 43 police forces “is not the solution”. We need “properly funded, well-resourced local constabularies, led by talented police chiefs who know and care about their communities”.

What next?
Mahmood is reviewing an independent report from former Metropolitan Police commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe that recommends how 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” to tackle serious and complex crime.

MPs, medics and campaigners are urging Health Secretary Yvette Cooper to trigger an early “break clause” from Palantir’s NHS contract in February. But ministers reviewing the £330 million deal to deploy the US tech giant’s flagship AI system have concluded that removing it would be “too disruptive”, said the Financial Times.

What is Palantir’s contract with the NHS?
In 2023, NHS England awarded a contract to link datasets across hospitals and trusts to a Palantir-led consortium. The result, the Federated Data Platform, is powered by Palantir’s Foundry software and loaned out to NHS teams to build applications, coordinate patient records, schedule procedures and reduce waiting lists.

The deal was controversial from the off, due to Palantir’s work with US immigration enforcement and the Israeli military. In June, the Commons Health and Social Care Committee recommended that the contract not be extended. “People don’t trust Palantir, its benefits are contested and other tools could deliver the same or similar advantages,” said committee member and Labour MP Ben Coleman in The Guardian.

Has its software helped the NHS?
Many doctors say Palantir’s FDP program is less effective than existing technology. A briefing for senior healthcare leaders described it as “slow and clunky”.

NHS England said that, as of June this year, 139 NHS trusts were “live” on Palantir’s software. But 52 of them “did not use a single FDP app”, said Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin in the London Review of Books, citing a Department of Health and Social Care official. In July, the Office for Statistics Regulation said NHS England lacked sufficient evidence for its claims that the FDP was directly responsible for performance improvements. 

What might happen next?
The National Audit Office, the independent public spending watchdog, is reviewing the rollout and costs of the platform, and will publish a report this winter. NHS England also commissioned Imperial College London to evaluate clinical outcomes, with that final report due in 2029.

The government’s review of Palantir’s contract is ongoing, but Cooper told MPs last week that she wanted to use the NHS “to develop UK sovereign AI”. Health officials have been “sounding out a handful of British companies to bid to run the FDP”, said the FT. But Palantir’s defenders claim switching to “an untested alternative” would be a “significant gamble”.

Workers prepare to uncover a 14-metre-high statue of Pope Leo XIV in the Peruvian port city of Callao ahead of his arrival in the country tomorrow for a six-day visit. Rafael Gutiérrez’s sculpture is the world’s largest monument dedicated to the pontiff.

Ernesto Benavides / AFP / Getty

Dumfries and Galloway is the only place in the UK to make National Geographic’s 2027 list of Best of the World travel destinations. This quiet, southwestern corner of Scotland has a wealth of “untouched natural beauty”, some great medieval attractions, and a vibrant literary scene, said the magazine. And from next summer, “stargazers will find a sanctuary” at the new Scottish Dark Sky Observatory in Galloway Forest Park, where they can marvel at the inky skies “among the trees of an ancient spruce forest beside a glimmering loch”.

The region also has plenty of excellent walking trails to explore, including the “rugged and wild” Rhins of Galloway Coast Path, a challenging 83-mile circular route between the fishing village of Portpatrick and the lighthouse at the Mull of Galloway. History buffs should spend an afternoon wandering around Caerlaverock Castle, a “triangular pink-sandstone fortress with its own moat” that looks “straight out of a fairy tale”. If reading is more your thing, head to Wigtown, where there are 17 bookshops, including Scotland’s biggest second-hand one, with more than 100,000 titles to pore over.

Legendary Scottish poet Robert Burns was born in Ayrshire, said Robin McKelvie in The Telegraph, but “I prefer visiting his old farm at Ellisland”, near Dumfries, where he “played out his poet-farmer dream”. Be sure to enjoy a dram at his “favourite drinking ‘howff’, The Globe”.

Visitors wanting to push the boat out should consider Knockinaam Lodge, said Chitra Ramaswamy in The Times. Set in its own “glittering cove” at Portpatrick, the 10-bedroom hotel “faces out to the high drama of the Irish Sea”. 

Gen Z doesn’t relish going to war – so what! You should worry more about the reckless generations that do
Jason Okundaye in The Guardian
Young people are being accused of “milk-livered zoomer communist pansyism” after their reluctance “to go to war for Britain” was revealed by the latest British Social Attitudes survey, writes Jason Okundaye. But “perceptions of war” have been shaped by the “strategic blunders and postcolonial overreach that have defined” 21st-century conflicts. Who would die “under a flag” for that? Patriotism would be a “very different proposition”, though, if war were to “reach these shores”. Then we’d all be defending our “communities, friends and families”.

I stopped eating salmon a year ago. Once you’ve read this, so will you
Simon Kelner in The i Paper
I’m not a “faddy eater” or “eco-warrior”, writes Simon Kelner, but since talking to a fisheries safety expert, I no longer consume salmon. I learned that farmed salmon “are kept at mind-boggling densities in cages” where sea lice inflict them with “stomach-churning” deformities. And some escape and “interbreed with wild salmon”, endangering “native populations” by reducing their “genetic fitness”. We must “recognise the gap between salmon’s healthy, nutritional image and the grim reality of intensive farming, and agitate for serious improvement”.

Gordon Ramsay, do we really need to see you shirtless at 60?
Hilary Rose in The Times
Gordon Ramsay celebrated “Day 2 of being 60” by sharing a picture of himself, “pecs clenched”, wearing “nothing but a rolled-down wetsuit”, writes Hilary Rose. Other ageing male celebs, from David Beckham to Sacha Baron Cohen, also seem to be getting their “nipples out”, so “topless clearly sells”. At least Ramsay’s breasts “make a change from Sydney Sweeney’s and allow for equal opportunities ogling”. But “I’m more interested in his recipe for a lobster roll” than “his clavicles, protuberant though they are”.