The Police Foundation’s Director gives his full response to the policing White Paper:

On Monday, Shabana Mahmood, the Labour Home Secretary and self-styled ‘reformer’, announced the policing white paper and chose to open her statement in the House of Commons with reference to a former Tory Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel.

Going as far as to quote Peel directly, she offered policing reforms that would deliver a ‘new mode of protection’ because the country, once again, had ‘outgrown her police institutions’.  Our own Strategic Review of Policing released in 2022 had borrowed the same phrase from Peel, and it is encouraging to see so much of that analysis reflected in the government’s plans. (Our former director is now a policy advisor to the Home Secretary).

The much-anticipated white paper – From Local to National: A New Model for Policing – makes some big strategic arguments that we recognise, and which mirror many of the conclusions from the Strategic Review.  Many crimes affecting the public are rising and trust has fallen.  Crime threats have become more complex and serious crimes continue to move online and across borders – so our best assets and capabilities need to be coordinated better at this national level if we want to have a more effective policing response.

Undoubtedly this shift to new regional and streamlined national capabilities and away from 43 forces offers scope for efficiencies and reduces duplication, although there will be additional costs in the transition. And of course we need to reduce waste where we can and allow for investment in world-class capabilities, but this is more than a Treasury numbers exercise. Reform goals should not be limited to efficiency gains.  There are much bigger arguments at stake here and the white paper engages with them.

That is why it was good to see some references to the mission of policing in the 21st century and to the question of where policing’s core role should end, a subject the Foundation will be exploring later this year in the context of harm online. Pledging to update outdated legislation to clarify the police’s role, for example, the white paper says:

“The police have also found themselves being sucked into policing online spaces using outdated legislation. Laws written to deal with public disorder on the street are now being applied to deal with online disputes, often involving offensive language. The public have been left wondering whether the police have drifted too far from their core mission”.

In parts, the white paper surprises with lines like this – bold positions that you would not expect coming from a Labour Home Secretary.  Or when she said, in her Commons statement, what many Conservatives might privately support, that it was really Parliament – and not, by implication, locally elected Police and Crime Commissioners – which is the rightful source of public priority-setting for the police:

“As the old Peelian maxim has it, the police are the public and the public are the police. I consider it essential that the people, through Parliament, can determine what they expect from their forces”

Like all white papers, the pledges must turn into legislation which will need to win parliamentary support to take affect, and we should be realistic about how much reform the system can handle in a short period of time.  And yes change on this scale always has a cost. But the resistance is unlikely to come from within policing – majorities at all ranks would probably concede the ossified post-war model we are limping on with today is not really sustainable.

There was a risk that this white paper would be too technocratic, where a tough fiscal environment was driving structural reforms to realise efficiencies first.  But that is not the impression you get reading it – this is really about system-wide modernisation to address some long-standing challenges, and the vision seems coherent.

So what are the biggest arguments that this white paper is making?

The past is reform, and so is the future

Police reform is a phrase full of contemporary baggage, but it is really just short-hand for the type of change that British policing has been undergoing for decades.  Some of today’s arguments are essentially unchanged.  The Home Secretary’s foreword argues that ‘Some forces are too small to handle complex investigations or major incidents’.  This is identical to the case made after the Royal Commission in the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, when police forces were merged and functions consolidated in the last round of major structural reform.

Reform goals should not be limited to efficiency gains.  There are much bigger arguments at stake here and the white paper engages with them.

This does not invalidate these arguments, but it does show that these propositions are not new or even that radical.  They simply continue a well-established trend towards greater centralisation over decades of public service reform, interrupted albeit only briefly by the devolution agenda of the Conservatives exemplifed by elected PCCs. In fact, policing has been under constant reform since Attlee’s government first began force amalgamations after the Second World War.

“Reform” after all is not a one-time fix – and policing is not broken, the Home Secretary was right to say.  Reform is about modernisation and necessary maintenance.  The white paper is full of references to reform being required to enable the police to adapt to crime and to a changing society, which is the right way to frame the issue.  Although some of the language did at times imply that the last government did no useful reform whatsoever, which might be news to MOPAC, the IOPC, or the NCA for that matter, which were all created in the 2012-16 period.

What makes this reform agenda different is its breadth and ambition.  At 106 pages it is twice the length of the Coalition Government’s 2010 white paper (albeit that was published just 12 weeks after the election, not 18 months later), and it takes a far broader scope.  Much media coverage has focused on the proposed structural reforms, which are simpler to describe, but this white paper contains important reform proposals in areas like local policing, workforce and technology that are much more important for the long-term viability of our policing model.

What makes this reform agenda different is its breadth and ambition. 

What is meant by local?

The white paper repeats the commitment to restoring, or ‘re-energising’ neighbourhood policing and the manifesto plans for 13,000 additional officers at a local level.  The widely trailed plan for fewer forces, and a series of mergers to create 12 or more regional forces, have already attracted opposition voices.  However it is the proposed changes to local policing – to be re-engineered at the Local Policing Area level (not necessarily the same as BCUs, though probably made up of current council wards) – that warrants more attention.

On the assumption today’s force boundaries are superseded – and a review will consult and then map out what these changes might look like before the autumn – the actual policing unit that delivers the neighbourhood patrol and crime prevention activity locally is not yet determined. This means that there is an interesting opportunity here to design these LPAs so they become the new ‘constabulary’ identity for local people.  If they went this route, it would need a clear plan to align these areas with people’s existing town or borough associations, and could also potentially justify investing in much more visible local leadership, and branding and livery that reflects this local link.  Such a development would be a compromise, but it could take much of the heat out of the idea of ‘losing’ local forces to a regional ‘mega-force’ where everyone feels that their police are now deploying from another county 70 miles away.

What will the national service look like?

The specific functions that the National Police Service (NPS) may contain in future are not comprehensively set out.  This again could be subject to another policy statement later this year.  The national fraud function currently housed by the City of London Police (under the established lead force model) is not clarified, however the White Paper does state that:

In time, [the NPS] will handle all national policing responsibilities, creating a world-class force focused on counter-terror, serious and organised crime and fraud. At the same time, the new force will lift the burden of delivering national responsibilities from local forces, ensuring that their focus is entirely on policing their streets.

This strongly implies that once the NPS is setup, local forces will no longer be doing fraud investigations or building case files to charge fraudsters and scammers, and that the City of London will lose their national fraud responsibility eventually, although at present, they have stated that there is no change (and only last week launched the rebooted fraud reporting centre).

There are moments in the white paper where there is a clear signal that agreement has not been reached, and policy design work is ongoing.  Take, footnote 44, which states: “The valuable role that the City of London Police fulfil as a lead force for Economic Crime, Fraud, and Cyber will need to be carefully considered in this new model”.  Such a change would be more than just a deck-chair exercise after all.  Fraud is now almost half of all recorded offences, so a step-change in the response here will actually impact many more people than burglary, or violent offences.

Leadership and the workforce

It was very encouraging to see the white paper address workforce issues.  As a profession, skills and training are critical in policing, and incentives really matter.  As does the wellness agenda and career paths and entry routes. The white paper confirms that ‘direct entry’ of some kind is coming back, along with a ‘Licence to Practise’ model and other training and accreditation changes.  In fact, a whole chapter is devoted to the workforce, and this is reassuring given how many indicators are already flashing red.

The warning signs are not just recent leadership failings in the West Midlands, or Hampshire, or Northamptonshire, or the worrying gulf on trust in leaders among the lower ranks, but the wider HR markers of what makes for a healthy organisation that attracts and retains its staff – attrition is high, application ratios are down, over five per cent of officers are on some form of restricted duties, and forces are coping with many more mid-career exits.  This is policing’s ‘people problem’.  It has many causes and many potential solutions, but it cannot be sidelined if reform is going to happen on the ground.

In fact, a whole chapter is devoted to the workforce, and this is reassuring given how many indicators are already flashing red.  

There is also further work required to set out how existing bodies with important workforce functions – like the College of Policing – will transition into the NPS and the timetable for that being established.  The College’s ongoing Leadership Commission (which we at the Foundation are supporting as a research partner) gets several mentions, and is clearly part of the Home Secretary’s emphasis on the need for good leadership.  What Lords Blunkett and Herbert recommend this summer will therefore be key to other commitments such as a workforce strategy – a huge endeavour that policing has needed for decades.

It was encouraging to see pledges around expanding the number of Special Constables, and around wider volunteering and crime prevention efforts.  Later this year the Foundation will be releasing new research on crime prevention to help develop some of these ideas and show how a renewed focus on the hard science of crime prevention could deliver real benefits.  We will also be doing further work on what opportunities come from local partnerships with the private sector.

Counting what matters

The white paper marks an important departure in other ways.  Instead of a fixation on raw inputs – total officers employed – the clear political expectation is being subtly adjusted to a focus only on visible, neighbourhood roles:

In recent years there has been an excessive focus on the number of police officers employed rather than the outcomes achieved for the public. This has led to officers being put into back-office roles, sitting behind desks rather than being out on the beat. We will change this approach. Instead of being paid to employ an overall number of officers, forces will be incentivised to deliver more officers into neighbourhood policing, with more police out on the beat where the public want them.

This recalibration is sensible, and overdue.  It reflects a policy compromise between the ‘operational independence’ of chief officers, and the political priorities of Ministers who want to meet the reasonable expectations of voters.  If forces, through these reforms, can bolster neighbourhood policing headcount in a way that the public notice – with visibility and presence scores tracking up as the key outcome measure – then the force’s actual total officer compliment will matter less.

How they will reliably measure this with timely, accurate visibility, trust and confidence data is not spelled out, but current surveys are probably inadequate.  The same is true for other metrics like detection rates, and victim satisfaction – all need to become part of a more sophisticated mix of outcome metrics that probably would better reflect whether policing was actually more effective and legitimate.

What’s old is new again

There are parts of the white paper that could have been authored by Tony Blair’s delivery unit circa 2005.  Targets. League tables. Guaranteed service levels. Performance measures.  None of these concepts are inherently harmful – if designed well and properly monitored – or necessarily that important when set against culture and cash, but they do show how the pendulum has swung back towards conventional new public management concepts and a stronger belief in transparency, consistency and the centralisation of public services to deliver key outcomes.

There are parts of the white paper that could have been authored by Tony Blair’s delivery unit circa 2005.  

Consistency is a recurring theme in the white paper, and while it is important that the public have levels of service that are not wildly different across the country, the lack of consistency in policing is a feature not a bug.  Policing is fundamentally a local service, rooted in communities.  It is not a single organisation with a founding narrative like the NHS and ‘single-buyer’ status.  So the experience of policing is a product of local decisions and will differ across the country as it always has.  We should not get fixated on consistency or the obsessions of planners to dismiss every variation as an intolerable ‘postcode lottery’. A lot of inconsistency is inevitable in a country with a diverse population and dense and variable geography.

Consistency is a recurring theme in the white paper, and while it is important that the public have levels of service that are not wildly different across the country, the lack of consistency in policing is a feature not a bug. 

Caring about consistency

In one narrower sense, the service’s lack of consistency of service has a lot to do with out-dated funding allocations and it is welcome that the Home Office will finally be revising the funding formula to better reflect real demands on policing.  However, variable service delivery is also the consequence of how forces have chosen to respond to bigger factors like mission creep and the uncapped demands on policing.

Undoubtedly consistency could be improved and the capability of forces could be levelled-up. But the most important issue is not consistency, or capability, it is capacity.  Forces are over-stretched, under-staffed, and over-regulated.  There is a clear nod to this in the white paper, but not much by way of data to explain how and why.  Frontline officers feel it, but so do their leaders. What this means in practice is that consistency, insofar as it is a reasonable goal, will only improve if the police can get some breathing room, and by extension, some more capacity.

Technology for what?

In a tight fiscal environment and against the inevitable demands of a growing population, the way to get the capacity needed to service the reasonable demands on policing is to invest in digital and technology tools.  There are some game-changing examples of the utility of AI not just to make policing smarter, but to save thousands of hours of labour – take Bedfordshire Police’s work with Palantir as a good example.  This opportunity has to be chased, and it makes sense to have the potential realised nationally and then cascaded down.  A single intelligence function is also an aspiration.

Undoubtedly consistency could be improved and the capability of forces could be levelled-up. But the most important issue is not consistency, or capability, it is capacity.  

However ultimately, these new pledges around AI and technology investments alone, welcome as they are, can only ever be supplements to the human capacity that is needed to deliver a human-first service.  Policing’s bandwidth will improve if these reforms are delivered, and technology is a big part of the answer.  But it is not as important as people.  So finding the ways to augment the capacity of the police is now urgent and it will not be achieved by traditional delivery models, new powers for the Inspectorate, or by league tables.

The risks of reform

Where the cynicism creeps in is really about what is deliverable in a system already under massive pressure.  There is risk in every reform but the disruption of this programme, even staged out over more than one Parliament, will be substantial.  Many previous reform efforts have stalled, or not delivered anywhere close to the promised benefits.

Clear transition plans and timetables are not set out, but they will be needed before leaders in the sector can have confidence that organisational disruption will not overwhelm the everyday.  The NPS should probably be stood up first – and then made ‘load-bearing’ as the current Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has said – before the NCA is merged with it and given all CT policing to run.

Many previous reform efforts have stalled, or not delivered anywhere close to the promised benefits.

We cannot afford for major change programmes to distract leaders from protest threats, major event planning or counter-terrorism operations.  Lessons also need learning from Scotland, and from places like Canada, where some provinces have also experienced structural reforms of local policing in the last decade.

What does success look like?

Opinions on the merits of these reforms will differ, but the real test is not how much these reforms save, but how much better they make policing and the police experience for the public.

Can legislation be passed that builds these new capabilities that can supercharge technologies like Live Facial Recognition to strengthen the police’s crime fighting capability, without also elevating and centralising so much that we end up eroding the local human connections that people want with their police? Or more practically, can a new national force like NPS really be effective if it has no local roots?  If it recruits many of its staff directly, and is not made up from officers who have learned their craft and trained as investigators at force level first, will it’s posture be enforcement first and always, and never problem-solving and Peelian prevention?

The real test is not how much these reforms save, but how much better they make policing and the police experience for the public.

We need policing that is both more effective at combatting crime and meeting public expectations, but we also need reforms that deliver a real step-change in capacity, so that cops have the space to invest in prevention and the work that will bring the police and the public closer together.  Without that there can be no turnaround in the very worrying decline in levels of trust and confidence.

Of course there will be changes and concessions along the way.  Will a Licence to Practise generate enthusiasm from the sector, or become a lightning rod for opposition to what could be seen as another imposition of red-tape onto a reluctant workforce?  Will consensus over the role of the NPS degrade over time as key personalities move on, and as today’s chief constables ultimately need to take steps to cede some of their own local force sovereignty?

Fundamentally, whatever compromises are made, we must prioritise those changes that will improve public safety and better support victims, and we need reform that ultimately strengthens our Peelian model of policing, rather than paying homage to the legacy of Peel whilst quietly eroding it.  Without careful thought, some of these changes could risk diluting that powerful idea just when it needs to be revived and (re)popularised. I am optimistic that enough people care about the policing by consent tradition that there is a path through, but only if we actually manage to deliver a stronger, more visible presence at neighbourhood level.

Conditions for success

The white paper met my expectations and answered many of the questions I was pondering before the weekend.  Now the attention will shift to delivery.  In Police Oracle this week, I have argued that public service reform agendas succeed when five conditions are met.  And based on this white paper, the Home Office have produced a plan that has two of these conditions sewn up: policy coherence, and professional cover.  Theresa May’s reform plans were rational, albeit less ambitious, but they never had this level of public or private support from the leaders in the system.

Fundamentally we must prioritise those changes that will improve public safety and better support victims, and we need reform that ultimately strengthens our Peelian model of policing.

We will not know if the government has political momentum to deliver this white paper in full until at least the summer – by then it will be clear how strong and organised opposition is (principally, to force mergers), and also whether this Home Secretary is able to stay in her role long enough to see the reforms through, with all the political leadership uncertainty that could follow the May local elections.

This could also impact the fourth condition, parliamentary time, enabling timely and smooth passage of the Home Office bill, which really needs to be introduced for first reading before end of July if they want it to reach the statute book by spring next year.  Finally, the one condition for success that is clearly absent is new money.  Without the ability to pump prime the reform effort, the plan will be much harder to land.

If the department can realise more internal savings, and start to grip the escalating costs of the asylum system, potentially more money could be found for policing in 2027-28.  But that should not be anticipated or relied upon.  And we still are not clear on how much the new investment to deliver new national structures is predicated on realising savings from the merger programme (aka ‘regionalisation’).

Nevertheless, with two of the five conditions met currently, this White Paper is off to a strong start. The curse of politics and the obligatory parliamentary hurdles still need to be cleared before this bold vision can become a reality, and if savings cannot be found, every reform element will become harder to land.

So for now, capacity constraints will continue.  And hard-working and overstretched officers and staff must keep doing what they do; meanwhile hoping that reform is not derailed and it pays dividends in time for them to see the upside, and by extension, the public they serve.

Upcoming White paper activity from the Foundation

• Further analysis from Police Foundation staff will follow on our blog over the next few weeks.
• We are hosting a range of strategic reflections via our Perspectives in Policing series. The first was published at the weekend, with more to follow.
• On Thursday 12 February we will begin our series of White Paper Policy Seminars in partnership with Accenture. We will be hosting six of these up until the end of May. Details to be announced soon.
• On Friday 13 February, in partnership with RUSI and the Police Federation of England and Wales, we are hosting a public half-day panel event in central London. Spaces are limited so please sign up early.