WIREDGOV

Emily Spurrell, APCC Chair

For more than a week now, the policing sector has been digesting the Government’s wide-ranging and ambitious white paper on police reform.

It is more than 14 months since the then Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced at the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Partnership Summit her intention to fundamentally redraw the policing landscape in England and Wales.

Since then, I and my police and crime commissioner (PCC) colleagues, supported by a small team at the APCC, have worked to inform and shape the White Paper so that this reform programme best delivers for the public.

Few would dispute the need for policing to change. Crime has been transformed by technology, and policing must keep pace – both to tackle tech-enabled crime and to adopt modern tools that improve its own response. Public trust and confidence have also been severely damaged, for multiple and complex reasons, but the impact is the same.

PCCs and deputy mayors for policing and crime remain broadly supportive of much of the white paper. We recognise its potential to promote greater consistency, efficiency, and evidence led improvement. But as the public’s elected advocates, we are concerned about proposals that concentrate power at the centre and risk weakening accountability.

Holding a powerful centre to account

The long wait for publication of From local to national: a new model for policing might make it feel like we’ve reached the end of the journey. In reality, as others have highlighted, this is very much just the end of the beginning. The Government has set out its vision, but much of the essential detail is still to come.

The big-ticket items attracting most attention include the creation of a number of larger regional forces – an independent review will report this summer – and the establishment of a National Police Service (NPS). This new body would bring together the College of Policing, NPCC, National Crime Agency, and counter-terrorism policing.

While consolidation may remove duplication and generate savings over time, the immediate cost of such change will be significant.

The NPS will be led by a chief officer directly accountable to the Home Secretary. With a promise of a “more active Home Office”, these two individuals will hold unprecedented power over policing.

Such centralised authority must be matched with strong and transparent accountability. Policing cannot operate at a distance from the communities it serves. A top-down model risks becoming unresponsive to the diverse needs and priorities of different areas. Local proximity gives PCCs – and deputy mayors in mayoral areas – the insight needed to shape effective, place-based solutions.

Local innovation driven by PCCs has already delivered nationally recognised programmes, such as Prisoners Building Homes – where prisoners or those on probation build high-quality affordable homes – and the Pegasus partnership to tackle retail theft. We must avoid a system where central direction stifles this kind of locally led innovation.

The Government’s sudden announcement last November that PCC roles will be abolished in 2028 remains, in my view, misguided. But until then, my colleagues and I will continue to serve our communities as we were elected to do.

What replaces PCCs, however, looks increasingly fragmented. In mayoral areas, deputy mayors will take on the role. Elsewhere – the majority of England – oversight will sit with police and crime boards made up of part-time local councillors, reminiscent of the old, invisible Police Authorities that PCCs replaced.

In Wales, where mayors do not exist, the future model remains undefined despite the UK Government’s commitment to work with the Welsh Government.

The case for change

The Government argues that structural and operational reform will restore public confidence and improve police performance. Crime has undoubtedly shifted online, but this does not diminish the public’s need for visible, effective neighbourhood policing. How this commitment will be delivered alongside a centralised, regionalised model remains unclear.

Recent crime statistics offer some positive signs: homicides down 7% year-on-year from 539 to 499 (the lowest figure since 2003) and knife-related offences are also falling, down by 9%. But robbery remains unchanged, shoplifting is up 5%, and police recorded 2.6 million fraud offences last year – likely a significant underestimate.

The word ‘technology’ and derivatives of it are used 85 times in the 100 or so pages of the white paper. Modernisation rightly depends on it. But the deployment of powerful tools like facial recognition must be subject to robust safeguards to ensure their ethical and responsible use. Without such protections, rebuilding public trust – particularly in communities where it is already fragile – will be impossible.

The Government aims to pass legislation enabling force restructuring within this Parliament. Given the volume of detail still undeveloped, the timetable is extremely tight.

Meanwhile, policing must continue its day-to-day work. Scotland’s experience of merging eight forces into Police Scotland a decade ago shows that such reform is complex, slow, and costly. England and Wales face an even larger and more complex undertaking.

Reform should be driven by improving service standards and public confidence. Yet, as in Scotland in 2013, many reforms are rooted in financial pressures. PCCs support efficiency, but major reform must be backed by realistic investment, particularly if the Government expects to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls (VAWG).

We have long argued policing is operating under unacceptable financial strain with an outdated funding model that creates inequities across the country, so I’m pleased the Government has pledged to review the funding formula.

Victims and crime prevention must remain central

The white paper’s structural changes have dominated discussion, but quieter references to victims’ services and crime prevention are equally important. PCC-led partnerships provide vital support to victims and fund prevention work that diverts people away from criminality.

While the white paper recognises the importance of victims and prevention, it gives less prominence to tackling VAWG than many of us had hoped. It also remains unclear what will happen to services such as the commissioning of victim services, perpetrator programmes, and sexual assault referral centres. These must remain independent of the police, with ring-fenced funding, if they’re to have the confidence of victims and the wider public.

We have secured a commitment from government to work with the APCC and other departments to determine where these responsibilities should sit. This must be used as an opportunity to protect and strengthen these services – not dilute them.

Protecting accountability in a new era

PCCs and deputy mayors currently provide focused, democratic oversight. Handing accountability to part-time local authority committees risks weakening the scrutiny that drives higher standards. Strong safeguards will be needed at both local and national levels.

We will continue to engage constructively with government and policing partners to shape the white paper’s commitments to neighbourhood policing, governance, and accountability. The timetable may be ambitious, but we must get this right.

My colleagues and I will be working hard to ensure the transformation in police accountability delivered by PCCs is not lost as policing undergoes its most significant overhaul in a generation.

• This article first appeared in Policing Insight