I wrote here recently about the government’s imposed reorganisation of local government across England, including the proposed abolition of our District and Borough councils and County councils such as Hampshire’s.
Now the latest idea is to scrap England’s county-based police forces and merge them into a series of large regional “mega forces”. Whether this idea will ultimately survive contact with political reality remains to be seen. For now, though, it warrants serious scrutiny.
In a recent White Paper, the Home Secretary has proposed reducing the current 43 police forces in England and Wales, perhaps to around 12. Under such a model, Hampshire Constabulary would cease to exist as an independent force. Instead, policing would be delivered by regional forces, supported by Local Policing Areas focused on neighbourhood work.
Unsurprisingly, many have voiced concern. Hampshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Donna Jones, has warned that merged forces could be “too big and unruly” and that performance could suffer as a result.
It is true that the 40 plus existing forces vary considerably in size and capacity. At one end of the scale is the City of London Police, covering the Square Mile. At the other is the Metropolitan Police Service, with over 30,000 officers. And there is a variety of urban and rural forces in between.
Performance also differs between forces, and critics argue that some are less well equipped to deal with sophisticated organised crime, including drug trafficking, human exploitation, immigration crime and cyber-attacks. These threats are complex and often cross constabulary borders.
I can see the potential efficiencies of merging forces. Each one currently runs its own procurement, HR and payroll systems. That can be bettered: there should be economies of scale in consolidating such back office functions. And many crime types are no longer local but national, even international, in nature (during my time as Security Minister it was reported that three quarters of fraud crimes with a UK victim had an international element, and a quarter had no UK-based perpetrator involved at all).
However, shared services do not necessarily require full structural mergers.
We already have Regional Organised Crime Units (ROCUs) and Economic Crime Units, which includes fraud. The South East ROCU for example brings together Hampshire with Thames Valley, Surrey and Sussex. These sound quite a lot like some of what the new merged force areas are meant to cover.
The White Paper also proposes a new “FBI-style” National Police Service to lead on terrorism, fraud and organised crime. Yet we already have the National Crime Agency (NCA), Counter Terrorism Policing, and other national responsibilities. It is unclear how this new body would differ, how responsibilities would be divided, or who would ultimately be accountable.
The idea of a “British FBI” is hardly new either. Phrases like that have been used not just at the formation of the NCA but for the National Criminal Intelligence Service (1992), National Crime Squad (1998) and Serious Organised Crime Agency (2006).
The stated aim of these proposals overall is to improve response times and end what the Home Secretary calls the “postcode lottery” in policing. That is a laudable objective. But it is not obvious how a top-down reorganisation alone would deliver it.
For rural communities like ours in particular, there are understandable concerns. Issues such as agricultural equipment theft, hare coursing, shed break-ins and large-scale fly-tipping may struggle for attention within vast regional forces inevitably focused on major urban centres.
Policing in Britain has traditionally been local, civilian and independent. Officers are drawn from, and accountable to, the communities they serve. As proposals for police reorganisation coincide with wider local government restructuring, the creation of mayoral authorities and other centralising reforms, some may reasonably question whether we are drifting away from that tradition.
If this reform is genuinely about equipping the police service to confront modern crime, that is one debate. If it is primarily about reducing costs, that is another entirely.
But if we are to reshape policing so fundamentally, we should be clear about what problem we are trying to solve, and whether bigger truly means better.
