Back in 1964 the Police Act slashed the number of forces in England and Wales from 117 to 49, which was gradually winnowed down to the 43 we have today. Mahmood wants to amalgamate those into a dozen or so regional super-forces while creating a separate, national force to cover big things like terrorism, fraud and gangs, and a new layer of local policing to deal with day-to-day crime.
The plan is bold. It’s logical. And it’s almost certainly doomed.
Let’s start at the beginning. There is obvious inefficiency in having 43 police forces with overlapping and duplicated functions. And traditional policing boundaries make less and less sense in an age of online fraudsters and county lines drug gangs. That’s why senior coppers have been arguing for mergers for years.
But at the same time, if people have been calling for something for a generation, there’s probably a reason it hasn’t happened. In fact, a very similar plan was introduced by Mahmood’s Labour predecessor Charles Clarke in 2006. It was an utter fiasco. As for creating a “British FBI” to fight crime at a national level, we’ve had versions of the same announcement in 1995, 2004, 2011 and 2016. And I may have missed a few.
The first and most obvious problem is operational. Any reorganisation like this is inherently disruptive. All the more so when bringing together organisations with different ways of working, different software systems and all the rest of it.
And the precedents are not encouraging. In 2013 the SNP merged eight Scottish police forces into one. Frontline officers complained that their views were ignored throughout, and that methods and personnel from Glasgow were being imposed on the rest of the country. In the decade that followed, the proportion of Scots saying their local force were doing a good or excellent job fell from 61 per cent to 45 per cent....<<<Read More>>>...