The Home Secretary has unveiled what are being described as the most significant reforms to policing in its history.
A forthcoming white paper, From local to national: a new model for policing, due on Monday, is expected to outline plans to drastically cut the number of police forces and introduce a ‘whole new model’ for the service.
Shabana Mahmood remarked that “crime is changing” but “policing hasn’t kept pace”.
Here are the main measures announced:
- Live facial recognition vans will be rolled out nationwide to catch criminals on police watchlists. The existing 10 vans will be increased to 50 and available for every force in England and Wales. A national centre for AI, called Police. AI will all be set up to roll out AI to all forces and oversee its use.
- A “British FBI” called the National Police Service (NPS) will be created to tackle serious and complex crime, merging the existing National Crime Agency, Counter Terror Policing, the National Police Air Service and National Roads Policing all under a single organisation.
- Regional crime hubs will replace existing regional organised crime units within the NPS, to target drugs, firearms, child sex abuse and fraud across force borders.
- Officers will be expected to reach the scene of a serious incident, such as danger to life or violence, within 15 minutes in cities and 20 minutes in rural areas. Forces will also be expected to answer 999 calls within 10 seconds.
- A senior police commander role called the national public order commander will be created to lead on public disorder and co-ordinate major responses as part of lessons learned from summer disorder in 2024.
- The Home Secretary will have the power to send in experts to failing forces to improve their performance, including over unmet targets for response times.
- All police officers will be required to have a “licence to practise” and will need to complete set training under the national programme in a bid to drive up standards. Officers who fail to meet the requirements will be sacked from policing.
- The Home Secretary will be given power to sack chief constables in any force if they are found to be “poorly performing”.
- An existing funding scheme called the officer maintenance grant will be scrapped to favour putting more police in community roles, after ministers said the grant encouraged forces to employ uniformed officers to meet headcount targets but then put them in administrative roles such as IT or human resources.
