Baroness Doocey (LD)
My Lords, our system of policing is outdated—that is beyond doubt. The White Paper is right to promise radical reform, but, for victims and communities, the real tests are simple: will more crimes be prevented and will more offenders be brought to justice? Reform cannot be a top-down, money-saving exercise imposed from the centre; it must rebuild capacity, confidence and local trust. Get it wrong and communities will feel even more abandoned, widening the gap between police and public.
The plan for a new national police service and fewer, larger regional forces has merit, but real questions remain. Of course we need strong national capability for terrorism, serious organised crime, fraud and online harms that cross borders, but restructuring is a means, not an end. Experience in Scotland shows that mergers alone do not deliver better results. If design and implementation are mishandled, local connection suffers. The first priority must be to define clearly what we expect the police to do, recognising how their role has expanded, and then to provide realistic, long-term funding before redrawing force boundaries. Leadership and scrutiny, not structure, drive performance.
At present, the police are the agency of last resort for everything from children’s social care to adult mental health crises, as overstretched services retreat and leave the police to pick up the pieces. We welcome the commitment to ring-fenced neighbourhood policing, but we must ask whether the proposed model of mega-forces plus local policing areas will really empower local communities or simply add another layer of bureaucracy. Without proper funding and wider criminal justice reform, restructuring alone will not make our streets safer. Since we all agree that community policing is vital, can the Minister assure us that extra officers will be protected for visible neighbourhood work, backed by stable multi-year funding, not redeployed elsewhere when budgets tighten?
We support in principle a national licence to practice, tougher misconduct rules and stronger leadership after the shocking failures of recent years. We need officers and specialist staff with the right skills, character and integrity. Rising standards can rebuild trust but must not load more bureaucracy on to an already exhausted workforce.
The creating and purchasing of IT and data systems is sensible, but only if designed around operational needs and with sustainable funding. After all, procurement must be handled by qualified professionals so that we never again see the Home Office-driven debacle over the recent replacement emergency service radios, now running 12 years late and around £8 billion over budget.
We welcome the decision to abolish police and crime commissioners, but whatever replaces them must be representative, transparent and subject to robust scrutiny. Meanwhile, the Home Secretary proposes new targets, intervention powers, turnabout teams and the authority to dismiss chief constables. Can the Minister say what safeguards will protect the operational independence of policing, particularly from short-term political pressure? No individual, whether a PCC, mayor, council leader or Home Secretary, should have unilateral power to dismiss a chief constable. Can the Minister confirm that the Home Secretary will be bound by the same consultation rules that apply to PCCs now under Section 11A of the Police Regulations 2003?
Finally, on live facial recognition, rolling out such powerful technology before strong statutory safeguards are in place means relying on algorithms whose accuracy, bias and oversight remain, at best, disputed. If the Government move too fast and lose public trust, it may take many years to rebuild.
Liberal Democrats want a system of policing rooted in communities, fit for modern threats, accountable and trusted. We will work constructively on reforms that raise standards, but we will challenge fiercely any move towards centralisation without transparency or any attempt to treat restructuring as a substitute for leadership.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
My Lords, to go to the heart of the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, this is being done for a purpose. Crime is changing: fraud and online crime are widespread, and sexual abuse, terrorism and a range of national crimes impact policing and the communities the police serve. There is a strong need to reconnect local police with local crime, such as shop theft, and with neighbourhood policing issues, such as antisocial behaviour. To deal with that, we currently have a patchwork of 43 local forces, some led by a mayor and some by a police and crime commissioner. Some mayoral areas, such as Liverpool, do not have a police and crime commissioner; others, such as Manchester, have a police and crime commissioner. In West Yorkshire, there is a police and crime commissioner and a deputy mayor appointed to report to the mayor. In the West Midlands, the police and crime commissioner runs in parallel with the mayor. New mayoralties are coming on stream in the next couple of years, and that patchwork quilt will continue to develop.
At a national level, we have no procurement organisation. We have police chief leads who deal with their local force but who are also leads for particular areas. We have a National Crime Agency, a national helicopter service and forensics. With this proposal we are trying to ensure that we give greater support to the neighbourhood policing model at a local level, and have a consistent model of leadership through the elected mayor or an elected board of councillors. That will be examined. In conjunction with the Senedd, we will look at the model for Wales. At the same time, we will look at force numbers. The proposals include a review in the next five or six months, with a chair to be appointed shortly. Its terms of reference will be to look at how we can slim down the number of forces to save money and give a regional structure.
In answer to the points from the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, on accountability, there will be an official—a mayor or councillor—who is responsible for that. The Home Secretary will have the power to remove chief constables. There will be a review of the number of forces. I do not know yet what that review will show, but it will help save money and give some focus. We intend to start very shortly to establish the national service. This will initially look at IT, forensics, the helicopter contract and procurement. Is it right that 43 forces procure 43 sets of uniforms? Is it right that there are different phone systems at a local level? Those are things that we need to look at. Later, the National Crime Agency, counterterrorism and regional crime units will be brought into focus, looking at how we deal with national issues.
Are we doing that for a purpose? We are. What is the purpose? To focus on things that matter on the ground and that matter collectively, nationally, and to potentially make better efficiencies and savings in the organisation and spend for things such as procurement of vehicles and uniforms. It is important to do that, and that is the model we are looking at.
There are issues. The noble Lord asked about the British Transport Police. That is not in the model at the moment; that is a matter for the Department for Transport. Everything can be examined, but that is not on the table at the moment.
In answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, on facial recognition, she knows that we are currently consulting on the standards and governance for it. Going back to my time as Police Minister 16 years ago, we were looking at things such as automatic number plate recognition. That was being tested in the last part of the previous Labour Government and is now a natural and automatic part of crime fighting, where you can track number plates and see who is involved with them. Going back 25 years, CCTV was a worry, but it is now an essential part of evidence gathering and crime fighting. I therefore say to the noble Baroness that we need to regulate facial recognition, but it is one of the next steps for the future of how we identify missing people and missing suspects, and we will use it to help identify how we can further reduce crime.
All this is done for a purpose. We are trying to re-energise neighbourhood policing and remove the barriers that stop the police focusing on things that matter. We are also looking at how we can organise nationally in this rapidly changing world; build capability on AI, for example, and save police time and resource; and improve standards, which again goes to the noble Baroness’s point. We have the licence to operate in these proposals and, in the policing Bill, we have proposals to vet police officers and raise standards. They are all important. It is important that we look not at where we are now but, as part of this reorganisation, at where we are going for the future, and at how we can better use AI and modern capabilities and technology to help improve police performance on the ground.
I therefore say to the noble Lord and noble Baroness, who are both my colleagues, that they have a very positive role to play in helping to design this service. However, ultimately, we cannot stay where we are. Rightly or wrongly, we think that the police and crime model has not worked efficiently and that we have too big a patchwork; we need to review and make a difference to it. It has been acknowledged for a long time that we have too many police forces. I say to both contributors that the police welcome this, from the Chief Constables’ Council through to the inspectorate and police forces across the country. We have an opportunity to redefine policing for the next 25, 30 or 40 years. This is a real opportunity to get better value for money, better performance and better efficiency, and to ensure that we meet the challenges of future crime.
Baroness May of Maidenhead (Con)
My Lords, the bedrock of British policing is the office of constable. That is an office under the Crown. The Government are now going to introduce the licence to practice, given by the Government. At the same time, it appears that the Government are going to reintroduce targets for policing. The experience under the Blair Government was that policing targets distorted police behaviour and meant that, all too often, local policing priorities were ignored. The Government are also going to introduce a huge national bureaucracy in the national police service, and we read of a “hands-on Home Office” and greater powers for the Home Secretary.
Given this combination, how will the Government ensure that we will not see national diktats completely overriding local policing requirements and, particularly, that we are not going to see the police subjected to undue influence from the Home Office and the Home Secretary? I remember November 2008, when the parliamentary office of the then Member of Parliament for Ashford was searched by the police without a warrant, reportedly because of influence from Government Ministers. How are the Government going to ensure, in this centralised police service and centralised model, that there is not going to be undue political influence that relates not to the policing interests of the citizens but to the political interests of the Government?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Baroness has great experience in this area. We have discussed this for many years, in shadow and government form. The Government are cognisant of the fact that the police service must be independent of government, have its own responsibilities, and make its own decisions around issues of arrest, suggestions about charges by the CPS and how to manage resources at a local level. Those are absolutely central, but this does not take away from the importance of the Government establishing the real areas of concern.
We are now saying that we need to have neighbourhood policing. As part of the grant, there will be an extra 13,000 neighbourhood police officers on the ground to look at the issues we think are important, such as anti-social behaviour, shop theft and a range of issues around policing in town centres. This is important for public confidence. It does not mean that we are interfering in policing. It means we are setting a number of potential targets which we think are important national and strategic issues.
On the national picture, the Police Minister is not going to be telling the head of the new policing body, “These are things I want you to do”, or “I want you to go round to X office, invade them and interfere in them”, but it is right for us to look at the strategic targets on counterterrorism, on serious organised crime and cross-border crime, and on crime that is coming into this country from the European Community, where we need to participate and co-operate. These are really important issues. It is right that the Home Secretary and the Government set these targets and some direction of travel in conjunction with the police, but still with that clear barrier between operational responsibility and overall policy setting.
The noble Baroness spoke about a police officer being an officer of the Crown. Through the licence to operate, we are trying to set a number of standards against which we check the performance of police officers so that, through the Crime and Policing Bill, we improve vetting, standards and management, and have a quicker way to remove police officers who do not meet our performance targets. These things will be done in conjunction with the police.
As I said in my opening remarks, the police have welcomed this at every level—from the inspectorate, through to the Chief Constables’ Council, to individual chief constables. I accept that that may be different for police and crime commissioners, but there is a real level of support among the police for the modernisation of the force. I hope that the noble Baroness will continue to hold us to account and that we will have this discussion as we continue.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, I welcome the publication of the much-anticipated White Paper on the future of policing across England and Wales. I particularly welcome the focus on neighbourhood policing to better address everyday crime. However, the White Paper has not addressed the unfairness of policing powers being withheld from Wales compared with the other devolved nations.
Three independent commissions—the Silk commission, the Thomas commission and the McAllister commission—have recommended the devolution of policing to Wales. It might be helpful for the House to be aware that, in First Minister’s Questions in the Senedd today, the First Minister stated:
“I want to make it clear that the Welsh Government has been clear that we want policing to be devolved to Wales”.
She went further to explain that the motivation behind this is to have
“better provision for the people in Wales”.
Will the Minister join the First Minister of Wales and Welsh Labour colleagues in the Senedd who are making the case here in Westminster for the devolution of policing to Wales?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I know where the noble Baroness is coming from. We have been very clear in the White Paper that the proposals for Wales are about organisation of the delivery and not about the devolution of policing. We have taken the view that policing is intricate within the whole legal system in Wales, which includes the court service, youth justice and a whole range of other matters. In the Labour manifesto, we said we would look at the devolution of youth justice. My colleagues in the Ministry of Justice are looking at this now, but we do not think that the devolution of policing is right for Wales at this time.
We will have to explain this judgment to all Members of the Senedd and I have to explain it to the noble Baroness in this House. We think that Wales is better served by a UK-based England and Wales service which looks at the main issues of national interest, such as counterterrorism, along with the other devolved Administrations. In the Welsh context, the discussions we will have with whoever forms the Government in the Senedd after the election will be about how we make a better structure in the period after the abolition of the police and crime commissioners.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester
My Lords, I note that when the original Statement was made in the other place, it began and ended with a reference to Sir Robert Peel. In my capacity as the co-chair of the National Police Ethics Committee for England and Wales, I probably talk more about the Peelian principles than I ever thought I was going to do in earlier life. One of those essential principles is that policing is a civilian force: it is people, the citizenry, policing themselves.
I welcome much that is in this report. It represents a way forward and I am sure that my committee will go along with it. But there are two challenges. The noble Baroness, Lady May, has already referred to one, and she gave an example of it. I will give another brief one from when we were looking at Covid in a precursor to the present committee. During Covid, the Operation Talla policing ethics committee was largely set up under my chairmanship because police chief constables were under such pressure from Government Ministers, who were announcing things, often on social media at nine o’clock at night, saying “This is now the law” when it was not. The police wanted somebody independent who could support them in the face of that kind of ministerial overreach. So I worry, as the noble Baroness, Lady May, does, about the risks of ministerial overreach and the powers being given centrally.
On the other side, on neighbourhood policing, again we are hearing all the right reassurances here, but that is so essential. During Covid, the Metropolitan Police at one point had, I think, an absence rate of about 10 times that of Kent Police, the neighbouring force. Kent Police was policing its local communities while the Met was busing people in crew buses all the way over the capital, where they were all giving each other the disease. It was not neighbourhood policing in any way, shape or form. So how can we ensure with the new policing structures that it really will be people policing locally who are that local citizenry, not somebody drawn from three counties away across a much larger area? But with that said, I appreciate what we are doing.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
There is a lot in there. The main thing I can say to the right reverend Prelate is that the purpose of our policing is to have the police working with the community at a local level. That is why we have to focus on neighbourhood policing, why we have put in an additional 13,000 officers over this Parliament, and why we are on 2,500 to 3,000 currently in terms of increasing neighbourhood policing, taking people away from warranted officers doing back-room jobs into warranted officers doing front-line policing and community reassurance. That is why the basic issues, as I have said before, of shop theft, anti-social behaviour—things that happen in the high street or on the estate—should be the focus of the local police force.
How do we better deliver that? Do we look at that in a regional context? Whoever takes over this examination of regional force levels might look at a region and say, “We need to have this as a force size for this region because there’s a synergy between this city and that city and this regional area”, but underneath there is still that local neighbourhood police model. We are trying to ensure that we have local governance that is better than the patchwork we have and, at the same time, we will look at the national challenges and ensure that the Police Minister and/or the Home Secretary sets some realistic targets but does that in conjunction with the police. Ultimately, we get asked all the time in this House what we are doing about shop theft and anti-social behaviour. Some level of co-operation and ambition has to be set between the Home Office centrally and the local police forces, but they still have to operate independently and manage their resources in a way that gives them local community confidence.
Lord Harper (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful that the Minister is leaving the British Transport Police alone. In my experience, it works very well and is led by an outstanding chief constable. I may have missed it, but I am not sure he said where royal protection is going to sit in this tier of policing. It is a significant cost, particularly for a county such as Gloucestershire, where we are blessed with a number of members of the Royal Family, including one of the homes that belongs to His Majesty the King. It is a significant cost to the force.
My real concern is that raised by the noble Baroness, Lady May, about accountability. We already have an issue with police being abstracted from rural areas to do public order policing in big urban centres. If we have larger police forces, I can see that getting worse. How are we going to make sure that rural communities get the level of policing that they deserve and, importantly, that they pay for through their council tax precept, without a democratically elected leader at a very local level?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
Starting with the question of royal protection, if the noble Lord will forgive me, I will not comment on that, because we do not normally comment on those issues in a public way. At some point, we will obviously make some further statements on it, but I do not wish to open that discussion now. On his comments on rural funding, we are as part of this proposal looking at reviewing the formula that currently exists within police funding. The police settlement that we announced a couple of weeks ago put significant additional resources into policing, but we recognise the need to modernise the funding formula, so part of the review that we are undertaking now will be on how we do that very task.
At a local level, there will still be somebody accountable politically for policing, but what I am trying to do, and what we are trying to do in the Home Office, is address the fact that at the moment we have police and crime commissioners, which is a patchwork model because of the advent of mayors. We have another pile of mayors coming on stream very shortly. We have some areas where there will not be a mayor, but nor will there be a police and crime commissioner in future, so we are still going to review those organisational models. At the end of this process, there will still be somebody who is accountable for policing, but not in the directly elected way, solely on police and crime issues, as the police and crime commissioner currently is.
Earl Russell (LD)
Serious organised waste crime is a national disgrace that is costing the UK economy over £1 billion a year. The Environment Agency, as a regulatory body, appears to be ill-equipped and fundamentally unable to control it. These police reforms offer a co-ordinated approach to serious organised crime, yet I can find no mention at all of waste crime in the plans, so can the Minister confirm whether it is the Government’s intention to give the new national police service responsibility for tackling organised waste crime?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The Environment Agency currently has a role in managing waste crime, but I think it is important that we put some focus on the fact that it has become increasingly clear, and this is a relatively new phenomenon, that serious organised crime is behind many of the large illegal waste dumps around the country at the moment. Our effort to improve performance will involve regional and national police forces, regional organised crime units, serious crime, nationally, and the National Crime Agency, over time, to look at how better we can tackle serious organised crime on a UK-wide basis, with support from the devolved Administrations in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Serious organised crime now manifests itself in illegal waste tips and could manifest itself in drug importation, weapons importation or a range of other things. The key thing is that we have some national co-ordination of regional crime units and national units to look at serious organised crime.
Lord Walney (CB)
The reforms to public order policing in the White Paper are welcome, in particular the commitment to greater data sharing between forces to enable this. Can the Minister confirm that that will include a greater level of intelligence sharing, which was one of the gaps that I found in my review of this wider area that was presented in 2024?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I can give the noble Lord that assurance. One of the things we are trying to do is to improve the IT systems and bring them under central control. That means improving data sharing and it also means using new technology, such as AI, to improve analysis of data and to give a central lead to performance measures, to get better outcomes for the community at large.
Viscount Goschen (Con)
My Lords, the Government should be commended for coming forward with bold proposals. It is clear that the existing structures are rooted in a situation from way before we had the levels of mobility, technology and new crimes that are coming forward and taking up so much of the police’s time. Having 43 police forces, therefore, is no longer fit for purpose, so it is good that the Government are showing leadership and taking bold steps. I was very struck by the cautious notes that my noble friend Lady May came forward with and, indeed, some of the dangers that lie here.
There is a lot of emphasis in the White Paper on accountability and performance, and that really is where an awful lot of the opportunities lie here. We are at an inflection point. There is the opportunity for considerable dividends from this, but there are also significant potential risks. I just ask the Minister to give a little more detail to the House about the process of determining what the eventual patchwork will look like—the size of forces, the allocation of resources and so forth. Could he also tell us how the mergers and essential integrations will be carried out without, essentially, dropping the ball? There are significant risks here but, overall, I think the Government are heading in the right direction.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful for the noble Viscount’s support on this matter. In response to his question about force sizes, we will be announcing a review very shortly, which we hope will be done by the summer. That will set the template for the Government to determine ultimately how many forces there will be and how we begin the process of changing that system accordingly. When parliamentary time allows—in that time-honoured phrase—we will bring forward measures to end the role of police and crime commissioners. This will be done by the time of the next election due for electing police and crime commissioners. In the initial phase we will also look at bringing together IT, forensics and procurement into a national service, but over time. Again, this will require parliamentary legislation to bring together the National Crime Agency and other bodies, including counterterrorism, into that body as a whole.
We also have a separate paper coming forward shortly that will look at fraud, which is currently the responsibility of the City of London Police as the lead force. We will be looking at how we can improve performance on that issue as well. These will not be quick fixes but if I look three to four years ahead, police and crime commissioners will have gone, the new structures will be in place for the new forces, and there will be accountability through the mayors or councils. We will be quite well down the road of the establishment of the wider national police service, bringing in training, national services and the roles of the National Crime Agency and counterterrorism police.
Lord Sentamu (CB)
My Lords, Robert Peel talked about policing by consent, emphasising public approval, but his key recommendation was crime prevention, and a primary goal was dealing with disorder. He saw that merely punishing crime after the fact was a failure. All the statistics we get are for the number of arrests that have been made or the number of crimes prosecuted. We never get the number of crimes that have been prevented. In this new White Paper, which I welcome strongly, how are we going to get to the position that we have got to in health? A good health service actually prevents people becoming unhealthy. How are we going to get that balance?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I welcome the noble and right reverend Lord’s commitment to the proposals in the White Paper. If we look at government policy as a whole, in parallel to that a great deal of work is being done by my noble friend Lady Smith on education, on prevention and on strengthening citizenship in schools. There is a need, through the Ministry of Justice, to look at improving sentencing outcomes and better performance in prisons to stop people reoffending. Through the Sentencing Bill, we are looking at a wide range of community sentences that people could be put into rather than prison. That all has the objective of reducing crime and recidivism and preventing people getting involved in crime in the first place. In this White Paper, we are again trying to have that strong focus on what needs to be done about serious organised crime at the national level. At the same time, we need to focus on building community resilience, improving neighbourhood policing, and meeting the Peelian principles that the right reverend prelate the Bishop of Manchester mentioned: the police are the public and the public are the police, and that happens at a local level as well.
On all those fronts, we are trying to prevent and reduce both crime and repeat crime, give the public confidence, improve standards in the police force and deal with significant, severe future challenges in organised crime and international issues such as internet and AI crime. I hope that reassures the noble and right reverend Lord. That is the Government’s plan, and we will no doubt be held to account on it by this House.