Police Leadership Commission Report

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing this Statement to the House today, and I am grateful for the opportunity to ask questions on it. Failures of police leadership are all too evident. Police leadership failed when forces overlooked, ignored and actively downplayed the scale of the grooming gangs. Police officers and police leaders were too afraid of being called out for being racist, and, as such, they left vulnerable young girls to suffer while the perpetrators got away scot free. Police leadership failed when officers manipulated evidence to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the football match in Birmingham over fears of “inflaming community tensions”. Police leadership is failing when we have officers spending more time trawling through social media posts than investigating and stopping burglary and shoplifting. When the policing of tweets and so-called diversity, equality and inclusion take precedence over the prevention and investigation of crime, we know we have a serious problem.

In 1829, Sir Richard Mayne, the first commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, wrote:

“The primary object of an efficient police is the prevention of crime: the next that of detection and punishment of offenders if crime is committed. To these ends all the efforts by police must be directed. The protection of life and property, the preservation of public tranquillity, and the absence of crime will alone prove whether those efforts have been successful and whether the objects for which the police were appointed have been attained”.


Like all officers who joined Hendon Police College, I had to learn those words by memory, and they are just as relevant today as they were in 1829, so I welcome the statement in the report that:

“Police leaders should be resolute in refusing to take sides, or to be diverted from the course of focusing entirely on the prevention, detection and prosecution of crime”.


I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, that is not what is happening.

We might ask how we got here. Noble Lords might have different answers, but, for me, it is in large part because we took our eye off the ball. We allowed policing to focus, particularly after 2020, more on representation and identity politics than on promoting the best and most qualified people for the job. The report also acknowledges that nepotism has impacted progression at senior ranks, again challenging the notion that promotion should be based on merit alone. I must press the Minister to think seriously about these points. If the Government want to improve public trust in the police and restore robust but fair policing, we cannot have reforms that place greater emphasis on the identity of senior officers than on their experience and leadership qualities.

Fundamentally, good police leadership is not hard. It is about cutting crime and having your officers’ backs. Those on the ground need to know that they can take action they deem necessary and will not be hung out to dry by senior leadership when they do so. Officers need to be able to exercise their professional judgment and common sense, and not be second-guessed by endless policies and guidance. Police leaders must stop prioritising public perceptions over robust policing.

This all requires a significant cultural shift within police leadership. But to engineer that, we need to improve not just the quality but the amount of leadership training. The report highlights the striking disparity between military leadership training and the police equivalent. It points out that:

“15 years after leaving Sandhurst, a colonel in charge of 1,500 people will have undertaken 72 weeks of leadership development. By comparison, chief superintendents in the MPS”—


the Metropolitan Police Service—

“who have had comparable progression are likely to have had two or three weeks”.

The comparison with the military is particularly apt here, because British military leadership training is widely regarded as some of the best in the world—there is a reason why military officers from around the world flock to Sandhurst. I urge the Minister, when considering the work of this commission, to feed in best practice from our military academies into future police leadership training.

I also ask the Minister to think carefully about introducing new direct entry schemes. I can say from my own experience that I do not think they had a positive effect on senior leadership. The report acknowledges that the total cost of the previous direct entry superintendent programme, which ran from 2015 to 2021, was almost £10 million. Only 33 people graduated from that scheme, putting the cost per graduate at around £342,000. I do not think that can quite be considered a success. Bizarrely, though, after pointing out the cost and low numbers passing through the previous direct entry route, the report goes on to recommend the creation of new direct entry routes. This is a somewhat bizarre situation.

I wish to end with some simple questions to the Minister. The Government have this report, it is obvious to us all what is going wrong with police leadership, and it is not too difficult to figure out what needs to change, so how are the Government going to take forward these recommendations? What work is going on within the Home Office, right now, to implement leadership reforms, and when will be able to see the outcomes of the Government’s work?

If the Government are serious about restoring trust in policing and fulfilling the aims of the commission, they must take swift action to overhaul police leadership training. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the report from the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert, which rightly starts with an uncomfortable truth: leadership across policing is too inconsistent and, for decades, we have failed to invest in developing leaders for the world they now face.

We support clearer standards, stronger developments of all ranks, and more transparent senior appointments, but consistency must not become Whitehall control. Before creating a national police service and a national academy, the Government must explain how police chiefs will be protected from politicisation. A central appointments panel may help, but only if it insulates chief constables’ appointments from political influence and ensures a diverse candidate pool, including those with neighbourhood and safeguarding experience.

We urgently need clarity about what we expect policing to deliver in the 2030s. Too often the police are left to pick up responsibilities that properly belong to other agencies, because those agencies are underfunded and lack the capacity to respond. But the police cannot walk away; they have a duty to the public, even when the work falls outside their remit. This results in police being increasingly drawn into non-crime work, spending hours in hospitals awaiting mental health assessments or caring for vulnerable children, leaving forces overstretched and officers shuttled from one crisis to another.

Ethical leadership cannot be a values programme instead of the hard work that inquiries have already recommended. Delivering ethics requires legally enforceable vetting and misconduct standards across forces, a complete overhaul of the complaints investigations so that they do not drift for years, and transparent monitoring of disproportionality in discipline, including for BAME officers. The public will not judge us by how many workshops we run but by whether the Angiolini, Jay and inspectorate recommendations are finally implemented in full.

Around 80% of crime now has a digital element, yet policing is still largely analogue, with 43 forces running separate IT systems and an obsolete police national computer. Outdated, poorly connected systems with multiple entry points heighten cyber security risks, given the high value of police data on the dark web. A lack of national co-ordination and the scrapping of ring-fenced capital funding means that most technology spending is now used just to maintain existing outdated systems. What is needed is a unified cloud-based technology platform and common procurement to enable seamless information sharing and good practice across forces. This will require very significant investments in IT and AI but offers the prospect of rapid returns in improved outcomes and would finally allow policing to exploit the wealth of operational data already at its fingertips.

We need national training frameworks that prioritise digital investigation skills for every officer and proper professional pathways for cyber, data, digital and forensic specialists. But highly trained specialists are locked into the same nationally set pay scales as everyone else, and chiefs have virtually no flexibility to pay them more than an entry-level constable. That is almost unbelievable. Is it therefore surprising that these specialists are routinely poached by the private sector, after they have been trained by the police for many years, on salaries that are several multiples of their police pay? If we are serious about tackling AI-enabled fraud, deepfake child abuse imagery and complex online exploitation, we must introduce genuine pay flexibilities for shortage specialties and parity of esteem for police staff.

I am deeply concerned that we are proposing a national academy and a licence to practise when there has been no independent national audit of police training since 2012. Officers need high-quality, regular, properly accredited refresher training to keep themselves and the public safe. If the College of Policing is absorbed into a new police service, we must avoid the police marking their own homework by ensuring that appropriate standards are set and independently audited.

This report gives us an opportunity to transform how we choose and develop leaders. But those leaders will succeed only if we define the mission clearly, fix the broken funding and training systems, and give policing the technological tools and special staff it needs. I very much hope the Government are prepared to meet those challenges.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

I place on record my thanks to my noble friend Lord Blunkett and the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, for their work on this important report commissioned by the Home Office to look at the important issues of policing. My noble friend Lord Blunkett is a former Home Secretary and the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, is a former Policing Minister; indeed, I shadowed him for a while in a previous life. They both bring extremely important experience to bear and on a cross-party basis they have examined the future training needs of the police service.

My noble friend and the noble Lord have made 27 recommendations and, in answer to the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, we are going to consider those recommendations. We are going to examine them in detail. We want to give them a fair wind. We will report back in the autumn with our response to those recommendations. I will be able to provide further clarity and discussion at that time on the Government’s approach to the points that have been made.

I begin in, I hope, a constructive way but also in a way of challenge to say that I do not accept the characterisation of the police to date by the noble Lord, Lord Davies. The police are doing a very good job in dangerous circumstances. Police officers at every level, from chief constables to ordinary police officers on the beat to police community support officers, do a very strong job. Our duty is to ensure that the recommendations that have been made by my noble friend Lord Blunkett and the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, help support those police officers to do a better job in the future.

Crime is down: theft offences by 11%; vehicle-related crime by 14%; domestic burglary by 22%; shoplifting by 1%; personal robbery by 12%; knife-enabled offences by 10%; knife-enabled homicides by 21%; and knife-enabled robberies by 15%. Those are just some examples from the past 18 months of statistics of how the police are helping to tackle those issues. But that does not mean that there is not room for improvement.

The noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, has pressed me many times to examine the issue of training; she is absolutely right to do so, and these recommendations form the basis of us examining how we can take those issues forward. I do not accept that we should not put diversity at the heart of our police service. I want to see diverse police officers representing their communities and representing the communities they police. But it is important that we secure training and support for all those officers, whatever their ethnic background.

There is a need for reform. The noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, is absolutely right that we need to examine what policing is for and how to ensure that we have the back-room support for front-line police officers. She and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, will know that we are in the middle of a radical programme of police reform. We are abolishing police and crime commissioners. We are waiting for a report from the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, on police force areas. We are establishing a national police service, which will encompass the very issues currently considered by the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, as chair of the College of Policing, with national procurement and a focus on what national policing should do, which is, from the National Crime Agency’s perspective, serious organised crime, counterterrorism policing and other important issues such as economic crime.

This reform programme is ongoing, but self-evidently —and this is where I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey—we need to put in place support and training to ensure that police officers both meet the needs of the 21st century and have the support to do their job in an effective way. In their report, my noble friend Lord Blunkett and the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, have put great care and skill into the recommendations. I also thank the other members of the commission who took part.

There is a particular emphasis on giving voice to those on the front line. It is right to say, as the report itself says, that

“the policing profession has not consistently had the excellent leadership it needs”.

The commission has highlighted the critical importance of leadership and we all know that. It will also ensure, I hope, that we maintain that principle of policing by consent.

It is right that we take time to consider the recommendations in full. We welcome the commission’s proposals and the intent behind them. We are actively looking at the recommendation to create a formal senior constable rank and how that can be done. The commission also recommends a new professional digital passport for policing, along with other measures to put in place stronger supporting structures around professional development. The review’s recommendations on a fast stream for policing, on a targeted direct entry scheme and on the role of the forthcoming national police service in promoting ethical policing are all issues that we want to look at and respond to. We will do so in due course.

The points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, about police conduct and ethical standards of policing are extremely important. She will know from when we passed the Crime and Policing Act recently, because we spent a gazillion hours dealing with it in this House of Parliament, that there is a strong emphasis in it on improving the performance of the ethical standards and on the ability to remove police officers who are not performing well. Again, that goes to the heart of the recommendations before us.

In summary, the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert, will both know that I cannot respond today to the 27 recommendations, but I welcome them. They give us a strong foundation to examine how we can improve police leadership, police performance and skill levels to face the 21st century. It is a valuable piece of work. I commit to the House, on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, that we will report back in the autumn on the recommendations and what we intend to do about delivering them.

In the meantime, there are police officers and leaders out on the streets now, and they are doing a dangerous job on behalf of us all. They should have our admiration but they should also have our support in improving their performance, and that is what the recommendations are aimed at doing.