Police Reform White Paper

Lord Sentamu Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.