Police Reform White Paper

Lord Harper Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.