Police chiefs reaffirm argument for force mergers amid Burnham’s government ‘reprioritisation’
A white paper in January set out proposals to establish a National Police Service, to centralise specialist resources such as terrorism and technology such as facial recognition.
Police leaders have warned the new prime minister against watering down plans to overhaul the way they work, as they reaffirmed their claim that force mergers are needed.
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Andy Burnham used his first week in Number 10 to tell his ministerial team that they must go through a programme of reprioritisation, and to put the cost of living at the heart of everything they do.
But chief constables have warned that a planned restructure of policing in England and Wales must not be “piecemeal” as they await the outcome of a review into how forces could be merged from 43 to as few as 12.
Gavin Stephens, chair of the National Police Chiefs Council, told LBC: “There’s a lack of consistency across the country at the moment.
“Policing is neither local enough - sometimes people are not seeing us in their local areas - nor is it national enough in dealing with new threats."
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He said: “The way that we police England and Wales was designed in the early 1960s and we’ve moved on so much since then - I would say it’s at least a decade out of date.
“Whatever we do in future has got to be an approach that’s enduring and what I wouldn’t want to see now is piecemeal changes that we have to unpick and revisit again in a decade’s time.”
A white paper in January set out proposals to establish a National Police Service, to centralise specialist resources like terrorism and technology like facial recognition and to reduce the number of regional police forces to help ease stretched budgets.
The Metropolitan Police was forced to close front counters and reduce the capability of some specialist units to decrease what had been anticipated to be a £450 million funding black hole.
Wiltshire Police, the third-smallest force in the country, also has £5 million in savings to find, on top of £8 million last year.
The proposal to merge forces has sparked controversy from some, including the Labour chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners.
Emily Spurrell warned merging constabularies into larger regional forces could separate officers from their local communities.
Hitting back at that argument, Sir Stephen Watson, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, said: “There are some very small forces that lack the capacity and capability even to turn the stone over in terms of some strands of serious and organised crime.
“It’s almost going untouched in their area because they simply do not have the capacity to determine what needs to be done, nor to then do anything about it.”
Sir Stephen, alongside the head of the NPCC, argued that merging forces will free officers up to focus more on neighbourhood policing.
Gavin Stephens added: “There's too much money in policing that is caught up in the middle. It's not being seen by local communities. It's not being seen in tackling national threats.
“And I really want to try and sort of dispel this argument that I've heard that in changing policing, it will take us away from local communities. It's the exact opposite. We're worried that investment will not make its way through to local communities.”
LBC has contacted the Home Office for comment.