A vehicle linked to an organised crime group crosses from one police force area into the next. Within hours, evidence of its journey may be captured in CCTV footage, automatic number plate recognition data, phone records, witness accounts and online transactions held across different systems and jurisdictions. The criminals can cross those boundaries without slowing down. The officers pursuing them may have to navigate separate systems, processes and permissions before they can assemble the same complete picture.
That is the gap police reform must close. Changing force boundaries will achieve little if the information needed to investigate crime still cannot move freely across them. Otherwise, reform risks redrawing the map without changing the reality beneath it.
In my first blog in this series,
Crime Has Changed. Can Police Reform Catch Up?, I argued that crime, evidence and public demand have moved ahead of the territorial model built to deal with them. The next question is what a different model could actually look like, and what would have to change beneath the organisational chart for it to work.
A national service does not mean policing everything nationally
Territorial policing grew from the principle of local people policing local crime, and that connection between policing and place must not be lost through reform.
The Government's January 2026 white paper,
From local to national: a new model for policing, points towards a more deliberate division of responsibility: local policing focused on communities and everyday crime; fewer, larger forces able to provide resilient regional and specialist capabilities; and a National Police Service responsible for national leadership and the threats that already operate across borders.
The proposed National Police Service would bring together national capabilities that currently sit across several organisations, including the National Crime Agency, Counter Terrorism Policing, the National Police Chiefs' Council and the College of Policing. It would also set mandatory standards in areas such as data, technology, training and workforce planning.
The principle is sound: match the scale of the policing response to the scale of the problem. Neighbourhood concerns should remain rooted in the communities experiencing them. Specialist and complex investigations need the reach and resilience of larger forces. Serious organised, cross-border and technology-enabled crime needs a genuinely national response.
The precise number and shape of future forces is still being considered. But, in my view, the more consequential question is not where one boundary ends and another begins. It is whether the people working on either side of it can operate from the same reliable picture.
The lesson from 'ask, not task'
None of this is entirely new. During my time working on national interoperability through the Association of Chief Police Officers, I saw both the value and the limits of collaboration. Much of it worked on an 'ask, not task' basis: forces could choose to work together, but the centre could not always require them to do so. Goodwill could create strong partnerships. It could not guarantee consistency across the whole system.
That distinction matters. A national body that merely encourages common approaches risks reproducing the same patchwork under a new name. A National Police Service with the authority to set standards (and the responsibility to provide shared capabilities) has the potential to do something more fundamental. It could move policing from optional alignment towards genuine interoperability.
The organisation chart is not the operating model
Structural reform naturally draws attention to mergers, leadership roles and governance. Those questions matter. But they are not what an officer, investigator or member of the public will experience at two o'clock in the morning.
They will experience whether an officer can see the intelligence that changes a risk assessment. Whether an investigator can locate evidence held by another force without starting a trail of emails and requests. Whether a control room has a current, complete picture. Whether digital evidence can move securely through an investigation and into the Crown Prosecution Service without being repeatedly downloaded, converted and uploaded again.
That is what it means for information to move with the new structure: intelligence and evidence must follow the investigation, not stop at the boundary of a system or force.
This is where standardisation matters more than structure. England and Wales currently have 43 territorial police forces, each carrying the legacy of years of local decisions about systems, suppliers, data formats, retention policies and workflows. Establishing a common standard is not the same as creating a common system. Creating a common system is not the same as ensuring that the information within it is accurate, accessible and trusted.
There is no single switch that turns 43 different ways of recording and managing information into one version of the truth. This will require sustained work: agreeing what information means, improving data quality, connecting old and new systems, protecting security and privacy, and making sure new processes help frontline teams rather than adding another layer of administration.
A warning policing has heard before
The consequences of fragmented information are not theoretical. The Bichard Inquiry, established after the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, exposed grave failures in the recording, retention and sharing of intelligence. The Police National Database was subsequently created to provide a national view of local force information.
Significant progress has been made since then, and the policing landscape is very different. Yet the Government's own reform paper still describes fragmented infrastructure, ageing systems, manual processes and inconsistent data standards that slow investigations and make innovation difficult to scale. The lesson endures: information management is not a back-office concern. It is an operational capability—and, at critical moments, a safeguarding capability.
National consistency without losing local judgement
Reform also changes how policing will be held to account. The white paper proposes abolishing Police and Crime Commissioners at the end of their current terms in May 2028, transferring their functions to strategic authority mayors or local council leaders through Policing and Crime Boards. That is a significant shift away from the model introduced to create a direct, visible link between police governance and local communities.
At the national level, the Home Secretary would hold the National Police Service to account for delivery, while operational decisions would remain with the National Police Commissioner.
Greater national consistency must not come at the expense of local judgement or accountability. Communities should still be able to see how their priorities are reflected in policing, and local leaders must retain the ability to respond to the character of the places they serve. The strongest model will be national where national reach is essential, regional where scale adds strength, and local where trust is built and policing is experienced.
Technology should make those layers work as one service. It should remove the seams between them, not remove the local knowledge that effective policing depends upon.
Easy on paper. Hard in practice.
Creating a national body, assigning responsibilities and drawing a new structure chart are achievable. Connecting the data, technology and working practices beneath that structure (while policing continues every hour of every day) is the harder transformation.
Success will not be measured by how many organisations are merged or how dramatically the map changes. It will be measured in operational moments: the missing link found sooner, the duplicated task removed, the evidence available when it is needed, the officer given more time to investigate and the public receiving a more consistent service wherever they live.
A National Police Service could provide the authority and shared direction that policing has long lacked. But a national name will not, by itself, create a national way of working. The information has to move with it.
In my next blog, I will look more closely at what it will take to turn national data and technology standards into operational reality, and how policing can connect systems and evidence without disrupting the frontline work reform is intended to support.
The map may change. The real test is whether policing can finally work across it as one connected service.
