Police reform has been talked about for years in the UK, often without much fundamentally changing. But since the beginning of 2026, there has been a noticeable gear shift.
The Government’s white paper,
From local to national: a new model for policing, sets out plans for the creation of a National Police Service and an independent review of the overall number of forces. The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has described it as the biggest redesign of policing since the 1960s.
That is a significant claim, but the scale of the ambition reflects a difficult reality: the current policing model has not kept pace with either the volume or the nature of modern crime.
I say that as a former Metropolitan Police officer and as someone who now works with police forces through NiCE. We are in the privileged position of supporting more than 20 forces across the length and breadth of England and Wales. That gives us a view of both the differences between forces and the challenges they share—and of the opportunities greater collaboration could deliver.
This is not to suggest that policing has stood still. Far from it. Forces are introducing new ways of working and technologies that support front-line officers and their wellbeing, accelerate investigations, improve prosecution outcomes, and strengthen relationships with citizens and businesses.
The problem is that much of this progress is taking place within a structure designed for a different age. The central question for reform is therefore not simply how policing should be reorganised. It is whether the structure around officers can finally catch up with the realities they face, and whether reform can become genuine transformation for the people responsible for delivering policing every day.
A model built for a different kind of demand
England and Wales are currently policed by 43 largely autonomous territorial forces. Each has its own senior command structure, ways of working and combination of systems, some procured and others developed in-house.
That arrangement made more sense when crime and communities were more closely tied to geography. Today, force boundaries can work against the realities of policing.
The way resources are allocated illustrates the problem. Population is an important consideration, but it does not always reflect the crime burden a force faces. An area containing a busy transport corridor, airport or major retail centre may experience levels and types of demand that its resident population alone cannot explain.
If reform allows expertise and resources to be directed towards the problems that actually exist, while still recognising specific regional and local needs, it could improve conditions for officers as well as outcomes for the public.
The same mismatch can be seen in the financial model. Maintaining 43 separate infrastructures inevitably creates duplicated overheads across leadership, back-office systems, procurement and technology contracts. As budgets tighten, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify buying similar capabilities dozens of times when some could be procured once nationally or across a smaller number of regional structures.
The argument for reform is not that everything should become national. It is that policing should decide more intelligently what needs to remain local and what can be delivered more effectively through shared regional or national capabilities.
If that leads to better working conditions, more effective allocation of resources and stronger support for specific regional needs, then policing may move beyond structural reform and begin to achieve real transformation.
Effectiveness and public trust are inseparable
The operational and financial arguments matter because they ultimately affect the service the public receives—and public confidence in policing has taken a real hit in recent years.
The
Crime Survey for England and Wales for the year ending March 2025 reported some improvement in public perceptions and experiences of the police and criminal justice system. However, confidence remained below the levels recorded a decade earlier.
There are encouraging signs of progress. The
British Retail Consortium recently reported that 13 percent of retailers now rate the police response to retail crime as good or excellent, compared with zero three years ago. That represents substantial improvement in what has often been a strained relationship, although there is clearly much further to go.
The connection to reform is important. Public trust is shaped by whether people believe the police can respond effectively to the crime affecting them. A model that can deploy resources according to actual demand, share information more readily, and reduce unnecessary duplication should be better placed to deliver the outcomes communities expect—even when money and people are in short supply.
Crime no longer respects the structure of policing
The need for change becomes even clearer when we consider how crime itself has evolved.
Organised crime is, without question, very organised—and often very successful. Criminal networks coordinate activity across regions and national borders, while a fragmented police response can struggle to match that reach.
County lines drug networks, for example, may span the length of the country. If forces cannot easily share data and intelligence across their own boundaries, investigating and disrupting that activity becomes disproportionately difficult.
At the same time, the rise of digital information has transformed almost every type of investigation. Around 90 percent of investigations now involve some form of digital evidence, whether from a mobile phone, CCTV, social media or another connected device.
When the NPCC published its
Policing Problem Book in 2025, improving the capture and analysis of digital evidence was positioned as its number one challenge. Investigations increasingly begin with digital information rather than a knock on the door. That shift has quietly redrawn what ‘doing the job well’ looks like for the modern investigator.
Yet the evidence relating to one case may be scattered across different systems, organisations and force areas. Officers can lose valuable time locating it, requesting it, converting it into usable formats and sharing it with colleagues or the Crown Prosecution Service. Once again, the way crime and evidence now behave has moved ahead of the structure designed to deal with them.
This matters for prevention as well as prosecution. Catching offenders remains essential, but preventing harm is always the better outcome when it is achievable. The current model is not always equipped to deliver either at the scale modern crime demands—not because officers and staff lack the capability or commitment, but because the structure around them has not caught up with how crime and evidence now operate.
Turning reform into practical change
Discussion of a national reform strategy will inevitably be greeted with some scepticism. The politics will not be simple, particularly when any reduction in the number of forces could also mean fewer chief constable posts and significant changes to long-established organisations.
But the timing is right. Policing must change if it is to support its workforce properly, use increasingly limited resources wisely and demonstrate to the public that it can tackle modern crime effectively.
For me, this is also where NiCE has a relevant perspective to contribute. Working with more than 25 police forces and organisations across England and Wales allows us to see how common challenges play out in different policing environments. We have seen the practical difference it can make when digital evidence is brought together around an investigation, manual processes are reduced and officers can collaborate more easily with other forces, citizens, businesses and the CPS.
Technology cannot determine the right structure for policing, and it cannot deliver reform on its own. But it can either perpetuate fragmentation or help overcome it.
NiCE’s role is to help ensure that the systems supporting policing reflect how officers and investigators actually need to work—across different sources of evidence, organisational boundaries and stages of the justice process.
Ultimately, reform should not be judged by how dramatically the organisational chart changes. It should be judged by whether it creates better working conditions for officers, makes better use of resources, improves investigations and helps policing prevent crime and protect the public.
The Government’s reform agenda has set the direction. Now comes the harder and more important task of turning that ambition into a policing model equipped for the realities of today and the threats of tomorrow.
In forthcoming blogs, I will explore what that model could look like and the practical challenges that must be overcome to make it work.
Crime has already changed. This is policing’s opportunity not only to catch up, but to get ahead.
