Police reform plans are poor fit for Andy Burnham's devolution agenda

Starmer-era proposal to combine constabularies into mega-forces has created bitter row among police chiefs and England's mayors

Good morning. First of all, a big thank you to my FT colleagues for the many enjoyable newsletters during my sabbatical, and to Georgina for organising it all.

Bear with me while I get back up to speed. (While I think the government may regret having such a steady-as-she-goes, safety-first Budget, I am relieved not to have come back from my break to a new prime minister or economic crisis.)

For today, some thoughts on the increasingly bitter row over the government's plans to reform policing.

Ill-conceived reforms

A public row has broken out between police chiefs after Mark Rowley, head of the Metropolitan Police, used an event on Friday to call for the number of police forces in England and Wales to be drastically cut back and replaced with eight to 10 mega forces.

The political backdrop here is that at the start of the year, Keir Starmer's home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, put forward proposals to shrink the number of police forces in England and Wales, something that has been on the wish list of senior police figures for a while. The exact number has not been confirmed, but Bernard Hogan-Howe, the former Metropolitan Police chief who was placed in charge of reviewing how many forces England and Wales should have, has long believed there are too many separate ones.

Fast forward to today and while Mahmood is still in place, Starmer of course is not and the reforms are a poor fit, to put it mildly, for Andy Burnham's plan to devolve more power to local government. The proposed eight to 10 police mega-forces would exceed the size of any unit of local government outside of London and Wales, so would lack meaningful scrutiny from local politicians. Burnham has asked for the reforms to be revisited and England's mayors are organising to try to change them.

Rowley's intervention aimed to make a retreat less likely. But, if anything, it had the reverse effect, bringing divisions among senior police leaders about the proposals out into the open.

As some readers may remember, I think the government's reform plans are ill-conceived. The best police forces in England and Wales are not, on the whole, the large ones.

Durham Constabulary consistently gets better write-ups from the police inspectorate than Cleveland Police or North Yorkshire Police, its larger neighbours. The City of London Police, which polices the physical area of the City of London as well as some fraud and financial crime for the whole country, consistently outperforms the Metropolitan Police.

Equally importantly, the idea that the home secretary of the day can scrutinise eight to 10 mega forces is, I think, ridiculous. Whoever holds the post always has far too much on their plate for that. There are some good ideas in the proposals -- for example, passing the responsibility for counterterrorism to a new national police force so that the Met can focus on day-to-day policing in the capital -- but the overall approach is, in my view, a mess.

I say this partly to explain my reasoning when I argue that I think Rowley's intervention is some of the best news that opponents of these reforms have had since Burnham came into office. There is so much opposition to the reforms among the people who would need to be onside -- such as police leadership in the smaller forces that would be merged, and mayors and council leaders who would have to scrutinise the new mega-forces -- that it is hard to see how they could work.

Conservative and Liberal Democrat rural voters would, I think, be among the biggest losers from the creation of these mega-forces, which would inevitably focus more on the larger population centres. The more noise opposition parties make, the more likely that the noise already being made by Labour mayors is picked up on. Questions about what a poor fit these reforms are for everything Burnham does and says about devolution will become harder to ignore.

Many of the changes since Burnham took over from Starmer have, thus far, been presentational. But devolution is one of the few areas where the new prime minister is, in policy terms, demonstrably quite different. That, coupled with the open row in the police, is one reason why these proposals will hopefully be the subject of a U-turn sooner rather than later.

Now try this

I am absolutely in love with Sabrina Ghayour's new cookbook, Persiana One. So many recipe books promising meals that can be cooked in only one pan tend to come with the caveat of "in a test kitchen perfectly laid out" or "with very specific equipment". But not this one. I cooked three of the dishes for dinner last night and they were all fantastic. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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