Met chief calls for regional mega-forces in radical police overhaul

Times

a day ago

The country's most senior police officer has called for the number of forces in England and Wales to be slashed by two thirds and urged the government to conduct the most radical overhaul of crime fighting in 60 years.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said the model of 43 county-based forces has not 'been fit for purpose for at least two decades' and suggested they should be replaced by 12 to 15 regional mega-forces.
Writing for The Sunday Times, Rowley said these 'bigger and fully capable' forces would be able to make better use of modern technology and the 'limited funding available'. There would also be less replication of back office services, such as human resources departments.
• Sir Mark Rowley: police exist to protect the public, we are not social workers
The regional forces would be supported by a new national policing body responsible for 'key capabilities', such as police helicopters and intelligence. Rowley said that chief constables were now 'united' on the urgent need for reform, adding that the home secretary Yvette Cooper shared a 'commitment to reform'.
It is Rowley's first major intervention since Rachel Reeves's spending review last month, the run up to which was dominated by a public row between the chancellor and police and security chiefs over cuts to law enforcement.
While Reeves announced a 2.3 per cent annual increase in funding, chief constables argued it would not plug the gaps, which have been compounded by a £300 million additional cost resulting from the government's early release scheme for prisoners.
Rowley describes the cash settlement as 'disappointing' and argues that while the Met was making progress tackling a number of offences, its budget would need to 'increase by 50 per cent to match policing spend per capita in New York or Sydney'.
He also warned that Sir Keir Starmer's key crime targets may not be met unless the government removes 'the distractions and bureaucracy that diverts' the police 'away from crime fighting'. Starmer has pledged an additional 13,000 police officers, as well as halving knife offences and violence against women and girls in a decade.
In a direct appeal to ministers, the commissioner said: 'Recruits join the police to protect the public — but too often officers effectively take on the role of social workers. Police chiefs are trying to correct this, but we need the government and public sector to help us.'
He highlighted the impact on the Met and other forces of children and adolescents regularly going missing from care homes, which he said drew 'heavily on police time'. Last year alone, there were 80,000 reported incidents nationally of missing vulnerable children, who are often 'exploited by gangs and lured into crime', he said.
He continued: 'Not only does this absorb thousands of officer hours, it cannot be right — financially or morally — that often the only place for vulnerable children to be held in moments of crisis is a police building.'
The problem has previously been highlighted by Festus Akinbusoye, the former police and crime commissioner for Bedfordshire. He said in 2023 that force control rooms were receiving a 'deluge' of so-called 'concern for welfare' referrals from social workers every Friday evening about children who have gone missing from local authority care.
Akinbusoye, who had volunteered as a special constable prior to his election as a PCC, recalled how social services were regularly sending their caseloads of missing children to the police at the start of the weekend, with officers having 'no choice but to go and find them'.
Rowley has also railed against the amount of time his officers spend responding to emergency call-outs involving mental health incidents. In June 2023, he said they would no longer do so unless there was an immediate threat to life.
Ahead of the new football season, he also said it was 'particularly astounding that the Met is still being asked to pick up 80 per cent of the £24 million annual cost of policing football matches in London, including the Premier League's'.
There are seven Premier League clubs in the capital, with Rowley citing the fact some could 'splurge over £100 million on a single player and pay them a weekly wage equivalent to more than 600 constables'.
Clubs only pay towards the cost of officers who enter their grounds. But the Met has to fund hundreds of other police who patrol the streets and transport hubs on match days, diverting them from other frontline duties.
His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary suggested 20 years ago that the number of forces in England and Wales should be drastically streamlined. The proposal failed to get off the ground due, in part, to resistance from local police chiefs.
Reform would probably mean some of the smaller rural forces, such as Warwickshire, being subsumed by the largest force in a region, such as West Midlands police.
Some smaller constabularies already share resources. For example, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire have a tri-force arrangement for major incidents, armed policing and forensics.