Police reform: problems of governance and accountability

This article considers the current decision of the Home Secre-tary to scrap the 43 police forces and replace them with 12–15 regional strategic police forces. This follows on from the recent report of HMIC, entitled Closing the Gap, published in September 2005, which was to conclude that as currently constituted the police structure for England and Wales was no longer ‘fit for purpose’. Using the ability of police services to provide an effective response to NIM Level 2 crime as a yardstick, HMIC was to find that any force with fewer than 4,000 police officers would be unlikely to be able to provide an adequate response. One consequence of the report and the Home Secretary’s response to it has been the request made to all police author-ities and forces to present a business case to the Home Office by the end of 2005 identifying the future structure of policing in the region and the pattern of amalgamation they might favour. In the course of this exercise it was to be found that alternatives to amalgamation, collaboration and federation, had both been closed down by the Home Secretary, who has concluded that only the option of amalgamation was now acceptable to his department. Subsequently it was to be learned that a number of factors influencing HMIC’s 2005 report obtained that had not been taken into account. These included the decision on the part of HMIC specifically not to include the written section on force collaboration within the final report. Nor, it was also to be discovered, had recognition been given within the report to the expectation that implementation was to be carried out in con-junction with comprehensive Workforce Modernisation. A leaked memorandum from ODPM in late 2005 that local gov-ernment reform was now under active consideration was also to undermine the earlier assumption on the part of HMIC that n