Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is reportedly considering a major shakeup of policing in England and Wales, with the current 43 forces set to be amalgamated into 15 or even 12 “strategic” forces. This will no doubt prompt much analysis of capabilities and geographical responsibilities, as pocket forces such as Bedfordshire — with 1,500 officers — are merged into larger, neighbouring constabularies. This, however, misses the details of the proposals.

This reorganisation is a long-term Home Office project, one that turns on political control as much as efficiency and cost savings. After all, Mahmood’s political hinterland suggests little interest in policing — this development is unambiguously driven by Home Office mandarins. And, as ever, they speak to a broader point, indicative of the policy void at the heart of successive governments. What kind of policing model does the UK really want: hyper-localism, or a multi-tiered European model, with municipal and national constabularies bolstered by a gendarmerie?

Given Britain invented modern policing, the last few governments have been curiously indifferent as to how our law enforcement model fits into the UK’s constitutional fabric. Since the last major restructuring in the Sixties, which merged over a hundred smaller provincial constabularies into the current 43, forces have been fiercely independent. Often cited as central to police accountability and a model of policing by consent, the current model has long been found wanting by central government when it comes to “strategic” issues such as organised crime, terrorism and public disorder.

Parochialism has led to pointless duplication of procuring equipment and IT, involving significant waste in forces. Worse, it has hampered investigations: might a larger policing body, less concerned about “community tensions”, have acted sooner on the grooming gangs scandal by spotting patterns across different towns?

Also, like Britain’s armed services, the police is top-heavy with senior management. To bridge these gaps, a creeping process of regionalisation has developed, with forces pooling specialist resources. For example, Surrey and Sussex police forces now share firearms capabilities. This makes sense, until one realises that the nearest armed response vehicle to an emergency in Staines — near London — might possibly be in faraway Gatwick.

The Home Office and successive governments, along with occasionally incalcitrant chief constables, have fudged reform for decades, then ravaged forces with austerity measures. Incremental changes provide clues to the Home Office’s preferred future — we now have an opaque, quangoesque National Crime Agency (effectively an adjunct of the Civil Service), for example. There are suggestions the Government is pondering an independent counter-terrorism force. After the summer riots of 2024, Keir Starmer even suggested forming a British gendarmerie to deal with disorder.

All of these proposals speak to a European multi-tier policing model, with specialist functions answering to the centre. Yet the idea that workaday policing might be provided by locally accountable constabularies is strangely absent. This is testimony to the Home Office’s increasingly controlling tendencies, which partly explains the death of the ill-fated police and crime commissioner experiment.

Time will tell whether this desire for centralisation translates into more effective neighbourhood policing for the average Briton, but we can be certain that Home Office mandarins will continue to exercise control over forces without accountability for any crises, scandals or mistakes. In the late Nineties, during protests over fuel duties and beef farming, I remember speaking to a senior police officer who’d attended Whitehall Cobra meetings. He told me how then-Prime Minister Tony Blair despaired at the fragmented nature of British policing. “He wants to push a button and have three thousand coppers appear wherever he likes,” I was told. “And, one day, he’ll get it.”