Police systems the world over face a common dilemma: how to preserve strong local relationships and accountability while building the capacity to tackle criminal threats that cross jurisdictions. The tension between local accountability and a system with joined-up national decision-making is a defining challenge for police reform.

That challenge is now at the heart of one of the most consequential decisions about policing in England and Wales in decades: the UK government must determine what should replace a structure of 43 forces largely inherited from the 1960s.

In March, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood appointed former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Hogan-Howe to advise on this question, examining which forces should be merged in line with the vision for a streamlined policing structure set out in her police reform White Paper. Hogan-Howe now faces an altered political landscape: Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda has recast the terms of the debate and created a new consideration for the review team in weighing its conclusions.

The debate risks becoming a contest between two maps. Mahmood’s White Paper outlines a three-tier model, with local policing areas beneath significantly fewer regional ‘super-forces’ and an overarching National Police Service. Burnham’s intervention, by contrast, reflects an apparent shift towards aligning public service boundaries and strengthening mayoral accountability. His ‘Rewiring the State’ proposals would see police forces map onto England’s developing mayoral geography, as mayors have questioned the case for mergers.

The focus on local accountability is crucial: policing must remain responsive to the communities it serves. But many of the problems those communities face are driven by criminal networks operating far beyond their neighbourhoods. In navigating this decision, a key touchstone for government – and a critical test of either model – is whether the arrangements leave the system better equipped to tackle serious and organized crime, from offenders active across borders to the harm they cause locally.

A threat that cuts across policing

Police reform must serve many objectives, from restoring public trust and strengthening neighbourhood policing to confronting terrorism and other national threats. Yet serious and organized crime offers a particularly revealing test of whether the new system will work. Its reach across communities, police force areas and national borders encapsulates the challenges these reforms must address. Amid growing debate over force boundaries and local governance, which Hogan-Howe’s forthcoming review could bring to a boiling point, this dimension should not be underweighted.

Serious and organized crime is not a distinct category of offending: it drives many of the threats confronting policing, from drug supply and associated violence to firearms trafficking, cybercrime and fraud. Criminal networks may operate across borders, but a disproportionate amount of the harm they cause is felt locally. Their activities fuel everyday offending, from shoplifting to organized vehicle theft. Yet these connections often go unrecognized: analysis of police data in selected neighbourhoods found links to organized crime in 31–45% of frauds and 27% of shoplifting and theft offences.

This confounds efforts to distinguish local policing from the response to national threats. Neighbourhood officers must be accountable to the communities they serve, but many problems they face cannot be resolved at this level. A local investigation may uncover criminal activity extending across force areas, necessitating specialist capabilities unavailable to these officers. Hence, determining what constitutes ‘local’ policing, and when responsibility should pass to regional bodies or the National Police Service, is central to the design of the current reform. The wider challenge will be to turn a constellation of 43 largely autonomous forces into a coherent policing system able to confront threats that cut across them.

And the threat itself is becoming more complex. Technology is transforming criminal activity, enabling fraud, cybercrime and other offences to be committed at scale across jurisdictions. The National Crime Agency (NCA’s) latest National Strategic Assessment identifies growing threats from drugs, organized immigration crime and illicit finance, alongside increasing harm from fraud and cybercrime. For policing, responding requires sustainable access to specialist expertise and the means to coordinate effectively.

The pressures are not evenly felt. The recent experience of Cleveland Police illustrates the demands that complex threats can generate. In August, a collision on the A66 near Middlesbrough claimed seven lives, including two police officers. In the aftermath, Cleveland Police – a small force with around 1 500 officers – faced a major investigation into organized criminal activity amid escalating violence. The crisis placed exceptional pressure on the force, which had to call in 200 officers from other constabularies, alongside NCA personnel.

The experience illustrates the strain such incidents can create and the importance of how capabilities are distributed. In the Cleveland case, mutual aid provided essential support, demonstrating how the current system can mobilize resources in response to immediate threats. But it again raises questions about how access to such capabilities can be sustained and how readily they can be deployed. For merger advocates, such episodes reinforce the case for larger forces, though consolidation alone does not guarantee better outcomes. The real test is which arrangements would best equip policing to deal with complex criminal threats while maintaining local responsiveness.

From recognition to operational design

The challenge is not a failure to recognize the problem. Introducing the White Paper, Mahmood warned that ‘serious and organised crime is growing’. The National Security Strategy 2025 identifies it as the most corrosive day-to-day threat facing UK citizens, while the NCA has warned that it causes ‘more harm, to more people, more often than any other national security threat’. The question is how that recognition translates into current debates over the organization of policing.

The White Paper provides a basis for considering this question. Among its proposals is replacing the Strategic Policing Requirement, which already identifies serious and organized crime as a national threat, with new National Strategic Policing Priorities. Rather than merely requiring forces to ‘have regard to’ these threats, the new framework introduces a duty to comply with national priorities, backed by measurable outcomes in a new performance framework. Forces would thus face greater accountability in how they tackle serious and organized crime, among other threats. In setting these expectations, the government has outlined a potential test for structural reform: which policing model would give forces the capabilities and capacity to meet them?

Meanwhile, there is further work to do in establishing how the National Police Service would function as a ‘strategic centre for policing’, providing national leadership, setting standards and delivering enabling services and operational capabilities to tackle serious, technology-enabled crime. Its governance, decision-making responsibilities and leadership arrangements are still to be defined. A new Police Foundation report has called for a clear National Police Service operating model before major structural changes proceed.

There is also a wider question of strategic direction. It is unclear whether the government will publish a renewed serious and organized crime strategy, following a 2023 strategy developed under the Conservatives, which attracted little attention. Organized crime features across stated government priorities on neighbourhood safety, serious violence and border security, but these separate agendas cannot replace a coherent approach to the criminal networks connecting them. To maximize the impact of reform, structural changes must be matched by renewed strategic focus and explicit governmental prioritization of serious and organized crime.

The debate over different models must ultimately be grounded in a careful reckoning with the evidence. What evidence is there that key changes would deliver substantive improvements, which shortcomings would each model address, and how would that translate into more effective disruption of criminal networks and tangible change for communities? Will efficiencies allow policing to meet as yet unmet demand in the form of crime that currently goes uninvestigated and, crucially, how should success be measured? These questions should inform decisions about boundaries, rather than follow them.

There is overwhelming agreement that policing must adapt, even if there is less consensus on how. Police reform is billed as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape policing for the demands of the 21st century. Realizing that opportunity will depend on whether the new arrangements demonstrably strengthen the response to organized criminal networks driving harm in communities, while preserving the local accountability on which effective policing depends. Central to this will be clear lines of command and a renewed strategic focus on tackling serious and organized crime.