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Critical policing responsibilities including combating terrorism and organised crime are to be handed to a new national police force for england and Wales under measures that home secretary Shabana Mahmood is due to announce on Monday.
The new National Police service (NPS) will bring together responsibilities currently exercised by counterterrorism policing units, regional organised crime units, and some responsibilities of the existing National Crime Agency (NCA) and the College of Policing.
Mahmood will present the planned change as ensuring that the toughest policing challenges are no longer handled by local forces that in many cases are poorly equipped to handle them. She will also say that the changes will relieve forces of national responsibilities that can drain resources from tackling local problems such as antisocial behavior.
“We will create a new National Police Service . . . deploying world-class talent and state-of-the-art technology to track down and catch hazardous criminals,” Mahmood said. “In doing so, local forces will be able to spend more time fighting crime in their communities.”
Mahmood will describe it as “Britain’s FBI”, a term often applied to the NCA.
Defending her reforms today, the home secretary said “there is an epidemic of everyday crime in their country, shoplifting, phone theft, antisocial behaviour. It feels like those crimes often go unpunished”.
“What I’m trying to do is design a new model for policing in this country, which means that we are capable of dealing with all of that everyday crime, that it is punished, that communities can have confidence that those sorts of criminals won’t be able to run amok,” she told the BBC on Sunday.
She insisted the reforms were “absolutely not” about saving money, but “making sure that we have a police service that can handle all of the different types of crime that we are seeing in this country”.
The establishment of the NPS reflects a widespread consensus among policing experts that more specialised officers are needed to combat threats such as online fraud and international organised crime, and that only larger forces can support the level of expertise required.
Alongside the establishment of the new body, the white paper published on Monday will set out plans to reduce the number of police forces in England and Wales from the current 43.
Chief constable gavin Stephens, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said police leaders were united in calling for “bold and enterprising reform”.
He said: “Crime is changing, technology is evolving and we need to be set up in the best possible way to tackle crime in the modern world.”
The force most affected by the establishment of the NPS will be the Metropolitan Police, which will lose its roles leading counterterror policing and some elements of the fight against organised crime. The NPS will also inherit duty for the National Police air Service from West Yorkshire Police and roads policing from sussex Police.
the NPS will also assume responsibility for setting standards for policing in England and Wales from the existing National College of Policing.
metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has been a especially strong advocate of a shift to hand over some of the force’s national responsibilities to a new body. He has argued that the c
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