Police mergers a bad idea, says commissioner

A police and crime commissioner (PCC) says merging police forces would make it harder to recruit officers, tackle rural crime and would not save money.

Last week, Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley proposed the current 43 forces should be replaced by eight to 10 larger forces, arguing the system was "heading for failure" without change.

However, Marc Jones, the PCC for Lincolnshire, said move "would not be in our benefit."

He said: "If we think the people of Skegness or Spalding or Horncastle are going to be safer because the Chief Constable is sitting in Nottingham, Leicester or Derby concentrating on major crime in the East Midlands, I'm afraid they won't."

In January, the home secretary announced a blueprint for reforming what she called the "broken" policing model in England and Wales.

Shabana Mahmood said the shake-up would create a new National Police Service to fight the most complex cross-border crime and could see the number of local forces in England and Wales cut by about two-thirds.

In a speech last Friday, Sir Mark said the current system was struggling to cope with organised crime groups, fraud networks, cyber-criminals and those involved in online child abuse, which increasingly operate across regional and international borders.

"We have 43 overstretched forces trying to do too much, with too little," he said.

Merging forces would reduce duplication and could free up thousands of roles to be redirected towards front line policing, he said.

However, Jones told BBC Radio Lincolnshire: "We've seen time and again that urban centres draw resources.

"You end up with a critical mass of officers being drawn to urban areas, which means large rural areas such as Lincolnshire always get the tough end."

He said a bigger force area would make recruiting officers more difficult as they may be deployed far away from their homes.

He added it was a "fallacy to suggest this is about saving money. The reality is we don't put enough money into policing at a national level."

He suggested larger police forces covering bigger areas would, like the Metropolitan Police, have "one chief constable with more assistant chief constables who are paid more money because they cover bigger areas".

Jones said the issue wasn't "how you cut the policing financial cake, it's the fact that the cake isn't big enough. If they want to be serious about this, they need to fund it".

A Home Office spokesperson defended the plans on Friday, saying: "Our current model of policing has not changed since the 1960s and is no longer fit for purpose."

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