The UK Home Secretary has announced what she describes as "the most significant changes to policing in this country in nearly 200 years”. Key proposals are the reduction of local police forces and the creation of a new National Police Service (NPS). In time, the proposed NPS will draw in all national crime-fighting responsibilities, including dealing with counter-terrorism, serious organised crime, and fraud.
We should be wary of media-friendly tags such as “the British FBI”. For one thing, the NPS wouldn’t be fully “British” since it could operate in England & Wales only (Scotland and Northern Ireland have independent policing structures). And the UK is constitutionally quite different from the United States, with no tier of “federal” laws officially beyond the ken of the territorial police forces.
Nevertheless, these proposals are important. There is something to the idea of economies of scale even within activities such as law-enforcement. In the case of global threats and trends, it seems right that, most of the time, large national forces would be better able to respond than small, local ones.
In the arena of economic crime, we have frequently been faced with impressive new legislation. The Bribery Act, the Criminal Finances Act and the recent Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, all have potentially far-reaching provisions (see our previous articles on The Bribery Act, the Criminal Finances Act and the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act for more information). But it’s fair to say that enforcement of some of these laws has been seen as somewhat patchy. After a latency-period, we can expect the new NPS to have ambitious targets for investigations and prosecutions under such legislation, and the resources to move large cases through the system much more efficiently.
We can’t help noticing that the Serious Fraud Office isn’t mentioned at all in the 106-page white paper. It was not so long ago that there was criticism of the SFO (which was sometimes unfair), and a push for the SFO to be absorbed into the NCA, or otherwise dissolved. Does its absence from the brave new plans for the NPS mean that it is intended by government to survive in its current form? Maybe. We speculate that the practical difficulty of digesting a highly specialised agency, and the fact of some recent successes at the SFO, has put the idea on the backburner, at least for now.
These structural reforms may take years to come into being. But such announcements can have real-world effects long before new uniforms are modelled or logos drawn up. A shake-up of the system creates a “carrot” for ambitious law-enforcement professionals, who realise that building a strong track record of cases today may mean more interesting or exciting new roles in future. Other factors being equal, we would expect an uptick in enforcement efforts from all the agencies who may ultimately be swallowed up by or feel themselves in competition with the NPS, to build their caseload as plans and timelines for the new agency crystallise.
