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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 will bring together responsibilities currently exercised by counterterrorism policing units, regional organised crime units and others with 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 behaviour.
“We will create a new National Police Service . . . deploying world-class talent and state-of-the-art technology to track down and catch dangerous criminals,” Mahmood said on Saturday. “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.
The establishment of the National Police Service 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 ambitious 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 responsibility 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 particularly strong advocate of a shift to hand over some of the force’s national responsibilities to a new body. He has argued that the change would ensure the wider responsibilities no longer distracted the force from its core role of policing London.