BBC NewsBorrowing was £17.4bn last month, the second highest October figure since monthly records began in 1993.
Finito World
Shabana Mahmood’s white paper From Local to National: A New Model for Policing may go down as one of the most ambitious attempts at public sector reform in a generation. If implemented in full, it would represent the most fundamental restructuring of policing in England and Wales since Sir Robert Peel first appointed his London Metropolitan constables in 1829.
And yet amid the headlines about a new “British FBI”, facial recognition vans, and the end of the Police and Crime Commissioner model, one question lingers beneath the surface: what does this mean for the future of policing as a career?
At a time when public trust in policing is fragile—and when many talented young people are hesitating before entering a profession that feels politically embattled and procedurally strangled—this overhaul may offer both opportunity and risk. The most radical reforms tend to.
The creation of a National Police Service (NPS), bringing together the National Crime Agency, Counter Terrorism Policing, and a host of fragmented specialist services, is a logical move in an age of borderless, hybrid threats: from cyber fraud to child exploitation networks and coordinated terrorism. Consolidation, in this sense, may allow for better resource allocation, clearer leadership, and faster tech adoption—especially with AI-led tools like automated CCTV trawling and document redaction now part of the plan.
But we must also ask: who will staff this new machine?
Already, the profession faces severe recruitment and retention challenges. A “licence to practise” for officers—modelled on the medical profession—is a step toward professionalisation, but could also feel like a bureaucratic hoop that further deters applicants. And the return of powers to sack chief constables directly to the Home Secretary may have an understandable political logic—but it risks politicising leadership and creating churn at the top, making it harder to attract world-class talent into senior roles.
The threat of force mergers—potentially reducing 43 forces to just 10 or 12—has drawn predictable fire from the Conservatives, who argue this will hollow out local accountability. But from a systems design perspective, it’s hard to argue that a map devised in the 1960s (and arguably before that) is fit for a 21st-century threat landscape. Just as the NHS now contends with centralisation vs local delivery, so too must policing.
From an employability standpoint, this raises deeper questions. Will a nationalised system make it easier or harder for diverse talent to enter and rise? Will it enable faster skill acquisition across jurisdictions—or create a sclerotic, top-heavy bureaucracy with fewer leadership opportunities?
There are also educational implications. As AI tools enter the toolkit—and as digital forensics, cybercrime, and data ethics become core parts of police work—policing will need to recruit not just traditional candidates with public service instincts, but coders, linguists, behavioural analysts, and systems engineers. We should be embedding this thinking in sixth forms and universities now: the police force of tomorrow will be more like GCHQ than Heartbeat.
But we must also be cautious. Technology is not a substitute for legitimacy. Facial recognition vans may prove effective in Croydon, but roll them out nationally and you quickly get into deep territory: bias in datasets, overreach in surveillance, and real fears around civil liberties. A career in policing should not require moral compromise.
Above all, the reform must not forget neighbourhoods. The “council ward by council ward” ambition is welcome. If we lose the human face of policing—community officers who know the patch, who speak the languages, who mediate before they arrest—then no amount of AI will rebuild trust.
At Finito, we work with young people who want to serve, but who are unsure whether the structures will support their vocation. If this reform provides clearer career pathways, stronger training, and a real sense of mission in line with contemporary realities, then it could be transformative. But if it simply shuffles hierarchies and floods frontline staff with new tech without support, it risks being another well-meaning white paper that gathers dust.
Policing is changing. But people—not just algorithms—will remain its heart.
