Yesterday, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced plans to get rid of Britain’s 43 police and crime commissioner roles. Tellingly, the only troubled parties were the commissioners themselves. Police watchers, on the other hand, were united in their approval.

Mahmood’s announcement was a stake through the heart of the Conservative Party’s post-2010 police reform agenda, led by Theresa May. Directly-elected PCCs were influenced by the Cameroon enthusiasm for localism, inspired partly by Daniel Hannan’s bucolic “Merrie England” vision for county sheriffs — a vision which would be crushed by reality. PCCs would supposedly provide strategic leadership, select chief constables and manage force budgets. Yet, in practice, they had little impact, with questionable performance and pitiful turnouts for elections.

What, then, of the details behind the Home Secretary’s announcement? The financial benefits cited are negligible: £100 million will be saved, with £20 million “invested” back into police forces. This equates to roughly 300 extra constable posts which, across 43 forces, is hardly a game-changer. In fact, chief constables are likely to use the money for civilian posts or community support officers, to service the Home Office bureaucracy bedevilling the police.

Alternatively, the initiative may have more to do with oiling the wheels of another Home Office pet project: mandarins’ long-term plans to merge England and Wales’s 43 constabularies into around 15 “strategic” forces. This would conveniently dovetail with Labour’s ongoing fascination with regionalisation. What’s more, the Home Office would find it easier to coordinate, and occasionally bully, 15 forces rather than 43.

In practical terms, the Government’s plan involves replacing PCCs in 2028 with newly-established mayors or local “police boards”. The demographics certainly benefit Labour: the UK’s largest forces tend to serve urban areas where the party enjoys most support. However, recent polling suggests some might fall to Reform UK or Green Party candidates, increasing the likelihood of concerns around politicisation and operational independence. How will the Government respond to a Reform or Green mayor clashing with chief constables? Britain has no American or even continental dynamic of federal versus regional government. New mechanisms will presumably be required to manage the inevitable disputes between mayors, police bosses and the centre.

A recent example would be the furore over policing at the Aston Villa-Maccabi Tel Aviv football match in Birmingham last week. There, allegations were made that West Midlands Police was biased towards the position taken by the local Muslim community, banning away supporters from the match. The Prime Minister, clearly annoyed, announced that the Government would provide local police with support, thus allowing the match to proceed with away fans in attendance.

Nonetheless, the matter technically fell under the jurisdiction of the local PCC. The match was subsequently policed by over 700 officers, deployed to prevent public disorder at a match with no away fans. The operation itself was contested and controversial. What happens when a “Gaza independent” becomes a big-city mayor? Or a Green mayor, with aspirations for Portland-style hands-off law enforcement?

Such debates over police accountability are strangely cyclical, so it seems apt to mention the Conservative MP Nick Timothy. Timothy, an Aston Villa fan, criticised the way West Midlands Police dealt with the match, finding himself “sad, angry and ashamed”. The irony? In 2012, Timothy was Theresa May’s special advisor, an advocate of PCCs and indeed the wider Tory police reform project. It was this project which was directly responsible for the swamp in which British policing is currently mired. One wonders what Shabana Mahmood will think of her announcement a decade from now. Will she find herself “sad, angry and ashamed” of policing in her Birmingham Ladywood constituency? I suspect, sadly, she might.