The only thing to be said for Met chief Sir Mark Rowley’s proposal to replace the 43 local policing constabularies in England and Wales with 12 to 15 “mega forces” is that it might save money. There is no guarantee that it will, but as saving money is going to increasingly be the priority of the creaking British state, we can expect it to be given serious consideration. It is, however, a terrible idea and an eye-opening example of just how evidence-resistant the upper echelons of our public services can be.

You might expect the current Metropolitan Police Commissioner to think twice before publicly offering his advice on how other parts of the country police themselves. The Met is nobody’s idea of a model force with its recent scandals over racism and misogyny, and at this point there are few on either the Left or Right of British politics who would object to its being broken up.

Meanwhile the other police force which comes closest to Rowley’s conception is Police Scotland, formed in 2008 when the SNP merged Scotland’s eight constabularies into one mega force. Like the Met, it is a force with very few friends and many critics.

Police Scotland offers a study in why Rowley’s mega forces would probably lead to worse policing. The Met’s geographical organization, after all, makes a degree of sense: it governs one large, inter-connected city. Its problems flow from its unusual hybrid status as both London’s local constabulary and the home of a host of national functions such as diplomatic protection, armed policing, and so on, and the blurred lines of accountability this produces between the Commissioner, the Mayor of London, and the Home Secretary.

In Scotland, however, the problem is that there is now a single force covering a huge area with very different policing challenges, from urban areas such as Glasgow and Edinburgh to the vast rural reaches of the Highlands and Islands. In 2014, some accused it of using a one-size-fits-all approach. Whilst there are obviously still officers deployed locally who know their areas, the very thing which saves money — combined back-office and leadership functions — means that experience must necessarily get narrower towards the top of the organization.

And when saving money becomes the priority, funding is increasingly easy to cut. In March this year, the chair of the Scottish Police Federation (SPF) warned that underfunding was leading to large areas of the country becoming “policing deserts”. In May, Scottish Conservative MSP blamed the force’s poor retention rate on “chronic underfunding”.

There are certainly areas where it seems likely that better national policing infrastructure could be a more sensible approach. It is obviously going to present challenges to local forces if we expect them to be one-stop shops, especially if that includes things such as public order policing which are both resource-intensive and, in many parts of the country, rarely called upon.

Some of this country’s most effective police forces, such as the British Transport Police and the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, are national forces with narrow specializations, and there is definitely a discussion to be had about expanding that model.

But the advantage of such an overhaul is that it would allow police reform in the exact opposite direction to Rowley’s vision: with more specialist functions taken over by national forces, day-to-day policing could be left to genuinely local constabularies, which could focus on the particular needs of their areas.

Indeed, such forces could perhaps be even more local than they are at present. The City of London police is responsible for a solitary square mile of territory, yet nobody is advocating for it to be rolled into the Met. Why should such arrangements be reserved for London? Centralizing, especially when obviously done for fiscal reasons, rarely ever improves performance.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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