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The long-awaited Police Reform White Paper lands today, with much discussion around what that means for the structure of policing in England and Wales. In this guest blog Dr Kreseda Smith, Senior Lecturer in Rural Criminology and Social Science and Director of the Rural Resilience Research Group, examines its implications.

Given that policing has not seen significant structural change since the 1960s some would argue that this White Paper is well overdue.

There are plans to reduce the number of police forces across England and Wales from the current 43 territorial forces to 12 large regional forces, create a new National Police Service touted as the British FBI - didn’t we hear this about the NCA? -  and reduce response times to the most serious incidents.

But how will any of this improve policing in rural and remote communities?

While the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners’ Chair, Emily Spurrell,welcomes the commitments in the White Paper to focus on protecting local communities and neighbourhood policing, the devil is always in the detail.

Will the reforms really enable increased police officer freedom? Will bigger, regional forces have the financial capacity to ensure equality of service outside of the towns and cities? Anticipated benefits include operational effectiveness against serious organised crime, financial savings and efficiency, improved consistency and technology, strengthened national coordination, and a focus on local policing areas. But how will these translate to rural policing?

Firstly, the idea that local and neighbourhood policing will be strengthened is hard to fathom and will be very much one of those issues where detail is everything. If police stations are retained at the level currently seen, then this could work for towns and cities.

However, this currently doesn’t work for many rural and remote communities following the centralisation of police resources from the 1990s onwards. Long gone are the rural police houses, and the local rural bobby, and there are concerns that these reforms could reduce rural police visibility and local knowledge further. In addition, with regional forces, those local rural policing teams may need to fight harder for appropriate resources which could all too easily be swallowed up by the response to volume crime in towns and cities. My own local force, West Mercia, is predominantly a rural force, but could potentially be grouped with Staffordshire and West Midlands forces if the regional forces work similar to Probation Regions. This would mean policing across North Shropshire would be trying to obtain resources from the same pot as police operating in Stoke-on-Trent, Wolverhampton, and Birmingham.

There are details emerging relating to minimum response times for the most serious calls, with these being responded to in 15 minutes in urban areas, and 20 minutes in rural areas. My concern with this is two-fold. Firstly, will forces see this as a target and start to pick and choose which calls to respond to based on where the emergencies are located, and if they don’t meet these targets what are the repercussions? Secondly, I’m not entirely sure that a 20-minute response is even possible in our more remote locations, even some of our less remote areas across England and Wales. This is before you throw in geographic challenges of some rural areas, including narrow lanes, winding hill routes, and sparse communities.

This transition will take time and money, the latter of which is often lacking in force areas, particularly those with a large rural remit. It’s not yet clear how this transition will be funded, but I distinctly hope it will not be pulled from the funding settlements police forces receive from Central Government, nor any of the other funding pots directed to things like Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee implementation.

Despite this, I do hope that the reduction of police forces will eventually reduce the bureaucracy and top-heavy staffing across forces. Moreso, I hope that these reforms will address the issue of inconsistent crime recording and explore the possibility of all forces using the same software to handle crime recording, intelligence, and investigation, rather than the multiple systems used now. Furthermore, could there be the possibility of some way of call handlers being able to consistently tag a rural crime to make things easier for the Rural Crime Teams to identify those that need to be followed up.

Lastly, how will 12 large regional forces ensure accountability to local communities, and how can they ensure that confidence in the police is improved? Will the direct accountability of Chief Constables to the Home Secretary create a risk averse environment and a potential concern around the principles of operational independence? Will these reforms make it harder for local residents to hold a regional ‘mega-force’ to account or to see accountability in action at the local level? This becomes harder when those local communities are hard-to-reach and located outside urban areas where many, if not all, police are based. Will regional forces lead to more crime detection, better community relations, and improve community confidence particularly across rural areas of England and Wales? Will Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee principles be seen in rural and remote communities, or will this idea of a minimum level of service – and indeed policing by consent – be eroded by the planned reforms?

I certainly hope that the reforms do not forget our rural communities, as is so often the case. I for one will be scrutinising the details as they become available.