From local to national: Why the UK’s policing reform marks an operational turning point
The UK Home Office whitepaper From Local to National: A New Model for Policing sets out what it describes as the most significant modernisation of policing in nearly 200 years.
It reflects a clear reality: today’s crime environment has outpaced the structures policing has relied on for decades.
For senior public safety leaders, the importance of this paper is not just its proposed organisational changes. It’s the operational worldview beneath them: how the UK is defining modern policing outcomes, and what it believes must be true at system level for policing to succeed.
Crime has changed: The system must follow
The whitepaper recognises that crime is now shaped by digital behaviours, digital evidence and digital opportunity.
It states that 90% of crime has a digital element and that fraud alone makes up a large proportion of recorded crime.
It also notes the operational consequences of this shift: cases are increasingly complex, taking longer to investigate, and policing is struggling to keep pace with rapid technological change.
This is not abstract policy language. It is an operational diagnosis: modern policing depends on how well organisations can gather, analyse share and act on information. That’s at speed, at scale and with clear accountability.
From an operational perspective, as technology continues to advance, including the use of AI to drive efficiency and scale, it will inevitably be leveraged – often asymmetrical – by those committing crime as well as those seeking to prevent it. That reality makes it essential that policing agencies are able to leverage technology, including AI, in ways that are effective, governed and defensible.
Fragmentation is now an operational risk
One of the strongest messages in the whitepaper is that fragmentation – across forces, systems, data and governance – has become a material constraint on performance and surfacing intelligence.
Policing in England and Wales is still organised around a force model last substantively reformed in the 1960s. That structure, largely unchanged for around 60 years, was not designed for today’s scale, complexity or digital nature of crime, particularly when it comes to specialist capability and transnational, serious and organised crime (TSOC) investigations.
Operating dozens of police forces with disconnected technologies and inconsistent processes makes it harder to:
- share intelligence at pace
- manage complex, multi-agency investigations
- maintain consistent evidentiary standards
- respond effectively to national and transnational threats
Crucially for operational leaders, the paper is direct about the impact of fragmented and poorly integrated technology environments. Information is often held across multiple systems that do not easily integrate, making it harder to share data, build intelligence and get the right information into the right hands at the right time.
The proposed move towards fewer forces and a National Police Service is not positioned as centralisation for its own sake. It is framed as a way to reduce duplication, strengthen specialist capability, and allow local policing to focus on communities while national functions absorb national complexity.
Local accountability and neighbourhood policing remain central to the model, while national capability is concentrated where scale, coordination and specialist experience matter most.
In operational terms, this is about removing friction from the system. Not adding hierarchy.
National reform is framed as enablement, not control
The whitepaper proposes a National Police Service to strengthen the national tier of policing and bring together capabilities that are currently fragmented across multiple organisations.
It sets out a clear role for the national layer: to provide strategic leadership, set consistent standards, enable shared services and strengthen specialist capabilities including forensics, intelligence and investigating serious and organised crime.
Crucially, the paper positions this reform as a way to reduce burden on local forces, allowing them to focus on neighbourhood policing and community safety, while national policing strengthens system-wide capabilities.
The operational intent is clear: create a national layer that enables consistency, capability and scale, while freeing local policing to deliver local outcomes.
Platforms are the quiet centre of gravity
Throughout the whitepaper platforms, shared services, and nationally enabled technology are emphasised – not a proliferation of new systems.
This reflects a growing understanding across public safety that point solutions create as many problems as they solve. They fragment data, complicate governance, and shift the integration burden onto frontline teams.
Platforms matter because they:
- connect evidence, intelligence and workflows end-to-end
- enforce consistent standards without manual oversight
- scale nationally while supporting local delivery
- strengthen defensibility, auditability and trust
This shift to platform-based capability is arguably the most important – and least visible – element of the reform agenda.
Data integration and standards are treated as foundational infrastructure
The paper’s strongest operational thread is its focus on data, technology and the conditions required for intelligence-led policing.
It describes current infrastructure as fragmented, with ageing systems, manual processes and poor data quality slowing investigations and diverting time from frontline duties.
It also makes the case for integration: at local level, officers need to access what they need without logging into multiple systems; and nationally, key data needs to be shared and used widely.
To address this, it outlines measures including a National Data Integration and Exploitation Service to support local procurement and procure national solutions for data integration, alongside a move toward mandated national data standards to reduce today’s “patchwork quilt” of systems, standards and processes.
This matters because it signals a shift away from treating technology as add-ons, and toward treating data integration, standards and shared capability as core policing infrastructure.
It also reflects that secure data sharing across systems and jurisdictions depends on common data standards, clear governance and interoperability technology foundations – the very enabler the whitepaper proposes.
A system built to stand up to scrutiny
Alongside capability, the whitepaper is explicit about consistency, standards and confidence: restoring stronger national expectations and accountability for performance, and strengthening the ability to intervene when performance falls short.
For public safety leaders, this aligns with a reality that never goes away: outcomes must be defensible – operationally, legally and publicly.
Bdna’s take: Reform will succeed or fail at the operational layer
The whitepaper sets a strategic direction. The hard part – and the part that determines success – is operational delivery.
Reform of this scale succeeds or fails based on whether, day to day:
- investigators can find the right information quickly and easily
- intelligence can be shared safely across boundaries
- evidence handling is consistent and defensible
- technology reduces friction rather than adding it
- national standards translate into real frontline enablement
This is where bdna’s Public Safety Platform is directly aligned with the whitepaper’s direction of travel. It is designed to operationalise secure data sharing across systems and jurisdictions, built on common data frameworks, clear governance and intelligence embedded into the platform.
Our platform is built for environments where integrity, accountability and operational pace must coexist to connect records and workflows cross the forensic lifecycle, from incident to investigation through to court outcomes, with intelligence built into the model to provide actionable insights.
And critically, it is designed around the same system principles the whitepaper is now pushing toward:
- consistency
- interoperability
- auditability
- and scalable capability.
As the UK repositions its local and national policing, the opportunity exists to reduce fragmentation, strengthen national capability, and create the conditions for intelligence-led policing at scale.
The whitepaper is a signal that the future of policing will be shaped not only by structure, but by whether the system underneath it can connect people, evidence and intelligence reliably, securely and defensibly.
Through our Public Safety Platform, bdna is committed to supporting policing and public safety agencies as this reform moves from policy intent to operational outcomes.
That is the operational promise at the heart of this reform.
Read the full UK Home Office White Paper, From Local to National: A New Model for Policing, here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/from-local-to-national-a-new-model-for-policing
