Police Leadership Commission Report

Lord Davies of Gower Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2026 Lords Chamber

To uphold these traditions while meeting the demands of modern crimefighting, we must ensure that our police forces are fair, open and meritocratic workplaces that are able to meet the high standards we rightly expect of those entrusted with keeping their fellow citizens safe and driven forward by strong, effective leadership at all levels. Reform on the scale required is no easy task, but working in partnership with policing and aided by the findings of this important report, I believe that we can and will succeed in making our police service stronger and our society safer. I commend this Statement to the House”.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing this Statement to the House today, and I am grateful for the opportunity to ask questions on it. Failures of police leadership are all too evident. Police leadership failed when forces overlooked, ignored and actively downplayed the scale of the grooming gangs. Police officers and police leaders were too afraid of being called out for being racist, and, as such, they left vulnerable young girls to suffer while the perpetrators got away scot free. Police leadership failed when officers manipulated evidence to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the football match in Birmingham over fears of “inflaming community tensions”. Police leadership is failing when we have officers spending more time trawling through social media posts than investigating and stopping burglary and shoplifting. When the policing of tweets and so-called diversity, equality and inclusion take precedence over the prevention and investigation of crime, we know we have a serious problem.

In 1829, Sir Richard Mayne, the first commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, wrote:

“The primary object of an efficient police is the prevention of crime: the next that of detection and punishment of offenders if crime is committed. To these ends all the efforts by police must be directed. The protection of life and property, the preservation of public tranquillity, and the absence of crime will alone prove whether those efforts have been successful and whether the objects for which the police were appointed have been attained”.


Like all officers who joined Hendon Police College, I had to learn those words by memory, and they are just as relevant today as they were in 1829, so I welcome the statement in the report that:

“Police leaders should be resolute in refusing to take sides, or to be diverted from the course of focusing entirely on the prevention, detection and prosecution of crime”.


I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, that is not what is happening.

We might ask how we got here. Noble Lords might have different answers, but, for me, it is in large part because we took our eye off the ball. We allowed policing to focus, particularly after 2020, more on representation and identity politics than on promoting the best and most qualified people for the job. The report also acknowledges that nepotism has impacted progression at senior ranks, again challenging the notion that promotion should be based on merit alone. I must press the Minister to think seriously about these points. If the Government want to improve public trust in the police and restore robust but fair policing, we cannot have reforms that place greater emphasis on the identity of senior officers than on their experience and leadership qualities.

Fundamentally, good police leadership is not hard. It is about cutting crime and having your officers’ backs. Those on the ground need to know that they can take action they deem necessary and will not be hung out to dry by senior leadership when they do so. Officers need to be able to exercise their professional judgment and common sense, and not be second-guessed by endless policies and guidance. Police leaders must stop prioritising public perceptions over robust policing.

This all requires a significant cultural shift within police leadership. But to engineer that, we need to improve not just the quality but the amount of leadership training. The report highlights the striking disparity between military leadership training and the police equivalent. It points out that:

“15 years after leaving Sandhurst, a colonel in charge of 1,500 people will have undertaken 72 weeks of leadership development. By comparison, chief superintendents in the MPS”—


the Metropolitan Police Service—

“who have had comparable progression are likely to have had two or three weeks”.

The comparison with the military is particularly apt here, because British military leadership training is widely regarded as some of the best in the world—there is a reason why military officers from around the world flock to Sandhurst. I urge the Minister, when considering the work of this commission, to feed in best practice from our military academies into future police leadership training.

I also ask the Minister to think carefully about introducing new direct entry schemes. I can say from my own experience that I do not think they had a positive effect on senior leadership. The report acknowledges that the total cost of the previous direct entry superintendent programme, which ran from 2015 to 2021, was almost £10 million. Only 33 people graduated from that scheme, putting the cost per graduate at around £342,000. I do not think that can quite be considered a success. Bizarrely, though, after pointing out the cost and low numbers passing through the previous direct entry route, the report goes on to recommend the creation of new direct entry routes. This is a somewhat bizarre situation.

I wish to end with some simple questions to the Minister. The Government have this report, it is obvious to us all what is going wrong with police leadership, and it is not too difficult to figure out what needs to change, so how are the Government going to take forward these recommendations? What work is going on within the Home Office, right now, to implement leadership reforms, and when will be able to see the outcomes of the Government’s work?

If the Government are serious about restoring trust in policing and fulfilling the aims of the commission, they must take swift action to overhaul police leadership training. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the report from the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert, which rightly starts with an uncomfortable truth: leadership across policing is too inconsistent and, for decades, we have failed to invest in developing leaders for the world they now face.

We support clearer standards, stronger developments of all ranks, and more transparent senior appointments, but consistency must not become Whitehall control. Before creating a national police service and a national academy, the Government must explain how police chiefs will be protected from politicisation. A central appointments panel may help, but only if it insulates chief constables’ appointments from political influence and ensures a diverse candidate pool, including those with neighbourhood and safeguarding experience.

We urgently need clarity about what we expect policing to deliver in the 2030s. Too often the police are left to pick up responsibilities that properly belong to other agencies, because those agencies are underfunded and lack the capacity to respond. But the police cannot walk away; they have a duty to the public, even when the work falls outside their remit. This results in police being increasingly drawn into non-crime work, spending hours in hospitals awaiting mental health assessments or caring for vulnerable children, leaving forces overstretched and officers shuttled from one crisis to another.

Ethical leadership cannot be a values programme instead of the hard work that inquiries have already recommended. Delivering ethics requires legally enforceable vetting and misconduct standards across forces, a complete overhaul of the complaints investigations so that they do not drift for years, and transparent monitoring of disproportionality in discipline, including for BAME officers. The public will not judge us by how many workshops we run but by whether the Angiolini, Jay and inspectorate recommendations are finally implemented in full.

Around 80% of crime now has a digital element, yet policing is still largely analogue, with 43 forces running separate IT systems and an obsolete police national computer. Outdated, poorly connected systems with multiple entry points heighten cyber security risks, given the high value of police data on the dark web. A lack of national co-ordination and the scrapping of ring-fenced capital funding means that most technology spending is now used just to maintain existing outdated systems. What is needed is a unified cloud-based technology platform and common procurement to enable seamless information sharing and good practice across forces. This will require very significant investments in IT and AI but offers the prospect of rapid returns in improved outcomes and would finally allow policing to exploit the wealth of operational data already at its fingertips.

We need national training frameworks that prioritise digital investigation skills for every officer and proper professional pathways for cyber, data, digital and forensic specialists. But highly trained specialists are locked into the same nationally set pay scales as everyone else, and chiefs have virtually no flexibility to pay them more than an entry-level constable. That is almost unbelievable. Is it therefore surprising that these specialists are routinely poached by the private sector, after they have been trained by the police for many years, on salaries that are several multiples of their police pay? If we are serious about tackling AI-enabled fraud, deepfake child abuse imagery and complex online exploitation, we must introduce genuine pay flexibilities for shortage specialties and parity of esteem for police staff.

I am deeply concerned that we are proposing a national academy and a licence to practise when there has been no independent national audit of police training since 2012. Officers need high-quality, regular, properly accredited refresher training to keep themselves and the public safe. If the College of Policing is absorbed into a new police service, we must avoid the police marking their own homework by ensuring that appropriate standards are set and independently audited.

This report gives us an opportunity to transform how we choose and develop leaders. But those leaders will succeed only if we define the mission clearly, fix the broken funding and training systems, and give policing the technological tools and special staff it needs. I very much hope the Government are prepared to meet those challenges.