Police Leadership Commission Report

Jonathan Hinder Excerpts

Monday 6th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

I thank the hon. Member for welcoming the report. I agree with some of what he said. He is right that it is not the work of critics looking in from the outside. The evidence base was developed through nine months of forensic work, talking to police across all levels within the force, meaning that this is a very honest assessment of the realities in which we find ourselves.

As I said in my statement, police leadership has been a problem for some time. Inspections of police forces by His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services from 2023 to 2025 showed that not a single force had outstanding leadership. There are different leadership challenges across all our forces. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the public need to believe in the police and be confident in policing. The statistics on public confidence in policing have been worrying for some years now, and we must all look at them.

The hon. Gentleman made the usual point about officer numbers, and I will make the usual point back: as he knows, the Conservative party cut 20,000 police and then recruited 20,000 police, but then put 12,000 of them behind desks. We are taking them away from desks and putting them on the frontline. We are also investing in technology. For example, the £75 million that I put into PoliceAI will transform the bureaucracy on which our police officers have to spend lots of their time, so that they can focus on the frontline.

Overall, I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s nice comments on the leadership review. The review has been incredibly important, and it is important that we have cross-party agreement about the need to improve leadership in policing.

[Jonathan Hinder (Pendle and Clitheroe) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for her statement. I welcome the focus on police leadership, and look forward to reading the report in detail. I thank her for acknowledging that this Government are not the first to grapple with this issue. Those of us who have been around policing for a little while have seen lots of changes, whether police and crime commissioners, independent misconduct chairs, or the different entry routes that the Conservatives brought in and then went back on, and there is a real weariness about changes to these processes. Frontline officers want to know whether it will get easier to deliver on the priorities that they know the public have but that they do not really feel backed to deliver. Can she reassure the House that that will be at the centre—no matter what changes, well-intentioned though they might be, are made on the back of this report?

[Sarah Jones]

My hon. Friend is right. We have to be laser-focused on what will improve outcomes for the public and what will enable the police to do the job that we ask them to do. I do recommend that he reads the report—it is a very good read. At its heart, it says that we want our police to have sound judgment and common sense in their policing. We want them to be freed up to make the decisions that are commonsensical and the right thing to do. To do that, we have not only to strip away the bureaucracy and all the forms they have to fill in, but to ensure that they are trained to be the police officers we want them to be. How do we match that training with freeing up our police to get on and do the job that we all ask them to do in the first place?