Police Leadership Commission Report

Matt Vickers Excerpts

Monday 6th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Matt Vickers (Stockton West) (Con)]

I thank the Minister for advance sight of her statement and pay tribute to the noble Lords Herbert and Blunkett for producing such a timely and thoughtful report.

The last year has done real damage to public confidence in police leadership. Of course, the report rightly recognises that there are many outstanding officers leading forces across the country, but the headlines that people remember tell a different story. From the shameful scenes surrounding the Maccabi Tel Aviv match to the heartbreaking murder of Henry Nowak, alongside too many other incidents, the public have been left asking a simple question: who is in charge?

Leadership is not about managing decline or issuing guidance; it is about setting a culture and making it unmistakeably clear that the first duty of every police officer is to protect the public and uphold the law without fear, without favour and without distraction. The report gets to the heart of that when it says that police leaders must refuse to take sides and remain focused entirely on preventing crime, catching criminals and bringing offenders to justice. Culture starts at the top. If we want frontline policing to change, leadership must change first.

What struck me most about the report was not simply its recommendations but the evidence behind them. This is not the work of critics looking in from the outside; it reflects what police officers themselves are saying. As the authors acknowledged in their letter to stakeholders, much of the evidence made for uncomfortable reading. Perhaps the most alarming finding is that only 13% of constables and just 17% of sergeants surveyed believed that they worked in a well-led and well-managed organisation. Think about that: more than four in five officers who put themselves in harm’s way to keep our streets safe do not believe that they work in a well-led organisation. If that does not ring alarm bells, I do not know what will.

Time does not permit me to go through all 27 recommendations, but there is much that deserves support. In particular, I welcome the emphasis on merit. Our best officers should be recognised, developed and promoted because they are the best, not because they have ticked the right boxes. But we also have to be honest about the context. The report sits alongside a programme of wider police reform announced by the Government, although reports suggest that the incoming Prime Minister is already getting cold feet about those reforms. That matters, because many of the recommendations assume larger forces and more centralised models. If those reforms do not happen, Ministers need to explain how the recommendations will work in practice rather than simply in principle.

There is another contradiction that cannot be ignored. If we want stronger leadership, we need to give police leaders the tools they need to succeed. That means enough officers on the streets and the technology to help them do their jobs effectively. Instead, officer numbers have fallen by about 1,300 across the country. At the same time, in London, the Labour mayor chose to pick a public fight with his own commissioner over the use of technology, with the commissioner making it clear that the mayor’s decision would leave the force able to achieve less. How can we demand better leadership while cutting officer numbers and denying forces the technology they say they need?

There is much in the report that hon. Members on both sides of the House can support. Better leadership is not a partisan cause—it is a public necessity—but if we are serious about restoring confidence in policing, we cannot stop at identifying what police leaders should do differently; we also have to stop making political decisions that make their jobs harder. The public deserve better, our best officers deserve better, and the future of policing depends on us getting both police leadership and political leadership correct.

[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.