Why the coalition’s police reforms will fail

The Home Office has radical plans, but they won’t come to much, says Alasdair Palmer. Less money and fewer paid officers will inevitably mean more crime

Last month when Theresa May, the Home Secretary, launched the coalition’s consultation document on the police, ‘reconnecting police with the people’, she said it would ‘herald the most radical reform of policing in this country for 50 years’.

Unusually for a politician, that was probably an understatement. If the reforms achieve what they are intended to, the nature of the police will be transformed in a way that has no precedent since a national police service was first set up over 150 years ago: control over policing will move from Whitehall and from local authorities to local citizens, reversing a century-long process of centralisation and professionalisation which has made the cops ever more remote from the rest of us.

The idea is a good one and badly needed.