New direction?

A commission co-chaired by Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert has spent nine months examining how policing selects, trains, promotes and supports its leaders. Its conclusion, delivered across 149 pages and 27 recommendations, is that the system is not fit for purpose at almost every level — and that fixing it will require money the service has not been given in years.

The Police Leadership Commission’s report, *Professionalism and performance: police leadership for the future*, was published on Monday following months of force visits, surveys, roundtables and a public call for evidence. Its authors describe it as the most comprehensive examination of police leadership in a generation. The verdict is blunt: leadership across the service is “not consistently of a high enough standard to provide confidence and trust” in what the public deserves.

Case for change

The report leans heavily on figures from the Independent Office for Police Conduct. Since 2018 the IOPC has received 107 referrals involving chief officers, leading to 78 investigations, 47 relating to chief constables or the equivalent rank, ten to deputy chief constables, and 21 to assistant chief constables.

Common themes across these cases include cronyism, nepotism, abuse of position for a sexual purpose, and corruption. Eight chief constables or former chief constables are currently under investigation or awaiting disciplinary proceedings, and one former chief constable was charged with misconduct in public office and fraud in November 2025.

Public confidence has fallen alongside this. Forty-nine per cent of people rated their local police as doing a good or excellent job in March 2025, down from 62 per cent a decade earlier, and the report cites polling suggesting the public trusts senior leaders less than it trusts frontline officers.

The Commission returns repeatedly to a comparison offered by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner: fifteen years after Sandhurst, an army colonel leading 1,500 people will have completed 72 weeks of leadership development. A chief superintendent with comparable career progression is likely to have had two or three weeks. Another stark finding is that central spending on leadership development currently amounts to just 0.02 per cent of total police funding, about £4 million a year.

Owning leadership

The report’s central structural proposal is a National Academy of Police Leadership, to sit within the new National Police Service as what the Commission calls a “system owner” for leadership — designing the promotions process, running the fast stream described below, hosting a senior workforce planning function, and eventually giving the academy its own dedicated building.

Underpinning much of this is a proposed professional digital passport: a single record of every officer’s training, qualifications, conduct and performance, built from mandatory annual performance reviews. The NPS would hold this as a national database, and the Commission wants it to form the foundation for a licence to practise, a recommendation that builds on a mechanism previously floated in the government’s police reform white paper, and one the Police Federation flagged concerns about in January over training capacity to support it.

The report also finds regular frontline officers know they are badly led, with “just 13 per cent of the constables and 17 per cent of the sergeants” agreeing they worked in a “well led and managed organisation”.

Talent pipeline

Several recommendations target how officers rise through the ranks. These include:

• A new senior constable rank, recognising that around three quarters of warranted officers are constables, with mentoring and tutoring responsibilities but no requirement to hold the rank before promotion to sergeant.
• Reform of promotion to sergeant and inspector, which the report says is currently broken: over three quarters of sergeants surveyed had acted up before substantive promotion, more than half for thirteen months or longer, and the existing exam is passed by only half of prospective sergeants and just over a third of prospective inspectors.
• A police leadership fast stream, aiming to recruit at least 400 people a year — roughly five per cent of annual constable joiners — with structured development over five to ten years toward superintendent rank. The Commission calls it the largest talent scheme ever introduced into policing.
• A targeted direct entry scheme bringing in proven leaders from adjacent professions such as security services and risk management, and more routine secondments to the NPS, modelled on the military’s use of staff colleges.

Senior appointments

At the top of the service, the report wants a central appointments panel for chief constable roles, after finding that vacancies attract fewer than three applicants on average and are frequently filled internally.

The panel would include external voices, including His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue, and would apply to any proposed extension of a chief constable’s term. All chief officers, including chief constables, would be expected to complete annual performance reviews, and the report suggests executive leaders should be supported by non-executive boards similar to the one recently established at the Metropolitan Police Service.

Reforming representation

The report devotes a full chapter to representation, and the figures are stark. Only 9 per cent of officers nationally identify as being from an ethnic minority background, falling to 4 per cent among the 258 chief officers in England and Wales. Ethnic minority officers leave the service through voluntary resignation at a rate of 43 per 1,000, compared with 30.4 per 1,000 for white officers. Survey data shows one in five black and minority ethnic respondents, and similar proportions of LGBTQ respondents, reported experiencing discrimination at work in the past year.

The testimony behind the numbers is pointed. One black female officer told the Commission that anonymous integrity complaints were made against her the moment her promotion was confirmed — complaints she says were fabricated, precisely because anonymity meant there would be no comeback for whoever made them.

Funding concerns

The report is explicit that none of this works without money. It calls for the government to restore central funding for leadership development in line with organisations such as the military and the NHS, and for a Home Office-led implementation group, working with the new NPS, to stop the recommendations stalling.

The Home Office has said it will consider the recommendations and publish a formal response this autumn. Given the report’s own diagnosis — that the last comparable underinvestment has left today’s leaders a fraction as prepared as their military counterparts — how much of that £4 million gap actually gets closed will be the clearest test of whether this becomes a blueprint for change or another report that gathers dust.

Six key recommendations

• A National Academy of Police Leadership (recommendation 24) — the proposed “system owner” for leadership across policing, sitting within the National Police Service.
• A professional digital passport and licence to practise (recommendation 10) — a national record of training, conduct and performance for every officer, held by the NPS.
• A police leadership fast stream (recommendation 12) — at least 400 recruits a year, fast-tracked toward superintendent over five to ten years.
• A new senior constable rank (recommendation 13) — recognising experience and leadership among the three quarters of officers who are constables.
• A central appointments panel for chief constables (recommendation 23) — responding to vacancies that currently attract fewer than three applicants on average.
• Restored central funding for leadership development (recommendation 26) — currently just 0.02 per cent of total police funding.