As this news report explains, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick is defending her organisation from an attempt by the London Mayor to try to merge it with the City of London Police Force and the BTP. As the report also comments this discussion ran in parallel with the Tory Manifesto promises (since kicked into the long grass) to merge the BTP with the MOD Police and the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. She argues that the complementarity between the City of London Police and the Metropolitan Police is valuable and sees no gain to be had from a merger between the two or with the BTP. Her comment that if things aren’t broken, they don’t need fixing is correct up to a point. I see not conflict between the Territorial Policing in the City of London along with their role focusing on business crime nationally, and the Territorial Policing of Greater London being operated by two seperate bodies. However as I wrote back in July 2011 in my second ever blog, the truth is that the three elements of the Met are at best a harsh compromise. The Territorial Policing and the Policing of the Royal Family, the Government and the Embassies and Consulates makes sense in geographical terms. However if the Royal Family and the Government were ever to move out of London and like a number of people I believe that Parliament should certainly do so, then that link would begin to break down. By the same token the link between the London Territorial Policing and Counter Terrorism does not really make much sense, except in the sense that many of the CT attacks are focused on Parliament and the Royal Family. However many are not and for me this would be the place to see a change. My experience in working with Sussex Police as an Independent Adviser means that on the rare occasions when there have been arrests by Special Branch in Sussex that have come into the public eye, that the police force locally appear to lose the ability to help explain to the community what is happening and why, as the Special Branch basis for communication seems to totally ignores the impact on local communities. Territorial Policing on the other hand relies extensively on support from local communities and on the ability to build relationships with them. Indeed the culture of ignoring local communities sometimes seems to spill out into the Territorial policing activity in London too, which is why in my own view, Counter Terrorism should be separated out from the Metropolitan Police.

This would then give the architect for Policing in the UK (Amber Rudd I presume) the challenge of what to do with the various national forces in terms of organisation. I have no knowledge of how they each operate outside of an interest in improving the way that Special Branch engage with communities and also improving the link between local communities and local Police forces with BTP. BTP operates in every force area which has a railway line and this means that there are inevitably challenges when something occurs on the streets of a community and then spills over to the railway territory and vice versa. I know that there are already regional policing structures for shared services across the UK and wonder if they would be a useful model for aspects of the BTP and the Nuclear Police service to operate in. This would make huge sense if the areas loosely coincided with the geography of rail franchises. Maybe also the Counter Terrorist structures too. At least that approach would make it easier for such national organisations to retain some economies of scale and also become closer in organisational terms to their colleagues and to the communities they are responsible for policing.