The Home Office has published aWhite Paper titled ‘From Local to National: A New Model for Policing’, setting out major structural reforms to policing in England and Wales and creating a new National Police Service (NPS) that will take the lead on fraud, economic crime and cyber crime.
Under the plans, the current 43‑force structure will be reduced following an independent review reporting in summer 2026. Local policing will be delivered through Local Policing Areas within fewer, larger forces. Above this, a new NPS will bring together the National Crime Agency (NCA), Counter Terrorism Policing, Regional Organised Crime Units, the College of Policing, and national digital and commercial services. The NPS will set mandatory national standards, run shared services and lead the operational response to serious, cross‑border and technology enabled crime through new Regional Crime Hubs, including responsibility for fraud.
Fraud, economic crime and cyber will move into the NPS alongside the NCA, making the NPS the primary national agency for these crime types, with the specialist fraud role of the City of London Police to be reviewed in that context.
The White Paper also proposes a new Police Performance Framework and public dashboard from early 2026, with Local Policing Guarantees and national targets on response, call handling and victim‑facing measures. It also signals that the forthcoming Fraud Strategy will set out a cross‑sector approach involving law enforcement, government, regulators, industry and civil society. Alongside this, government plans to invest £115 million over three years in AI and automation, establish a Police.AI National Centre for AI in Policing (including an AI Lab and a public registry of police AI tools), and create a National Data Integration and Exploitation Service with mandated data standards and a single national decision maker for key datasets.
A new Crime Prevention Unit will develop integrated crime mapping, test prevention interventions and convene national partnerships with regulators and industry, with fraud and online enabled crime highlighted as priority areas for joint working.
For CCUK and members, these reforms point to fewer but more powerful interlocutors on fraud and cyber, a stronger national centre with regional hubs, and more structured expectations around data access, format and timeliness where communications data are relevant to serious and economic crime.
These reforms also underline a shift towards treating fraud and cyber as core performance issues, increasing pressure on policing and partner sectors to demonstrate measurable results on scams and digitally enabled crime, and creating both risks and opportunities as telecoms and IP based communications are drawn further into national fraud prevention and enforcement frameworks.