The Public Accounts Committee recently painted a concerning picture of policing in England and Wales. Forces are drawing down reserves, spending a greater proportion of revenue on financing debt, and operating under an outdated funding formula. Into this fragile landscape comes the new Policing White Paper. It promises a radical structural overhaul, including a new National Police Service and a plan to hire 13,000 additional Neighbourhood Police Officers. This plan relies heavily on projected but unmapped efficiency savings from technology adoption and structural reform. Joel Hoskins and Dr Bart van Ark outline research from The Productivity Institute at The University of Manchester and make recommendations on how government can best enact the plans laid out in its new White Paper.

• The new Policing White Paper commits to a wide range of reforms and improvements to policing. Delivery is reliant on enormous predicted -but unmapped and unproven- cashable savings (£350m from procurement reform) and capacity gains (6 million hours freed up by AI alone).
• Research from The Productivity Institute at The University of Manchester warns that technology only delivers productivity gains when it solves the right bottlenecks — a condition the White Paper cannot currently guarantee.
• A four-point roadmap is identified to strengthen the foundations that the White Paper needs to succeed.

Overhaul and reform

Our submission to the Public Accounts Committee, drawing on The Productivity Institute’s research into police productivity and public sector innovation, warns that the government’s plans must account for two economic realities:

First, technology and reform only improve productivity if they genuinely resolve bottlenecks in the delivery chain. If applied elsewhere, they may simply add cost. For example, consider a police force where the lack of capacity to process seized mobile phones and laptops is a constraint. Adding hundreds of neighbourhood officers without expanding the ability to process these additional devices will not improve public safety. In fact, it may degrade it — more officers mean more arrests and more devices feeding into the same bottleneck, creating longer queues for victims and suspects.

Second, technology rarely delivers immediate gains. Forces must divert time and money into retraining staff, integrating new systems with legacy infrastructure, and resolving the inevitable issues that follow any major change in equipment or software Only once those costs are absorbed does performance begin to recover and eventually improve. Economists call this pattern the “Productivity J-Curve”, because overall productivity is at first negatively affected by the new technology, until enough complementary assets are deployed to make the technology work as intended. For a service already operating on strained budgets and depleted reserves, that dip is not a minor inconvenience. It is a period of serious vulnerability to premature budget cuts that the White Paper currently makes no provision for.

Recommendation 1: Collect Quarterly Bottleneck Reports

The proposed Police Performance Framework may promise greater accountability, but accountability is only meaningful if underperformance can be accurately diagnosed. The Public Accounts Committee warns that the Home Office currently lacks the data to do this.

Part of the problem lies in the limits of what data are being collected. A decline in output metrics like arrest rates can show that a force is struggling but provide limited insight as to why.

To resolve this, the Home Office should mandate quarterly Bottleneck Reports from Deputy Chief Constables. These concise statements would identify the specific operational constraints that local leadership judge to be most detrimental. Whether the primary blockage lies in Crown Prosecution Service delays or legacy IT failures, identifying these bottlenecks provides the context missing from raw quantitative data. This would allow the Government to effectively target its interventions rather than applying generic solutions to specific local problems.

Recommendation 2: Systematically Collect Data on Internal Capabilities

Technology does not drive productivity on its own. What matters is whether a force actually knows how to identify the right problems, choose the right solutions, and embed them in everyday practice. The skills that an organisation uses to do this also determine whether a force can successfully navigate the J-Curve or simply get stuck with the costs without ever reaping the benefits. Our recent research which reviewed the academic literature on innovation and public sector management, identified twelve foundational capabilities that determine whether an organisation can make this transition successfully – five that a single leadership team can build directly, and seven that require collective action across the sector as a whole.

The White Paper’s National Workforce Strategy will still leave the Home Office without visibility on which forces possess these capabilities. It should therefore systematically audit forces against this framework. Additionally, the Home Office should establish a confidential reporting channel for managers to flag where progress is impeded by cultural or structural weaknesses. To prevent gaming, this data must not be used for operational or HR decisions. It should serve exclusively to map capability gaps.

Recommendation 3: Keep Innovation Separate from Operations

The government proposes to merge the College of Policing’s strategic services into a new National Police Service alongside the National Crime Agency’s operational services. This is a serious mistake.

Innovation culture and operational police culture can pull in opposite directions. Effective knowledge creation requires tolerance for failure, flat hierarchies, and rigorous experimentation. These are precisely the qualities that high-stakes and high-pressure operational environments squeeze out. Fold the College into a national operational force and its knowledge-building function will likely be the first casualty when a crisis hits — not necessarily because of malice or managerial incompetence, but because of the ordinary logic of institutional prioritisation.

The government must therefore maintain innovation support as a structurally distinct function with its own governance, accountability structures, and a protected budget well above the 0.2 per cent currently allocated to the College of Policing.

Recommendation 4: Incentivising the Transition

The funding formula review offers an opportunity to redesign the incentives that drive police leadership. The new formula must align financial rewards with the behaviours required for productivity growth.

The Home Office should reward management teams that successfully increase organisational capability or provide insightful Bottleneck Reports. Forces that feel penalised for transparency will simply conceal problems rather than surface them, undermining the diagnostic value of the framework entirely. Shifting incentives toward capability building would therefore encourage the transparency and long-term thinking the Committee found lacking.

Navigating towards safer streets

The government’s Safer Streets mission is ambitious, and the White Paper provides many of the necessary architectural changes needed to achieve it. However, the evidence provided by the Public Accounts Committee shows that the foundations for this transition are currently weak.

The Home Office currently lacks the data, capability insight, and funding mechanisms to guarantee success. Without addressing these foundations, the projected efficiencies may not materialise and the government’s plans could be dangerously exposed.