Police force bun-fight highlights failure to deliver genuine devolution: Yorkshire Post Letters

The skirmishing over English police forces continues. Align police territories with mayoral authority boundaries, says the PM (conveniently forgetting that vast areas of the country are not in mayoral authorities).

Put your finger in the air and come up with "the right number" of regional forces, says Sir Mark Rowley (a cost-driven mentality not concerned with rational geographic boundaries or with making police forces accountable to the public).

Keep the status quo, say rural leaders (for fear of losing out to urban areas and seeing all those top police leaders made redundant).

At its root, this dispute happens because England never implemented a sensible sub-national geography (i.e. regions).

All counties except Yorkshire are far too small, and even Yorkshire is chopped up into so many small bits, yet the counties have never quite let go of their grip and many of them remain in place despite the 2024 English Devolution Act, now stalled part-way in its attempt to remove the remaining two-tier county councils. Another half-implemented set of pointless changes.

We therefore find ourselves groping haphazardly towards yet another attempt at rationalising sub-national governance for England, focussing this time on police forces and boundaries.

The Civil Service has done its darndest over the decades to sabotage any attempt at weakening their central power - and perhaps they are right, perhaps England is just too small to justify any sub-national government at all - there might be much to be said in favour of having just one leadership, doing things properly and efficiently (and based somewhere central rather than in London).

Meanwhile political leaders in their repeated attempts at meaningful devolution have only ever looked to tactical advantage.

Nobody, but nobody, sat down and started from scratch working from sound first principles.

Had they done so, the traditional counties would have been kept as "brown sign" designations but all actual local government would have been delivered through proper regions with their own parliaments, not based at all on the lopsided county structures.

We wouldn't need MPs at Westminster as well as regional MPs.

Almost every aspect of the governance of England could be delivered through regional parliaments (North, Midlands, South-East, South-West: we don't need more than four). Including policing.

Imagine it - each region responsible for the entirety of its policing, education, NHS, social care. How simple and clear it all could be, every aspect of the running of our country based on the same territories!

The latest bun-fight over the number and boundaries of police forces is just another symptom of this core failure to start with a clean sheet of paper and some clear, unbiased thinking.

I scarcely care about the outcome of the latest police forces debate - it will be a limp compromise between vested interests rather than what's best for the country. Very much the English way.