Abolishing police and crime commissioners now is putting the cart before the horse

In a surprise announcement last week, the government revealed it is going to abolish police and crime commissioners, the elected local politicians responsible for holding police forces to account, appointing (and sacking) chief constables and setting strategic direction and priorities for their forces across England and Wales. Instead, these powers will be exercised by mayors, where they exist – or will exist by 2028. In areas without mayors, police oversight will transfer to new policing boards, made up mainly of local authority representatives. 

The government says it is doing this because the PCC model has ‘failed’, citing perverse incentives around hiring chief constables and reduced accountability for policing. But there will be major complications in transferring these powers now while devolution arrangements are still uncertain, and it’s not clear how – or if – the new policing boards will be any improvement.

It is sensible to work towards mayors exercising PCC powers

Labour’s argument is that the public variously have little understanding of PCCs and their role, don’t have confidence in them and rarely know who they are – citing Home Office research that only 16% of people in areas with PCCs ¹³ 37 of England and Wales’s 43 police force areas have PCCs. 5 have mayors who exercise PCC powers (Greater London, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire and York and North Yorkshire, while the City of London Police is overseen by the City of London Corporation Common Council.  said they could name them. In her announcement yesterday, the policing minister Sarah Jones contrasted this with strategic authority areas where mayors exercise PCC powers, which she argued provides “greater collaboration, visible leadership and local innovation.” ¹⁴ House of Commons, Hansard, ‘Police Reform’, 13 November 2025, vol 775, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2025-11-13/debates/4F4435A9-95B2-4E22-BF5B-FB3459AA9BA1/a#  

Transferring PCC powers to mayors makes sense. Mayors unquestionably have greater name recognition with the public. They can also coordinate and align work across multiple policy areas. One of the perennial problems with the PCC model has been that the ‘crime’ part of their role gets too easily forgotten, partly because they have very limited power to respond to wider drivers of crime like housing, healthcare provision, and so on. Mayors have a higher profile, wider powers and more funding flexibility – especially in established mayoralties like Greater London and Greater Manchester – that can help them address some of these and build more effective partnerships. 

But not all areas have a mayor, and as IfG research has shown, in many cases mayoral boundaries don’t align with police forces. Nor is it clear what will happen in Wales, where there are currently no plans to introduce mayors or strategic authorities.

Police and strategic authority boundaries are a complicated tangle 

Five mayors are already exercising PCC powers. By 2028, when PCCs are due to be abolished, this is expected to have reached at least 13, covering 15 police force areas. ¹⁸ This figure includes all areas that have a mayor or are on the government’s devolution priority programme, and align with police force boundaries, including areas where the strategic authority will cover two forces.  But that will still leave most areas (27 police forces) without a mayor who can pick up these powers. 

In many cases, the likely ‘footprint’ for the mayoral strategic authority is clear and fairly uncontroversial, and maps neatly onto existing police force boundaries: Sussex, Essex, and Hampshire and the Solent, for example. But there are also many areas where this isn’t the case and the size and shape of the future authorities is still being negotiated. Thames Valley Police, for example, is likely to be split across two or three new strategic authorities. 

Even areas already covered by a mayor don’t necessarily line up with police force boundaries. Just one example is Durham Constabulary, which straddles both the North East Combined Authority and the Tees Valley Combined Authority.*

It is hard to argue that this leads to effective democratic accountability. Ultimately, the way to resolve this tangle is to align police force areas with strategic authority boundaries, once those are agreed. But it is not clear what abolishing PCCs is likely to achieve in the meantime.

This is the wrong time to transfer PCC powers

Where mayoral and policing boundaries don’t align or a strategic authority hasn’t yet been established, PCC powers will instead pass to new policing and boards, made up of upper-tier council leaders and appointed members with relevant expertise. Mayors will also sit on these boards, where relevant. Each board will have a policing and crime lead intended to provide visible oversight of policing, much like existing mayoral authorities have deputy mayors for policing and crime.

The government has insisted that “these boards will not be a return to the bureaucratic and invisible committee-based oversight of policing that existed before the establishment of PCCs.” ¹⁹ House of Commons, Hansard, ‘Police Reform’, 13 November 2025, vol 775, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2025-11-13/debates/4F4435A9-95B2-4E22-BF5B-FB3459AA9BA1/a#  But it’s not clear how they will be different. Police authorities, which provided oversight and strategic direction to forces before PCCs were created, were likewise made up of a combination of elected councillors and appointed experts. What’s more, the twin pressures of local government reorganisation and negotiating devolution arrangements are only likely to make it harder for local leaders to negotiate yet another new set of arrangements to provide effective scrutiny and direction for policing.

More fundamentally, there is little benefit to setting up these new policing boards now, when the ultimate intention is for all of England to be covered by a strategic authority. Dissolving PCCs’ offices and transferring PCC powers to policing boards in 2028, only to then transfer them again to elected mayors, hardly seems likely to provide good value for money or effective police oversight. Nor is it likely to satisfy Welsh demands for greater devolution of police powers. ²⁰ Paun A, Fright M and Allen B, The Independent Commission on the Future of Wales, Institute for Government, 24 January 2024, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/independent-commission-wales   

The government would have been better off keeping PCCs in place until devolution arrangements have been agreed. They could then transfer their powers to the new strategic authorities in England and agree an appropriate arrangement with the Welsh government.

*An earlier version of this piece incorrectly said that West of England Combined Authority included areas policed by Avon and Somerset Police as well as Gloucestershire Constabulary. South Gloucestershire, within the West of England Combined Authority, is in fact policed by Avon and Somerset Police. Our apologies for the error.