Another policy flop from Restore Britain

Restore Britain has published a new policy on policing. No doubt, nobody is interested in my opinion on it because I criticise everything Restore Britain does and I seldom, if ever, have anything good to say about what they do. While many suspect I have ulterior motives for that (I really don’t), it’s mainly because their work simply doesn’t live up to the standard I want to see. They have considerable resources, yet they continue to produce low effort garbage.

My first impression is that it's mostly padding. Henry Bolton's intro is very Boomerish (predictable hackneyed Peelian principles shtick), and there's a lot of Danny Kruger-esque deckchair shuffling that tails off into ChaptGPT filler and appendix padding to give the impression that it's detailed and comprehensive - which is their usual tactic. They equate length with quality. If it does make a point, you have to hunt for it. It's badly written slop.

First off, the paper makes no reference to the 2026 Home Office policing White Paper. It could have looked at some of the proposals in play, arguing their pros and cons. The Home Office report actually identifies many of the problems outlined by the Restore paper. It says:

“there is evidence that the police have been prevented from focusing on the issues that matter to the public by excessive bureaucracy and outdated laws. Rules around crime and incident recording and criminal justice paperwork have become an increasing burden. The police have also found themselves being sucked into policing online spaces using outdated legislation. Laws written to deal with public disorder on the street are now being applied to deal with online disputes, often involving offensive language. The public have been left wondering whether the police have drifted too far from their core mission.

The remedies the Home Office proposes, though, are little more than sticking plasters. Restore should point out what they would do instead. Instead, they come at this in a “day zero” vacuum, as though they’re the only players in the field. As it happens, this is an easy mistake to make and I’ve made it myself in other works, pushing reforms that are already in the pipeline. Good policy should address the subject as they are likely to find it on obtaining power - and that requires an in-depth look at the status quo rather than supposition.

The core issue with the police is that they face an impossible task recruiting good people, and an even harder time of it retaining them. The police force is only as good as its people. Garbage in, garbage out. It is from that first base that any analysis should be done.

What we've seen over the decades is an accelerating trend of amalgamation and centralisation, turning police into glorified admin clerks, taxi drivers (covering massive beats) and social workers who have to balance that with being first responder paramedics and all points between - leaving the police overstretched, demoralised, and broken. We've seen a complete retreat from community policing, while the command level is too busy trying to appease the demands politicians, activists, and zealous HR agendas.

As such, policing is not the attractive and rewarding career that it should be, where officers can take pride in their work. What that leaves you with is a force full of young, inexperienced, improperly supervised children, who will end up making a bad situation worse - and they’re not much better than PCSOs.

While the word retention appears in the Restore paper eight times, it doesn’t really say anything about it, and says even less about pay or career progression. The real question for policy makers is how we get good, diligent, intelligent and brave people to join (and stay) in the police force. The paper says “Detective career pathways will be strengthened”. It does not say how. There is much to be said about promotion incentives, and incentives to satay on the front line rather than flying a desk for more pay.

Where Restore seeks to address the issue of community policing, it says “Foot patrols and neighbourhood beat officers will be reasserted. Neighbourhood officers will be assigned stable areas and expected to build offender knowledge, community knowledge, intelligence awareness, location awareness, and local confidence”. While this is the accepted wisdom, it doesn’t happen in practice because everything is geared around centralised police headquarters, and operational demands rapidly see officers redeployed elsewhere at a moment’s notice to locations over an hour away by car.

As such, it calls for a reversal of the centralisations of the last thirty years, but there we bump into the limitation of this aspiration. The reason is was done in the first place is because Britain is flat broke - at a time when crime is evolving at lightning pace, further complicated by the stresses of mass immigration, thus this position, partly informed by nostalgia, needs an injection of realism. It’s al very well saying we must re-open police facilities, but that then leads to a lot of duplication and redundancy.

If pressed to say what’s good about this policy, the back office deckchair shuffling is in the right ballpark (no worse than anyone else’s efforts), but it amounts to another top-down reorganisation without addressing the operational challenges that causes good police to quit. While Henry Bolton is reputed to have valid expertise in other areas, this is not his wheelhouse.

The way to approach this is to consult with mid-ranking coppers and take the time to understand the barriers they have to navigate, and give them the tools they need to do the job - and the backing to do it well. Home Office statistics show a record number of officers are working in professional standards departments. There are more police staff tasked with looking into the suspected misconduct of colleagues than monitoring repeat offenders in the general population. That, more than anything, tells you why crime is out of control.

Ultimately, this policy is marked by its Ukippy boomerish tinge, similar to what you'd hear from any pub bore who bangs on about how smart and tidy the British bobby used to be, but it doesn't get near the question of how you properly police a low trust country on a civil conflict trajectory, having to deal with sectarian disputes and inter-ethnic troubles. A lot of what we see here is misty-eyed nostalgia when the police were never as good as they were made out.

But what must also be addressed is that the nature of crime has changed beyond all recognition, and the idea of the plod on the street as the sole guardian of public order is no longer a realistic paradigm, especially as so much crime has cross-border elements. Had Restore Britain conducted a proper rape gang inquiry, they’d have looked much closer at the internationalised crime syndicates behind it which would have informed a lot about their policing policy.

The Restore policy recommends that “Regional Organised Crime Units will remain regional police-owned capabilities, and will bridge local forces, NCIS and the NCA” but this is a major part of the problem, with fragmentation of effort, the inability to co-ordinate across police borders, and confusion about jurisdiction and diffusion of responsibility and accountability.

We already have multi-tier police forces - NCA, Fraud, etc. At present they are not good and there’s a fatal fragmentation of effort. The Home Office white paper even acknowledges this.

Criminals move at pace, using the latest technologies and operating with ease across local and international borders. To deal with this requires national action, and yet our fragmented policing structure makes it hard to act in a coordinated way. The system relies on voluntary collaboration, part time national leadership (via local chiefs with national portfolios) and decision making requiring agreement between 86 decision-makers (Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) and Chief Constables). At the national level there are several organisations with overlapping remits, none of whom have any real power to drive collaboration between forces.

We should acknowledge that we need a properly-funded and equipped national police agency - like the FBI - with a clear definition of powers and jurisdiction, leaving local policing (public order, street crime, etc) to local police forces, which need to be smaller and more accountable.

My own view is that policing is just one part of the jigsaw puzzle. We're not going to fix crime without also looking at the courts, re-opening the hundred of magistrates courts that were closed by the Tories, and then beefing up local authority enforcement - from planning and housing inspectors to EHOs, which are the best crime surveillance tool we have. As such, an overhaul of local government is every bit as important as fixing the police. It's going to require a full manifesto of joined-up policy, and on the basis of what we've seen from Restore Britain, they won't get anywhere close to the standard we need to see.

On the matter of politicisation, the Restore paper places too much emphasis on this. The paper speaks to present-day gripes about policing, when the decline of the police (not that they were ever that good) is part of a forty year trend, that has to be meticulously examined. The worst of the politicisation can be addressed through updated public order laws, and better leadership. The rot usually starts at the top. Once you change the promotion incentives, you very rapidly change the culture of an organisation.

The worst aspect of Restore’s paper is how badly written it is. It could have said more at half the length. It’s unlikely that anyone will read it, not least since Restore supporters have a seizure if confronted with a six paragraph tweet. While there are some measures worth considering, it’s buried deep inside pompous verbiage.

More to the point, it wouldn’t even matter if this paper was good. Restore Britain as a party took on board the point that it’s a good idea to have policy, but don’t understand the utility of it. They will publish it to their website where it will gather dust, not even read or digested by their own comms people, and the main account will continue to churn out slopulist mantras, never referencing (and often contradicting) their own policies. Ultimately, if you don’t know how to use policy or what it’s actually for, there is no point in producing it. If this is all Restore can be bothered with, they may as well not.