A government-backed inquiry into all 43 police forces in England and Wales has found that leadership across the service is riddled with nepotism and bias, that the public receives markedly unequal policing depending on geography, and that senior officers are insufficiently focused on cutting crime, according to The Guardian.

The findings come from the Police Leadership Commission, a six-month review launched by the College of Policing with Home Office support and referenced in the government's January 2026 policing white paper, From local to national: a new model for policing. The commission was co-chaired by former Home Secretary David Blunkett and Nick Herbert — Lord Herbert of South Downs, chair of the College of Policing and a former Policing Minister. Blunkett told the Guardian that some of the findings were "staggeringly" poor. Herbert said some forces "have lost focus on cutting crime."

What the Report Found

The headline diagnosis is systemic. The commission identified deep concerns about the consistency, capability, and culture of leadership across the police service — not isolated failures, but structural ones baked into how forces recruit and promote.

Talent identification and promotion decisions, the report found, are shaped "in the image of the leaders who are responsible for them at a local level." In practice, that means officers advance because of who they know, not what they can do. The result is a self-replicating leadership class that crowds out talent and embeds the same cultural blind spots generation after generation.

The numbers are stark. Only 13% of constables and 17% of sergeants agreed they worked in a well-led and managed organisation — a floor-level confidence figure that cuts across rank, region, and force type. Since 2018, 78 investigations have been opened into officers at assistant chief constable level and above. Eight chief constables or former chief constables are either under investigation or awaiting disciplinary proceedings at the time of publication. The Independent Office for Police Conduct, which handles the most serious cases, reported that recurring themes in those investigations include cronyism, nepotism, abuse of position for a sexual purpose, and corruption.

One case serves as a concrete illustration of the culture the commission is trying to dismantle. Former Northamptonshire Chief Constable Nick Adderley was dismissed after being found to have fabricated his CV and has since been charged with fraud and misconduct in public office.

The report also flags what it calls a "postcode lottery" — the quality of policing a resident receives varies substantially depending on which force area they live in. That variation, the commission argues, flows directly from inconsistent leadership quality rather than from differences in resource allocation or local demand.

The 27 Recommendations

The commission makes 27 recommendations. The centrepiece is a new national academy of police leadership, intended to create a common developmental infrastructure that currently does not exist. Alongside that, the report calls for a fast-stream programme to identify and accelerate future leaders, and a significant increase in funding for leadership training.

The logic is straightforward: if promotion is currently driven by local patronage networks, a national pipeline with standardised assessment criteria would, in theory, break that circuit. Whether forces and Police and Crime Commissioners with established local autonomy will accept a centralised talent function is a live question. The white paper's framing — a shift toward a more nationally coherent policing model — provides some political headroom, but implementation will require sustained pressure from both the Home Office and the College of Policing.

The breadth of the commission's findings makes the recommendations hard to dismiss as incremental tinkering. A 13% confidence rating among constables is not a marginal dissatisfaction score — it is a near-total breakdown of institutional trust in leadership from the bottom of the rank structure. Seventy-eight investigations into senior officers in eight years, with eight chief constables currently facing proceedings, is not a rogue-individual problem. It is a governance problem.

The fact that this review was formally embedded in a government white paper matters too. Previous inquiries into police culture — from the aftermath of Hillsborough to the post-Macpherson era — produced recommendations that forces absorbed selectively and at their own pace. The commission's anchoring within a live policy programme creates at least a nominal accountability mechanism that earlier reviews lacked.

What happens next depends heavily on whether the Home Office is prepared to use the leverage it now has. The recommendations are on the record. The data is in the public domain. The harder question is enforcement.