The government has this week announced its intention to deliver the most ambitious reforms to policing in decades with the creation of a National Police Service (NPS). While there are some clear potential benefits for the fight against dirty money and economic crime more broadly, there are also some real risks that need to be carefully navigated.
With the global money laundering watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), coming to review the UK next year, a global Summit being held in London in June this year on Illicit Finance, and a commitment to ramp up anti-corruption enforcement in the government’s Anti-Corruption Strategy, it is crucial the UK gets this right.
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One of the key agencies that has been at the forefront of tackling dirty money, the National Crime Agency, will be merged into the new NPS.
The NCA currently hosts a range of units that are absolutely vital for fighting economic crime, dirty money and corruption, including:
- the National Economic Crime Centre (a multi-agency centre designed to “optimise the collective impact” on economic crime),
- the UK’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) (which has national responsibility for receiving, analysing and disseminating intelligence submitted through the Suspicious Activity Reports to law enforcement in the UK and overseas),
- the Combatting Kleptocracy Cell (which became prominent after Russian’s full-invasion of Ukraine to investigate corrupt elites, high-level money laundering, and sanctions evasion),
- the International Corruption Unit (the aid-funded cell that focuses on international bribery, corruption and related money-laundering offences connected to the UK),
- the International Anti-Corruption Coordination Centre (also aid-funded, and which plays a crucial role in helping countries from the Global South get stolen assets back),
- the Proceeds of Crime Centre (which provides training, accreditation and monitoring of Financial Investigators), and
- the National Fraud Squad (jointly led by the NCA and the City of London Police and focused on tackling high-end fraud).
So what could the benefits of merging it into a NPS be?
1. Finally tackling acute recruitment and retention issues
As our report in 2024 made clear, the NCA has had long-standing issues with recruitment and retention related to structural pay issues. NCA staff get paid significantly less than the Police – a gap that has grown over the last decade – making it hard to attract and crucially retain top talent. It has faced high turnover rates and ‘acute difficulties’ in recruiting and retaining specialist and technical roles. We have seen this directly in some of the key economic crime units, with turnover of over 20% in the UKFIU unit looking at the highest priority suspicious activity reports.
These issues aren’t unique to the NCA – the police also have recruitment issues – but they are more acute at the NCA where 7.5% of staff want to leave ‘as soon as possible’ and 14% in the next 12 months, according to the latest Civil Service People’s Survey. Last June the NCA’s independent review body described it as “wholly unacceptable” that the NCA had failed to secure meaningful pay reform after 9 years of trying. In response, the government accepted that there should be a pay rise for NCA officers, but once again failed to provide any new funding to deliver it. The result was higher pay but a slow down in NCA recruitment.
The White Paper makes encouraging noises about having a workforce strategy for the police which will ensure “greater flexibility to recruit and retain” key skills. Ensuring the new NPS can recruit and retain key financial investigators, forensic accountants, and cyber specialists in crypto and AI enabled financial crime will be crucial.
But the creation of the NPS must not make the same mistake that the government made setting up the NCA – where it consistently underfunded a key national agency, and failed to provide sufficient resourcing to develop and retain a highly skilled workforce. And it should not repeat the failed experiment of a two-tier workforce – with officers on the one hand and non-officer staff on the other – that has caused such huge problems for the NCA.
More immediately, the NCA will not move into the new NPS until after the next election. That means that more urgent attention will need to be paid to the ongoing pay and recruitment issues at the NCA if we’re going to see it deliver on the effective economic crime and anti-corruption enforcement needed to tackle dirty money over the next 3-4 years.
2. A moment to look at the most effective structures for economic crime enforcement?
The White Paper is clear that the new NPS will have responsibility for fraud. What is not yet clear, and what the independent review that will follow must directly address, is how to ensure that fraud and other economic crime policing is protected in a force that also covers counter-terrorism and serious and organised crime.
It is well recognised that the ‘slower’ and less ‘noisy’ crimes like fraud, corruption and money laundering usually lose out in any police prioritisation when they are up against threats to, or loss of, human life.
Unless there are clear structures and ringfenced funding within the new NPS which protect this type of enforcement, this will continue to be a risk. So it is crucial that the forthcoming review looks specifically at how economic crime enforcement will be structured, resourced and protected within the NPS among other things on its agenda.
There have long been criticisms that economic crime enforcement is fragmented and split between too many agencies. So moves towards consolidation are a positive step. But working out how the new NPS will work with the wider economic crime enforcement landscape is key.
The White Paper has flagged that the review will look at how to protect the specialist skills at the City of London Police (COLP) – currently the lead force on fraud – and whether they should be subsumed into the NPS. If COLP is to retain any national functions it will be critical to have clear parameters for how these will work with the new national force, especially around the development and sharing of intelligence and working with the private sector. This includes the new Domestic Corruption Unit in the COLP which received £15 million as part of the launch of the Anti-Corruption Strategy in December 2025.
And the White Paper makes no mention of the Serious Fraud Office – which plays a unique role in prosecuting complex fraud and corruption. It will be important for there to also be clarity in the division of labour between the SFO and the new NPS, and a robust Memorandum of Understanding to ensure they can draw on each other’s skills.
Nor does the White Paper make any mention of the UK’s Financial Intelligence Unit which has faced criticism from FATF for delays in operationalising new IT systems and failing to expand staff numbers sufficiently. Though there has been progress on improving human and technical resources, the latest publicly available information on staffing numbers indicates that it is still yet to reach 200 staff as recommended by FATF in 2018. The review is an opportunity to look at where the FIU will sit, and how to make it as effective as possible in providing a stream of actionable intelligence for the fight against economic crime, as well as against serious organised crime and terrorism.
But also some real risks
Alongside these opportunities, there are key risks that the review must address. Chief among these is the new powers that the White Paper suggests will be given to the Home Secretary to direct police strategies and priorities and hold the new NPS to account.
We have seen in the US how the FBI can be weaponised to go after political opponents of the ruling administration (for example New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI head James Comey). We have also seen how politically directed central agencies can be used to conduct draconian enforcement against targets of an administration, with recent abuses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the US a particularly chilling example.
The review will need to look extremely carefully at how to ensure the correct checks and balances are put in statute to prevent politicised interventions from a Home Secretary and ensure there is a robust statutory definition of the ‘operational independence’ for the police.
Independent expert bodies have pointed out that current UK legislation and guidance doesn’t adequately define the boundary between the police’s operational independence and democratic oversight and accountability. In developing where this boundary lies, the review will need to look at international standards on policing which call for robust independence including that the “the police should not receive any instructions of a political nature” (the Council of Europe), and law enforcement bodies must be “free from any undue influence” (UN Convention Against Corruption). The UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime similarly notes that law enforcement authorities should be given “adequate independence to deter the exertion of inappropriate influence on their actions.”
The review will also need to examine new oversight arrangements for the NPS. Scotland chose to establish an independent oversight body – the Scottish Police Authority – when it merged its regional police forces into a single force – Police Scotland – in 2013. The White Paper suggests that while oversight for the new regional police forces will primarily revert to Mayors and local authorities, it is the Home Office that will exert oversight over the NPS, and the new National Police Commissioner who will run it. The review should critically examine whether this will provide sufficiently independent oversight to give the public confidence that there cannot be political interference in the UK’s policing.
Where does this leave us?
The reforms announced in the White Paper will have profound consequences with the potential to strengthen anti-corruption and economic crime enforcement in the UK – long an achilles heel.
But there are also major risks that less high profile economic crimes, including corruption, could be squeezed out by other priorities and that the long and strong tradition of policing “in complete independence of policy” is undermined. As the independent reviewer navigates this welcome but complex reform, the government needs to commit to be in listening mode.
It must ensure that the new National Police Service is futureproofed against the risks of government capture, and that this reform – and the salaries of those who will staff the new agency – are properly funded so that policing really does change for the better.
