Home Office must deliver on police reform at critical moment, watchdog warns

Police are facing rising workloads and more complex types of crime, but investment has fallen behind, according to the government's spending watchdog.

Funding pressures have become so acute that four in five police forces in England and Wales are now drawing on their savings to balance annual budgets. Last year, police forces reduced their financial reserves by £276m and borrowed £632m to fund 60% of investment programmes.

Reliance on borrowing for investment - on infrastructure, equipment, and technology - is expected to rise further, exposing forces to higher debt repayments and future risk, the National Audit Office (NAO) reports. Lincolnshire Police withdrew the most from its financial reserves in 2024/25, using more than 6% of funds, followed by the Metropolitan Police Service at 4%.

The report outlines how an "outdated" funding model has contributed to financial pressures - leaving all police forces except for North Wales with less government funding relative to their population size than in 2015. Some forces can raise more additional funds than others through council tax, but this is dependent on property values in the area - leaving those in less affluent areas at a disadvantage.

Funding for new technology cut The government expects to increase total police funding by an average of 1.7% per year in real terms over the next three years - however the NAO says this will likely all be absorbed by pay increases and inflationary pressures. Currently, almost all police spending on technology is on maintaining legacy systems.

Treasury finance for the rollout of important new technology, including live facial recognition, has been withdrawn from this year's funding. Meanwhile, Home Office funding for new technology and improving productivity in policing has been cut by more than half, to £50m in 2025/26 from £105m the year before.

However, investment in technology will be crucial to helping police make better use of their limited time and funding, the NAO says. Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said: "Improving the productivity of the police is crucial to helping them manage financial pressures while supporting their ability to respond to changing demands.

"While structural changes will take time, the Home Office can make immediate progress on tackling the other barriers to higher productivity." For example, the report highlights that 532,000 officer hours were spent preparing audio-visual files - including body-worn video and CCTV - for cases which did not progress to a charge in 2022/23. A significant portion of that time was spent on redacting sensitive information, which could be more efficiently automated with AI-enabled tools, the report says.

More complex crime Government focus on recruiting police officers has meant forces have been limited in how they use resources, and restricted recruitment of specialist technical and digital staff, the report says. To live within budgets, police forces have also run high levels of staff vacancies.

In 2025-26, the average vacancy rate for police forces is 7%, with some forces exceeding 10%, and police officers are often left to backfill staff roles. However complex cases like fraud, sexual offences and stalking and harassment have become a larger share of police workloads in recent years, and now account for nearly two in five of all recorded crimes.

They can be more complex and require specialist resources to investigate. While there is currently no standard definition or measure of productivity in policing, pressures can be seen in different areas - for example in the length of time taken for charges to be brought, which has tripled over ten years to 41 days from 14 days in 2015.

"Successive governments have reduced the amount of police resource and said they've got to be much smarter in the way they do their job," David Wall, professor of criminology at the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies at the University of Leeds, told Sky News. "These are the hard things to reconcile.

Ironically, we've rolled back a lot of community care and the police are left to pick up what's left. "One issue is training, the other is trying to work out how to fit it in a police budget which is often directed towards things that 'bang, bleed or shout'.

"I don't think for instance we take enough preventative action. Cybercrime is happening on such a scale now and is increasing as it will do with artificial intelligence, that we need new policing models," Prof Wall, who is an expert in cybercrime and organised crime, added.

The government has made several ambitious commitments on policing, including recruiting 13,000 additional neighbourhood support officers under the Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee, as well as halving serious violent crime within a decade. Read more:Number of cops sacked and barred from service revealedPolice watchdog warns of difference between 'what is offensive and what is criminal' Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said: "Previous initiatives have failed to lead to long-lasting improvements.

"With the Home Office not yet having decided how it will meet its key targets, no internal agreed definition of productivity, nor the establishment of funding available to the programme, there are significant risks. There must also be sufficient funds to invest in digital technology, which will be critical in improving the productivity of policing.

"As government plans to publish its White Paper on police reform, it is vital that the Home Office builds on its work to better understand the key drivers influencing police performance and productivity, as well as opportunities to streamline current processes and ultimately ensure our public remains safe." The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories.

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