Re:View 14 November 2025
Director of Policy and Research
In yet another week where the political noise has drowned out the policy debate, it was refreshing to catch up with a horde of fellow think tank wonks at the inaugural Smart Thinking think tank awards.
We were very pleased to have our work recognised in two important categories. We overcame some seriously impressive competition to place second (the official “runner up”) in the ‘Think Tank of the Year’ category. For most of the last year Re:State has been a nine-person team, and we’re incredibly proud to have given the Institute for Fiscal Studies (an organisation which I admire enormously, but is in a different weight class) a proper run for its money.
Where we did triumph was with our Policy Director Joe Hill’s recognition as ‘Think Tanker of the Year’. Joe has made an enormous impact on the national policy debate and on the life of our organisation: writing trenchant policy reports, penning disruptive essays, pulling together innovative new programmes, organising conferences, and generally popping up all over the place.
Anyway: on now to a development which might have slipped under Re:View readers’ radars: plans to abolish Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs).
PCCs were a Coalition-era “experiment” (in the words of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood) that never quite worked: they sit awkwardly between Chief Constables and the Home Office, have no direct operational control (and a bit of unwillingness to exercise what powers they do have), and are often elected on vanishingly low turnouts even by the standards of local government. Yet the answer to those weaknesses is not to abandon democratic oversight of policing altogether. In a system where policing power is exercised in communities every day – often enough in questionable or unpopular ways – some visible and accountable political figure must own the choices about priorities, trade-offs and how police forces relate to wider public services.
In that sense, the clarification that PCC functions will move into the hands of directly elected mayors – and, where those do not exist, council leaders in strategic authorities – is significant. In areas like Greater Manchester and Yorkshire we can glimpse the potential of this model. Folding policing and wider “blue light” oversight into a mayoral remit could allow questions of crime, safety and justice to be joined up with housing, public health, transport, youth services and economic strategy. Rather than treating policing as a sealed-off, quasi-national service, it becomes part of a broader place-based public service reform agenda, led by someone with a clear, direct mandate from the population they serve.
Done well, an England-wide move to mayor-PCCs could hard-wire that logic into the system. Strategic Authorities would be responsible not just for setting a police precept and signing off a plan, but for weaving policing priorities into their wider missions on inequality, growth and community resilience. That would also create a cleaner line of accountability: if residents are unhappy about the balance between, say, neighbourhood policing and public order, or about how victims are treated, they know exactly which political figure to reward or punish at the ballot box.
There are important questions still to answer, though. In areas where there is no appetite for a Mayor and a foundation Strategic Authority is formed, PCC powers will be handed to the council leader running the show. Most council leaders are already juggling stretched responsibilities; adding policing oversight could simply bury accountability inside the usual local government machinery. If this path is to work, it will need very deliberate design: clear public-facing roles, strong overview and scrutiny, and a presumption that these areas really are on a journey towards fuller, mayoral-style devolution rather than permanent second-class status. Time will tell!