Police Race Action Plan: Two Years to Build. Five Minutes to Abandon.

How Britain's biggest agreement on police race reform is being quietly dismantled.

Britain’s police chiefs and leading Black organisations reached a historic agreement to confront racism in policing. That agreement is now close to collapse. Andy Burnham and Sarah Jones have one final opportunity to rescue it before Black organisations consider withdrawing from police consultation and recruitment altogether.

For generations, Black people in Britain have experienced policing differently from the rest of the population. We have been stopped and searched disproportionately, subjected to force at higher rates, failed by complaints and disciplinary systems, and too often treated as a threat before being recognised as citizens entitled to protection. Black children have been strip-searched in circumstances that shocked the country. Black officers and staff have described racism, isolation and unequal treatment inside the police service itself. Inquiry after inquiry has documented the same gulf between the democratic promise of equal policing and the reality experienced by Black communities.

After the murder of George Floyd in the United States in 2020, police leaders in England and Wales accepted that another declaration of concern would not be enough. The scale of the international protest, and the depth of anger it revealed in Britain, forced policing to confront a legitimacy crisis that had been building for decades. Police chiefs promised a national programme that would examine racial inequality throughout policing and establish what every force needed to do differently. That programme became the Police Race Action Plan.

The name sounds bureaucratic, but its stated ambition was easy enough to understand. Every police force in England and Wales would work towards becoming anti-racist. Police leaders would examine why Black people experienced worse outcomes, either provide a convincing explanation for those differences or reform the practices producing them, and publish evidence showing whether conditions were improving. The Plan would address how Black communities were policed, how Black victims were protected and how Black officers and staff were treated inside the service. It was published in 2022 as a national programme intended to improve policing for Black people and repair a long legacy of mistrust.

Its importance, however, lies not only in what was written on its pages. It lies in how the agreement was reached.

The Plan was not simply drafted by police chiefs and then presented to Black communities for approval. Over two difficult years, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing worked with a broad coalition of civic and non-governmental organisations, including the Alliance for Police Accountability, Operation Black Vote, the Runnymede Trust, the Black Equity Organisation, Action for Race Equality, StopWatch, the National Black Police Association and many other national and local groups. These organisations brought decades of experience in civil rights, race equality, police accountability, public policy and community organising. They supplied evidence, challenged weak language, pressed for measurable results and insisted that Black people should be involved in judging progress rather than merely being invited to endorse what policing had already decided.

This was never an easy or harmonious process. Progress became so slow, and confidence in police leadership fell so sharply, that participating organisations called a national boycott and withdrew from the negotiations. That decision was not political theatre. It was the collective use of the only leverage Black civil society possessed: the refusal to lend credibility to a process that appeared unable or unwilling to deliver. Engagement resumed only after renewed commitments were secured and changes were made.

The eventual adoption of the Plan therefore represented something rare in the history of British race relations. It was not perfect, and no serious participant believed that a document could by itself dismantle generations of institutional inequality. Nevertheless, it amounted to a negotiated national compact between policing and Black civil society. Police leaders accepted that racial disparities required coordinated institutional action. Black organisations agreed to remain at the table and invest their expertise, reputations and the fragile trust of communities that had seen many previous promises abandoned.

What happened next did not occur in isolation. The current crisis is the culmination of more than twenty-five years of inquiries, scandals, official reviews and repeated promises of reform. Understanding that history matters because the problem facing Britain today is no longer a lack of evidence. It is a failure to act on it.

Every chief constable subsequently approved the Plan through the National Police Chiefs’ Council. It was their Plan. The NPCC still describes it as the largest coordinated effort ever undertaken across every police force in England and Wales to improve trust and confidence among Black communities, and confirms that every chief constable signed up to support its objectives.

That formal endorsement must not be confused with meaningful implementation. The Plan may carry the signatures of all 43 territorial chief constables, but most have not demonstrated the public leadership necessary to turn agreement into institutional change. Fundamental to the Plan is recognition that racism can be systemic: embedded in the cultures, procedures, assumptions and outcomes of an organisation even when no individual officer openly intends to discriminate. Yet, by the APA’s count, only six of the 43 chief constables have so far publicly acknowledged systemic racism with the clarity the Plan demands.

This is not an argument over fashionable terminology. Without recognising how racism becomes embedded in systems, anti-racism is reduced to a collection of disconnected activities: another training package, a recruitment campaign, a communications strategy, an advisory panel or an annual community event. Some of those interventions may be useful. None provides an adequate answer to the central question of why racial inequality persists across different forces, generations of officers and repeated programmes of reform.

A chief constable cannot credibly promise to dismantle systemic racism while refusing to acknowledge that it exists. An institution may become increasingly sophisticated in how it describes disparities while remaining unwilling to confront how its own decisions reproduce them. It can speak about confidence, bias, disproportionality and organisational learning, yet carefully avoid the diagnosis that would require it to examine the institution rather than merely the attitudes of individuals.

Nor has national approval of the Plan produced national delivery. Outside the West Midlands and a small number of other force areas, there is little evidence of implementation at the scale or speed originally promised. Progress has been fragmented, dependent upon individual champions and vulnerable to changes in senior leadership, funding and political attention. What was presented as a national transformation programme has too often become a postcode lottery.

That conclusion does not come only from campaigners. An Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board was created to examine the Plan from outside policing and assess whether police leaders were delivering what they had promised. The Board brought together people with expertise in law, policing, data, race equality and public accountability. Its role was not to organise another listening exercise. It was to examine evidence, challenge police claims and report publicly on whether implementation was credible.

Since 2023, its work has provided an increasingly stark account of slow, uneven and fragile progress. The Board warned that advances depended too heavily upon the commitment of particular individuals rather than being embedded across policing. It questioned whether the structure of the programme was capable of overcoming the very institutional problems it was established to address. Its 2025 report argued that, without structural change, the Plan would fail to improve relations between policing and Black communities. When the NPCC responded in April 2026, it said the programme would continue “in a new guise”, a phrase that offered neither Black stakeholders nor the public a clear explanation of who would now be responsible, how progress would be enforced or what meaningful national scrutiny would remain.

The Independent Board’s importance should not be lost amid the alphabet soup of policing institutions. Its findings support the central argument advanced by the APA: race reform requires permanent, properly resourced professional scrutiny. Police data are complex. Policies differ between forces. Apparent improvements can result from changes in recording, population estimates or the way statistics are presented. Serious oversight therefore requires people with the time and specialist skills to interrogate data, compare performance, examine policy and distinguish genuine change from carefully packaged activity.

But expert scrutiny is only one half of the answer. A group of skilled professionals, however independent, cannot substitute for democratic accountability by the communities who experience police power. Professional scrutiny brings legal, analytical and policy expertise. Community accountability brings democratic legitimacy, local knowledge and the authority to judge whether institutional claims correspond with lived reality. One tests the figures and systems; the other tests what policing feels like on the street, in the station, inside the complaints process and within the police workforce itself.

The Plan’s so-called Maturity Matrix was meant to help provide that evidence, although its language appears designed to discourage almost everyone outside public administration from understanding it. In plain English, it is supposed to be a national scorecard showing how far each police force has progressed towards meeting the Plan’s promises. Rather than allowing a force to claim success because it has appointed a senior officer, produced a strategy or held a community meeting, the scorecard asks for evidence across a series of standards concerning leadership, use of police powers, treatment of Black officers and staff, quality of data, public confidence and accountability.

Its basic questions could be understood by any 15-year-old: what did the police promise, what have they actually done, what has changed for Black people and who has independently checked their answer?

That is potentially valuable. It becomes worthless, however, if police forces grade themselves, choose their own evidence and remain the final judge of whether they have succeeded. A school examination in which every pupil writes the questions, marks their own paper and decides whether the result should be published would command no public confidence. Neither should a police accountability system constructed on the same principle.

The scorecard must therefore be examined by independent professionals capable of testing the evidence and by community organisations capable of comparing official claims with lived experience. Police forces should provide the data, but they cannot be allowed to mark their own homework. The NPCC presents the matrix as a framework for assessing progress across policing; the unresolved issue is whether any independent body will possess the authority, resources and access required to turn it into a credible public judgment.

The West Midlands offers one of the few serious indications of how this national promise could be converted into democratic local practice. The West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner’s office has entered a co-productive process with the APA designed to bring local Black communities into a structured examination of policing. The significance of this work lies not in staging another town-hall meeting or asking residents to react to a strategy already written by officials. It lies in preparing citizens to exercise informed and independent judgment.

Participants are given the opportunity to examine police data, understand the history of relations between policing and Black communities in the West Midlands and consider why distrust and disproportionality have endured. They can examine good and poor practice, learn from arrangements in other constabularies and consider international models of community accountability. Only after that process of education, evidence and deliberation are participants asked to decide what kind of accountability structure they want locally.

That is a fundamentally different democratic proposition from conventional police engagement. It does not rely upon the same small circle of familiar representatives being invited to endorse an official account of progress. It does not begin with the institution defining both the problem and the acceptable solution. It treats Black residents as citizens capable of learning, questioning evidence, comparing models, weighing competing arguments and reaching informed conclusions about the exercise of police power.

The intended result is a five-year Black Policing Charter: a public agreement establishing measurable commitments and the means through which communities can determine whether those commitments have been honoured. The Charter is not another aspirational statement to be launched with speeches and quietly forgotten when leadership changes. It is intended to specify what the police must do, what evidence will demonstrate progress, who will scrutinise performance and how failure will be brought into the public arena.

The Charter model also seeks to give practical meaning to the celebrated British principle of policing by consent. Police leaders often invoke that phrase as though consent were permanently granted to the institution at the birth of modern policing and thereafter belonged to the police themselves. But democratic consent is not an heirloom. It must be continually earned through fairness, effectiveness, restraint, legitimacy and accountability.

APA Charters therefore include the possibility of policing consent orders and withdrawal-of-consent orders. These would not suspend lawful police powers or pretend that a community body can override Parliament. They would provide a structured democratic judgment, grounded in evidence and deliberation, on whether policing continued to retain the confidence and consent of the people most affected by it. Where commitments were being met, consent could be publicly affirmed. Where persistent disproportionality, broken promises or institutional bad faith had destroyed legitimacy, consent could be formally withdrawn.

That would turn policing by consent from a slogan claimed by police leaders into a living relationship judged by the public. It would make clear that legitimacy has conditions and that communities are not merely audiences for police declarations about their own success.

This emerging West Midlands model demonstrates why the Police Race Action Plan should be rescued rather than abandoned. The national Plan establishes shared objectives. A permanent independent body can provide skilled professional scrutiny. A clear national scorecard can expose differences between forces. Local observatories, assemblies and Charters can place the evidence in the hands of communities and require police leaders to answer publicly for their performance.

The necessary pieces already exist. What is absent is national political ownership capable of joining them together.

The present crisis also exposes a much wider problem in the relationship between Black Britain and the state. British institutions rarely respond to demands for racial justice today through blunt rejection. Their methods have become subtler. They absorb the pressure, borrow some of the language of their critics, commission research, convene working groups and redirect the urgency of protest into the slower routines of administration.

I describe this as Institutional Aikido: the ability of powerful organisations to receive the force of criticism, redirect its energy into controlled processes and emerge without fundamentally changing the distribution of power. A demand for accountability becomes an invitation to advise. A call for structural reform becomes a consultation. An insistence upon community power becomes a place on a reference group.

The institution appears responsive. Meetings are held, grants are announced, public events are staged and selected Black representatives are photographed beside senior leaders. Yet the institution continues to decide who participates, which evidence counts, what recommendations survive and whether the entire process continues. Nothing has to be rejected outright because the original demand is gradually converted into something safer and more manageable.

For communities, the cumulative experience is Consultative Abuse. Consultation itself is not abusive. Democratic government requires listening, negotiation and compromise, and no organisation can claim to represent every Black person or expect each of its demands to be accepted. The abuse begins when institutions repeatedly ask communities harmed by discrimination to contribute their time, knowledge, trauma, trust and legitimacy while retaining the unilateral right to postpone, dilute or abandon the commitments that emerge.

It occurs when Black organisations spend years reading documents, analysing proposals, attending meetings and persuading deeply sceptical communities that engagement may be worthwhile, only to discover that nobody in authority can be required to deliver the resulting agreement. It occurs when participation provides institutions with intelligence, political cover and the right to describe a programme as co-produced, while communities possess no comparable power to protect what they helped to create.

The Police Race Action Plan is in danger of becoming the defining example. National and local organisations invested two years in co-production. They withdrew when progress stalled and returned only after further commitments were obtained. The final Plan was approved by all chief constables. Independent scrutiny was established. A system for comparing force performance was developed. Yet implementation remains exceptional rather than routine, most chief constables still avoid the systemic diagnosis at the Plan’s heart, and the national programme has been allowed to drift into an undefined “new guise”.

If that history can simply evaporate, the message to Black civil society will be unmistakable. An agreement with policing has no permanence. A commitment endorsed by every chief constable carries no enforceable consequence. Independent scrutiny lasts only while temporary funding and institutional enthusiasm survive. Black organisations may co-produce a national programme, but policing reserves the right to decide whether it lives or dies.

This is why another round of conventional engagement will not be enough. National organisations that have already invested two years in this process will not return to the same table merely because it has been renamed, repopulated with handpicked “leading Blacks” or accompanied by another sequence of grants, receptions and carefully choreographed public events. The old machinery of race relations management—patronage, selective access, discretionary funding and performative inclusion—may improve institutional optics. It cannot repair a relationship approaching breakdown.

Funding is not inherently patronage, and engagement with recognised leaders is not automatically illegitimate. Many organisations have used public resources to protect communities and secure important reforms. The corruption begins when funding and access are used to curate a manageable version of Black representation: rewarding those considered safe, excluding those prepared to impose political costs and presenting attendance at official events as evidence of democratic consent.

The test is not how many people entered the room, how diverse the platform appeared or how positively the meeting was reported. It is whether racial disproportionality declined, whether Black officers experienced fair treatment, whether public confidence improved and whether communities acquired independent power over the institutions affecting their lives.

Andy Burnham and Sarah Jones now face a choice that could determine the future of police–Black community relations during this Government. Burnham became Prime Minister on 20 July 2026 after building his national argument around the need to rewire Britain, challenge Whitehall centralism and transfer power closer to people and places. Jones has served as Minister of State for Policing and Crime since September 2025 and represents Croydon West, a diverse urban constituency in which policing, youth violence and community confidence are lived political realities.

That combination creates a genuine opportunity. Burnham’s constitutional ambition could supply the authority and urgency the Plan has lacked. Jones’s ministerial responsibility and local experience could translate that ambition into a practical programme of implementation. Together, they could place the Home Office decisively behind the agreement, renew engagement with the organisations that helped create it and establish a national system combining professional scrutiny with democratic community accountability.

But the same combination carries a serious risk. Devolution is not automatically democratisation. Transferring authority from Whitehall to mayors or regional executives can relocate the state without sharing power with citizens. A mayoral office may be geographically closer to a community while remaining politically insulated from it. It can cultivate preferred intermediaries, control funding and manage dissent just as effectively as a government department.

Burnham’s record in Greater Manchester therefore deserves both recognition and scrutiny. The operational recovery of Greater Manchester Police under Chief Constable Stephen Watson has been presented as a major achievement. Improvements in organisational performance should be acknowledged; serious criticism loses credibility when it refuses to recognise progress. Yet operational recovery is not the same as racial justice, and a productive relationship between a mayor and chief constable does not by itself create democratic accountability.

The constitutional test is what happens when Black communities disagree with both the mayor and the chief constable. Do they possess independent organisations with access to the evidence, the capacity to interrogate it and a recognised means of requiring public answers? Or must they seek influence through bodies selected, funded or convened by the same executive system they are expected to scrutinise?

This is why Manchesterism cannot simply become the national model for police reform. Greater Manchester is not London or Birmingham, and neither does it represent the circumstances of smaller Black populations in towns where serious disproportionality may exist without the civic infrastructure necessary to challenge it. A model constructed around a powerful mayor, close executive relations with a chief constable and institutionally curated community engagement may appear stable. Exported nationally without strong independent community institutions, it risks becoming regional centralism presented as democratic renewal.

Sarah Jones faces a related danger. Her recognition that racial disproportionality remains unacceptable gives her a stronger starting point than politicians who deny the evidence or treat every reference to institutional racism as an attack upon individual officers. But recognition alone is no longer enough. The older model of urban race policy has relied heavily upon funded intermediaries, partnership boards, police-led engagement, public events and selected community representatives. It can produce valuable projects, but it can also confuse access with power and managed visibility with democratic accountability.

At their best, Burnham and Jones could rescue the national agreement and create a new architecture of police accountability. At their worst, Burnham’s strong executive devolution could be combined with Jones’s inherited tradition of managed community engagement. Authority would move from Whitehall to mayors and senior police leaders, while Black communities remained confined to advisory groups, funded projects and ceremonial participation. The language would be devolution, partnership and community confidence. The fundamentals would remain untouched.

That would not rewire British democracy. It would relocate centralism and rebrand patronage.

There is also an immediate legislative opportunity that should not be missed. The previous Government’s Crime and Policing Bill has now completed Parliament and become the Crime and Policing Act 2026. Its centre of gravity was the expansion and revision of criminal offences, enforcement powers and police capabilities. Whatever the merits of its individual provisions, it did little to answer the deeper democratic question running through this crisis: how are communities to hold policing independently accountable when trust has collapsed and racial disproportionality persists?

The more consequential opportunity now lies in the forthcoming Police Reform Bill. The Bill was announced as the legislative vehicle for implementing the structural programme set out in the White Paper, From local to national: a new model for policing. That programme proposes some of the largest changes to police organisation and governance for generations, including stronger national direction, restructured forces, enhanced performance management and new arrangements for local oversight. Yet the proposals conceived under the Starmer Government were strikingly underdeveloped on direct community accountability. They were far clearer about how power would be reorganised among the Home Office, national policing bodies, chief constables, mayors and other state institutions than about how citizens—particularly communities experiencing disproportionate police powers—would acquire any durable influence over the new system.

Burnham should not treat that inherited settlement as politically complete. His own argument for democratic rewiring creates both the authority and the obligation to improve it. The Police Reform Bill offers a rare opportunity to move community accountability from the margins of policing policy into the constitutional architecture itself. The legislation could impose a statutory duty upon the Home Secretary and police governance bodies to maintain independent community-accountability arrangements; require every force to publish progress against the Police Race Action Plan’s national scorecard; guarantee community access to disaggregated policing data; establish independent professional scrutiny; and require chief constables and mayors to appear before regular public accountability hearings where serious racial disparities persist.

The Bill could also provide statutory recognition for locally negotiated policing Charters, community observatories and deliberative assemblies without allowing government or police forces to control their membership or conclusions. It could require that structural reorganisations, force mergers and new mayoral governance arrangements demonstrate how independent community scrutiny will be preserved and strengthened. Otherwise, the largest reorganisation of policing in generations may concentrate authority more effectively while leaving the democratic deficit untouched.

The Crime and Policing Act expanded what the state can do through policing. The Police Reform Bill must now address who can hold that power to account. That is the legislative test of Burnham’s promise to devolve power rather than merely rearrange it.

The practical alternative is therefore not merely administrative; it is both executive and legislative. Burnham and Jones should immediately establish a Police Race Action Plan Implementation Taskforce within the Home Office, while using the forthcoming Police Reform Bill to give the new accountability settlement statutory durability.The practical alternative is already available. The Prime Minister and Policing Minister should establish a Police Race Action Plan Implementation Taskforce within the Home Office. Its purpose should not be to begin another two-year consultation about matters already negotiated and agreed. It should exist to drive delivery, remove institutional blockages and report publicly on progress.

The taskforce should include senior Home Office officials, the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the College of Policing, the National Black Police Association, independent national civic organisations involved in producing the Plan, representatives of local community accountability bodies and people with the professional expertise required to analyse data and policy. Its mandate, membership, milestones and reporting arrangements should be public. The Home Office must provide political ownership; police chiefs must accept responsibility for implementing the Plan they approved; independent professionals must be able to test performance; and Black communities must possess organised power through which they can judge the results.

The work of the Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board should provide the foundation rather than being lost with the ending of its formal role. A permanent successor is needed, properly resourced but protected from control by the Home Office or policing. It should analyse force data, compare performance and publish judgments that neither ministers nor chief constables can quietly edit or suppress.

Alongside that professional body, the APA and other independent organisations should build the democratic infrastructure of community accountability: local observatories, deliberative assemblies, public hearings and five-year Black Policing Charters. The national scorecard should connect the two levels. Each force should publish what it promised, what it did and what changed. Independent analysts should test the evidence. Communities should judge whether those findings match their experience. Police leaders and the responsible mayor or policing authority should then be required to answer publicly and agree corrective action.

No participant should be allowed to mark their own homework.

This is not a demand that unelected organisations take control of operational policing or displace the lawful responsibilities of ministers, mayors, police and crime commissioners and chief constables. It addresses a missing dimension in the British constitutional settlement. Constitutional accountability identifies which office-holder possesses formal authority. Democratic accountability asks whether the people who experience state power possess an organised and independent means of influencing how that power is exercised.

Britain has repeatedly reorganised the first while neglecting the second.

The next stage of constitutional reform cannot merely transfer power from Whitehall to town halls, combined authorities or mayoral offices. It must also transfer meaningful influence from the state to citizens. Otherwise devolution becomes the relocation of centralism, and democratic renewal becomes another exercise in Institutional Aikido.

The APA is not announcing a national boycott today. Such a decision could not responsibly be taken by one organisation alone. It would require collective deliberation among national Black organisations, local community groups, Black police associations and those most directly affected by policing. Its objectives, scope and conditions for re-engagement would need to be explicit.

But ministers and police chiefs should understand how close that discussion now is.

If 2026 ends without substantive progress, unambiguous Home Office ownership, renewed national police leadership and a credible system combining professional scrutiny with community accountability, the case for continued participation will become extremely difficult to sustain. Black organisations will have to consider whether attending further listening exercises and advisory forums merely lends legitimacy to institutions unwilling to honour the agreement already reached.

A consultation boycott would mean refusing to participate in new race initiatives until existing commitments were implemented. A recruitment boycott would pose a more difficult question: whether Black organisations should continue encouraging young Black people to enter police services that seek their labour and public endorsement while failing to confront the experiences of Black officers and the communities they are expected to police.

Neither step would be undertaken lightly. Withdrawal carries real risks. It could reduce contact with reformers inside policing and leave the field open to people actively hostile to the anti-racist purpose of the Plan. But permanent participation in processes that extract civic legitimacy without delivering reciprocal power carries a deeper danger. It teaches institutions that Black civil society can be invited, used, disappointed and invited again without consequence.

Burnham and Jones have inherited a Plan that is wounded but recoverable. They have inherited the work of police professionals, national and local civic organisations and an Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board whose warnings can no longer be dismissed. They have an agreed framework, a means of measuring force performance and emerging local models showing how national commitments can be converted into democratic accountability.

They can grasp that opportunity and restore life to the Plan. They can give the Home Office ownership, require the NPCC to lead implementation, rebuild independent professional scrutiny and support Black communities to establish binding five-year Charters through informed democratic deliberation.

Or they can return to the default settings of British race policy: handpicked representatives, selective patronage, cosmetic engagement and public performances designed to improve the image while leaving the institution untouched.

The first course could begin repairing police–Black community relations and give practical meaning to Burnham’s promise to rewire Britain. The second would make further deterioration during his premiership not merely possible, but increasingly inevitable.

The Police Race Action Plan was created because policing and Black civil society agreed that the relationship between the police and Black communities could not continue as before. That agreement took two years, difficult negotiations and a national boycott to secure. Every chief constable approved it. Independent scrutiny exposed the failure to implement it. A scorecard has been constructed to show what progress should look like. In the West Midlands, communities are beginning to demonstrate how the national promise can become a living local democratic agreement.

The evidence exists. The framework exists. Much of the work has already been done. Black civil society remains willing, for the moment, to help rescue it.

What is missing is the decision to act.

This is the last-chance saloon for national police race reform. The door remains open, but Black communities will not stand in it indefinitely.