Urgent ministerial intervention required on the future of the Police Race Action Plan

To: Richard Muir, Policing Advisor to the Home Secretary

30 July 2026

Hope all is well.

I am writing to urge the Home Office to intervene decisively in the future of the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s Police Race Action Plan.

The position has now become untenable. PRAP was launched as the most significant collective commitment ever made by policing in England and Wales to address racism, racial disproportionality and the collapse of trust among Black communities. Every chief constable formally signed up to it. Yet five years on, the NPCC’s own published material concedes that progress has been slow, that many people believe policing has become more harmful, and that tangible outcomes have not matched the volume of activity. The National Black Police Association has said that the plan lacks effective accountability, remains disconnected from local delivery and is implemented inconsistently across forces. The Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board has similarly warned that institutional resistance and deeply embedded attitudes continue to obstruct change.

Despite this record, the central PRAP structure has been allowed to reach the end of its funding period without a clear, publicly accountable settlement for what replaces it. The NPCC has stated that funding for the central team was extended only until the end of March 2026 and that future arrangements were still being discussed with government. Its proposed direction places greater responsibility on individual forces and seeks to embed the work within existing NPCC structures.

That is not a neutral administrative transition. It risks dismantling the only national architecture created specifically to confront racism in policing and dispersing responsibility across forty-three forces with widely differing levels of commitment, capability and political will. A national pattern of racial disproportionality cannot be answered through forty-three voluntary interpretations of anti-racism. Without a properly resourced central programme, enforceable national standards, independent inspection and consequences for failure, the move towards local delivery will become a retreat from national accountability.

The danger is made more acute by the gap between institutional language and lived reality. The NPCC continues to describe PRAP as a long-term commitment to becoming an anti-racist police service, while its own evidence records that Black people remain twice as likely to be arrested, three times as likely to experience police use of force and four times as likely to be stopped and searched as White people. Research cited by the programme found that nearly three quarters of Black officers and staff had experienced racial microaggressions, discrimination or harassment. These are not peripheral disparities. They represent a continuing institutional crisis.

The publication of maturity matrices, performance indicators and revised anti-racism commitments cannot substitute for enforceable accountability. Such tools may be useful, but they will have little value if forces are permitted to assess themselves, if performance data are not fully public, if HMICFRS is not required to inspect against national standards, and if chief constables face no consequences for sustained failure. The central question is not whether forces can demonstrate that they have adopted the language of anti-racism. It is whether Black communities experience measurable improvements in safety, treatment, trust and access to justice.

The Alliance for Police Accountability is therefore asking the Home Office to take political ownership of the next phase of PRAP rather than leaving its future solely to the NPCC and individual chief constables. This should begin with a clear ministerial statement confirming that PRAP remains a national programme, that its central infrastructure will be funded, and that local delivery will be governed by mandatory national standards rather than voluntary aspiration.

The Home Office should also require the publication of a single national performance framework covering stop and search, use of force, misconduct, recruitment, retention, promotion, victim satisfaction and trust and confidence. That framework must include transparent force-level data, common measures, clear deadlines and regular public reporting. HMICFRS should be formally required to inspect every force against those standards, with the results reported to Parliament.

Independent scrutiny must also be rebuilt. Black communities cannot continue to be invited to provide testimony while policing retains control over the terms of scrutiny, access to information and the pace of reform. A strengthened national oversight body should be established with independent leadership, direct access to data, properly funded participation and the ability to escalate concerns to ministers, inspectorates and police and crime commissioners. The NBPA and genuinely independent Black-led civil society organisations must be resourced to participate effectively, rather than expected to lend credibility to reform at their own expense.

The transition from the existing central team also requires immediate transparency. The Government and NPCC should publish the options considered for PRAP’s future structure, the funding decisions taken, the assessment of risks arising from devolution to forces, and the evidence used to conclude that existing NPCC committees can provide adequate national leadership. Black communities should not discover through institutional drift that a programme created in response to a profound crisis of legitimacy has been quietly absorbed into business as usual.

We think this now requires ministerial leadership. The NPCC cannot be left to determine the scale of its own accountability, nor should chief constables be permitted to decide individually how seriously they will treat a national commitment to racial justice. Rick, your role places you at the centre of the strategic advice required to prevent PRAP from becoming another ambitious reform programme that was praised at launch, weakened in implementation and finally dissolved into existing structures.

APA would welcome an urgent meeting with you to discuss a credible national settlement. We are not seeking another consultation about the existence of racial disparities. The evidence is settled. We are seeking agreement on the institutional machinery required to reduce them: national standards, central funding, independent inspection, transparent data, properly resourced Black community oversight and consequences for failure.

PRAP has repeatedly been described as policing’s last best chance to repair its relationship with Black communities. That chance is now being placed at risk. If government allows the national programme to fragment while disparities persist and trust continues to collapse, responsibility will no longer rest with the NPCC alone.

It will rest with the Home Office.

Yours sincerely,