# The Thin Blue Bloodbath at the Top: Blunkett's Damning Police Leadership Report Says the Service "Isn't Good Enough" — and Eight Chief Constables Are Either in Trouble or Under Investigation

Eight chief constables. Either under disciplinary action or waiting on the result. That number dropped on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg and it should have stopped people mid-breakfast. That is not a rogue officer or two. That is a leadership crisis sitting at the very top of British policing.

Lord Blunkett did not dress it up. "At the moment, the service isn't good enough." Six words. No spin.

Zero Forces Rated Outstanding. Not One.

The Police Leadership Commission report publishes today — 6 July 2026. It covers all 43 forces in England and Wales. Its finding on inspection grades is brutal: not one force was rated outstanding for leadership. Not one. Nearly a third were rated as needing improvement. Two were rated inadequate.

This is not about a few bad apples at the bottom of the ranks. This report is specifically about leadership. The people setting the culture, running the forces, making the calls. And across 43 forces, not a single one is doing it at the highest standard.

That is the story. Everything else follows from it.

Who Is Behind This Report

This was not commissioned by a government trying to score points. The College of Policing ordered it. The Home Office backed it. And the two people who wrote it are Lord Blunkett — former Labour Home Secretary — and Lord Herbert — former Conservative policing minister who actually created the College of Policing and later chaired it.

A Labour Home Secretary and a Conservative policing reformer, jointly signing off on the same damning verdict. That cross-party pairing was deliberate. It is a signal that the problem sits above any one government's watch.

Blunkett's Home Office track record matters here too. Crime fell to an all-time low during his tenure. He put 15,000 extra officers and 6,500 community support officers on the streets. He knows what a functioning service looks like. His verdict now — that it is not good enough — carries real weight.

What the Review Actually Found

Six months of evidence. A call for evidence closing in February. Expertise pulled from senior police leaders, military figures, academics, and private sector specialists — including former New York City Police chief Bill Bratton.

What they found: scarcity of resources, officers drowning in paperwork, and leadership cultures so risk-averse they are leaving the workforce demotivated. Voluntary resignations hit record levels in the year to March 2025. They now account for 53% of all leavers. Officer numbers have been falling since a peak of 147,745 in March 2024, dropping by over 2,000. Some new officers are being mentored by people who barely finished their own two-year probation.

The recommendation is a "root and branch modernisation" of recruitment, development, and monitoring. The report calls it a "fundamental overhaul." HMICFRS is now launching its own independent inspection of police leadership this year, using this report as its foundation.

The Henry Nowak Context

This report lands in a specific moment. In December 2025, Henry Nowak — 18 years old — was stabbed and died in Southampton. Bodycam footage showed officers handcuffing him as he lay dying, after his killers lied and said he had assaulted them. His killer was convicted of murder in May 2026 and got a minimum 21-year term. Two officers are now under IOPC investigation for potential gross misconduct.

That case blew up in Parliament. It reignited every argument about how policing makes its decisions. Blunkett addressed it directly. He acknowledged a perception problem but rejected the "two-tier policing" framing pushed by others. His line was firm: "There's no room for culture wars or woke. It isn't the job of the police in our country to take sides of any sort. It's the job of the police to deliver."

That is the reset the report is demanding. Not an ideological one. A functional one.

The Verdict

Morale broken. Resignations at record levels. No outstanding forces. Eight chief constables in disciplinary trouble. A workforce being mentored by people barely out of their own training.

Blunkett said morale and motivation "needs a reset." That is understatement. What the numbers describe is a service eating itself from the top down. The report is the diagnosis. The question now is whether anyone acts on it before the next crisis forces their hand.

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