WHILE we abhor any public waste, pushes to merge the upper echelons of Thames Valley Police with its sister force in Hampshire would be deeply flawed.

Anthony Stansfeld has yet to settle into his new office in Kidlington as the Thames Valley’s first Police and Crime Commissioner and already is facing calls to merge his role with Hampshire as well as that of the Chief Constable.

John Kelly, the former emergency planning officer, is a man who knows his way around public authorities.

His call about further sharing of some departments between the two forces is sound on the face of it, although such mergers raises the question whether we spent years paying for inefficient backroom departments in the past.

But we urge caution about any wholesale rush to merge frontline policing units. If Thames Valley Police had X number of firearms officers to cover its mammoth area, for instance, and Hampshire had Y number of similar colleagues, merging the two units and decreasing the number of officers ready to respond is a retrograde step.

Likewise, any move to decapitate the head of each force and have one Chief Constable might have the attraction of saving one £160,000-plus pay packet but it would be ultimately folly.

The Thames Valley is a huge policing area and we need a Chief Constable overseeing it to weigh up the diverse issues of urban Oxford, rural West Berkshire and a new town like Milton Keynes.

Trying to then cover for the whole of Hampshire would be impossible.

While we maintain the post of commissioners has been overwhelmingly rejected by the public, any additional restructuring would leave our police in a state of uncertain flux for years to come.