The Police Leadership Commission has published its report, and if you're preparing for a promotion board it's one of the most useful documents to land in years. It's the most thorough national review of how policing develops and promotes its leaders in a generation, and its verdict on the current promotion process is blunt.
This is the first part of a two part guide. Part one covers what the Commission is and why its findings matter to you. Part two covers the reforms it recommends and how to prepare for the direction they point in.
One note before we start. The report sets out recommendations, not law, and it sits within a wider government programme of police reform. Some of it may be adopted quickly, some may change or fall away. What follows is what's been said and why it matters for the way you prepare, not a set of rules already in force.
What is the Police Leadership Commission?
The Police Leadership Commission was an independent commission set up by the College of Policing with Home Office support, chaired jointly by Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert. Its report, Professionalism and performance: Police leadership for the future, examines how the service attracts, develops, appoints and supports its leaders at every rank, and makes a wide set of recommendations for reform. It's published under the Open Government Licence, which is why we can quote it directly here.
Its central finding is uncomfortable. Despite falling crime and many examples of strong individual leadership, the Commission concluded that “the overall quality of police leadership is inconsistent and fails to provide the policing that the public deserves.” That single sentence is why the report reaches all the way down to how you'll be assessed at your next board.
The verdict: the promotion process is called broken
The Commission doesn't soften its language. It states plainly that “promotion processes to sergeant and inspector are broken,” relying on “an out-of-date exam that only half of prospective sergeants and just over a third of prospective inspectors pass.”
The survey evidence behind that is stark. 78 per cent of sergeants and 64 per cent of inspectors who responded said they didn't believe the process identifies the officers who go on to be effective in the role. Many described getting on to development as a matter of who you know rather than what you've done. Over three quarters of sergeants had acted up before getting the substantive rank, and more than half for 13 months or longer. If you've ever felt the process was a lottery, the national review has now said the same thing, with the data to back it.
Why leaders were never properly developed
The report traces the problem to decades of underinvestment. Central spending on leadership development runs at only about 0.02 per cent of total police funding. The comparison that's travelled furthest makes the gap vivid: fifteen years after Sandhurst, an Army colonel commanding 1,500 people will have had 72 weeks of leadership development, while a comparable Met chief superintendent is likely to have had two or three weeks.
The effect shows up in how the workforce feels. Just 25 per cent of respondents to the 2025 National Police Wellbeing Survey agreed they worked in a well led and managed organisation, and frontline officers were the least likely to agree. More than a fifth of new sergeants and inspectors said they'd received no formal leadership training more than two years into the role. Most sergeants said their training had prepared them “not at all” (38 per cent) or to only a “slight extent” (34 per cent) for their promotion.
What the verdict means for you
It's easy to read all this and feel discouraged. The more useful reading is the opposite. A process the service itself admits leaves most officers underprepared is one you can stand out in by preparing properly. The officers who take their own development seriously aren't competing against a well drilled field. They're competing against a system that, by its own account, has left most officers to work it out alone.
That's the real message of the Commission for anyone sitting a board. The bar is moving toward demonstrated leadership, and the officers who prepare on substance will meet it while others are still revising for an exam the report itself wants to demote.
Part two sets out what the report recommends changing, including the new national definition of police leadership it introduces and the way promotion itself is being rebuilt around capability. For the full picture of how boards work, from the process through to what panels score, see the complete guide to UK police promotion boards.