Eight police forces in England and Wales carried out no undercover operations in the past year, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has revealed, warning that the ability to use covert tactics against serious criminals could be lost.

Rowley raised the figure in a speech on police reform delivered in Manchester on Friday 6 November, in which he argued that the 43-force structure in England and Wales can no longer cope with modern crime. He said undercover officers were important for tackling offences including child sexual abuse and drug dealing, and questioned whether the capability was available wherever it was needed.

"Eight forces carried out no basic undercover operations in the last year," Rowley said. "That raises a serious question about whether these tactics are available wherever they are needed." He did not identify the eight forces.

The commissioner said local officers could not be asked to confront international criminal networks without the strength of a wider service behind them, and that strong local policing needed both neighbourhood teams and specialist support. Undercover work, he argued, sits alongside digital specialists, financial investigators, surveillance teams and firearms officers as capabilities that must be available when local officers need them, rather than sitting beyond their reach in a patchwork of collaborations.

Rowley used the speech, titled "The cost of standing still is that criminals will win", to back a major reorganisation of policing. He proposed a National Police Service to tackle the most serious and complex crime, supported by eight to ten larger regional forces and hundreds of local policing commands. The reforms are estimated to cost about £2 billion, while Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has said a national service could save £350 million for frontline policing.

The commissioner set out the scale of the threat facing forces, saying fraud now accounts for around 45 per cent of all Crime Survey offences, with more than four million offences a year, and cybercrime represents around one in ten crimes. He said at least 59,000 people are involved in serious and organised crime in the UK, costing the economy at least £47 billion a year, and the National Crime Agency estimates at least £1 billion of criminal cash is laundered through high street businesses every year.

On child sexual abuse, Rowley said more than 92,000 referrals were made by online platforms last year, and reports of child sexual extortion, where young people are blackmailed using intimate images, increased by 127 per cent in a single year. He said online-facilitated offending now accounts for close to half of all recorded child sexual abuse offences.

He also pointed to falling police funding, from around 0.9 per cent of GDP to around 0.7 per cent over fifteen years, and said forces used £276 million from reserves last year simply to balance their budgets. With 148,000 officers and 89,000 staff across the service, he said, the public still want safe streets, criminals held to account and children protected, but the system built to deliver that was designed for a different age.

Rowley said the choice facing policing was between a third great revolution in British policing or the inevitable decline of its ability to protect the public. He argued that the 43 forces were overstretched and trying to do too much with too little, relying on nine regional and many bilateral collaborations to provide capabilities such as major crime investigation and armed policing.

Lord Hogan-Howe, a former Metropolitan Police commissioner, has been appointed to lead an independent review of police force structures, and Rowley said the review offered an opportunity to shape what comes next. The reforms backed by police chiefs would replace the current structure with three tiers: local teams dealing with neighbourhood issues, regional forces sharing specialist resources, and a National Police Service tackling the most serious crimes.