I recently wrote about Local Government Reorganisation and the proposed abolition of our District, Borough and County councils such as Hampshire’s.

Now the latest idea is to scrap England’s county-based police forces and merge them into a series of large regional “mega forces”.

Whether this idea will become a reality remains to be seen but for now, it warrants serious scrutiny.

In a recent White Paper, the Home Secretary proposed reducing the current 43 police forces in England and Wales, perhaps to around 12.

Under such a model, Hampshire Constabulary would cease to exist as an independent force. Instead, policing would be delivered by regional forces, supported by Local Policing Areas focused on neighbourhood work.

There have been understandable concerns. Hampshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Donna Jones, has warned that merged forces could be “too big and unruly” and that performances could suffer as a result.

It is true that the 40 plus existing forces vary in size and capacity. At one end is the City of London Police, covering the Square Mile. At the other is the Metropolitan Police Service, with over 30,000 officers. And there is a variety of urban and rural forces in between.

Performance also differs between forces, and critics argue that some are less well equipped to deal with sophisticated organised crime, including drug trafficking, human exploitation, immigration crime and cyber-attacks.

I can see the potential efficiencies of merging forces. Each one currently runs its own procurement, HR and payroll systems. That can be bettered.

However, shared services do not necessarily require full structural mergers.

We already have Regional Organised Crime Units (ROCUs) and Economic Crime Units, which includes fraud, with the South East ROCU bringing together Hampshire with Thames Valley, Surrey and Sussex.

The White Paper also proposes a new “FBI-style” National Police Service to lead on terrorism, fraud and organised crime. Yet we already have the National Crime Agency, Counter Terrorism Policing, and other national responsibilities.

The stated aim of these proposals overall is to improve response times and end what the Home Secretary calls the “postcode lottery” in policing. That is laudable, but it is not obvious how a top-down reorganisation alone would deliver it.

For rural communities like ours there are understandable concerns. Issues such as agricultural equipment theft, hare coursing, shed break-ins and large-scale fly-tipping may struggle for attention within vast regional forces inevitably focused on major urban centres.

Policing in Britain has traditionally been local, civilian and independent. Officers are drawn from, and accountable to, the communities they serve. Some may reasonably question whether we are drifting away from that tradition.

If we are to reshape policing so fundamentally, we should be clear about what problem we are trying to solve, and whether bigger truly means better.