Prince Charles isn't the only person to emerge this week as an unlikely dissident.

Across the country, magistrates, councillors and the business people and community leaders who serve on police authorities are in open rebellion over the Home Secretary's plans to abolish 43 local police forces and replace them with a dozen regional forces.

These are people who don't oppose the government of the day lightly. By nature and training, they seek consensus. They don't pick fights. Yet, from every part of the political spectrum and from the police officers tasked with delivering an efficient responsive service, there is condemnation of the proposals.

Why that should be, why Charles Clarke isn't listening and why the Prime Minister is strangely silent on this issue are questions to which we need answers.

Clarke's proposals will have an immediate cost of at least £36m in our region, and around £800m nationally. They will involve extra borrowing, burdening council taxpayers for years.

He says we need the new forces to fight terrorists and "sophisticated" professional criminals. I agree that national security and the detection and deterrence of career criminals are key policing objectives. I also believe they can be dealt with by strategic cooperation and pooling of resources between forces without the need for costly structural change.

But can I introduce a note of realism? When I visit resident and community groups and, as it invariably does, the talk turns to crime and disorder, people don't fire questions at me about what the police are doing about terrorists or about targeting criminals.

They want to talk about the issues which grab fewer headlines, but which have a much greater impact on them. The "unsophisticated" hoodlums who steal cars and vandalise property, the insidious and pervasive fear of intimidation in the street and outside your own front door.

The daily issues which can eat into your quality of life and which are best dealt with by a locally managed, locally accountable police service in tune with the priorities of the people who pay its wages.

They will not be solved by remote control policing. In Middlesbrough we have 25 community councils. Our Chief Constable, Sean Price, has visited them all to listen to their views and concerns and shape the service he provides accordingly. Would the same level of customer care be delivered by a chief responsible for an area covering three major conurbations and 3,300 square miles? I doubt it. The citizens of Berwick Hills in Middlesbrough have differing priorities from those in Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Charles Clarke looks and talks tough. He relishes his reputation as a political bruiser. When Dave McLuckie, the chairman of our local police authority, suggested he would seek legal advice on these plans, Mr Clarke's reply was, 'Then I'll get a better (for better, read more expensive) lawyer'. A crude version of 'my dad is bigger than your dad' if ever there was one.

I suspect that Mr Clarke will soon have recourse to his brief as within the next week I expect many police authorities will do something quite unprecedented. They will openly defy the Home Secretary and undoubtedly seek a judicial review.

Published: 24/02/2006