Country
Justice and public safety in England and Wales
England and Wales is a legal system rather than a state: dozens of territorial police forces under elected commissioners, one prosecution service whose Director acts under the superintendence of a law officer, courts divided into six jurisdictions, and a single agency carrying out sentences in custody and in the community. It is not the United Kingdom, and it is not Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Institutional facts on these pages were checked against their sources on . Where a cited provision carries a scheduled change, the page states the date.
Jurisdictions modelled
A territory can exist administratively without being a separate legal jurisdiction. This table records, for each modelled tier and territory, whether it has its own arrangement for a function, whether the function is organised nationally, or whether we have simply not researched it.
| Jurisdiction | Level | Courts | Prosecution | Policing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales | legal-system | own | own | own |
unknown means not researched. It is never a synonym for none: an unresearched territory does not inherit the metropolitan arrangement.
Sources
Sources
Police Act 1996, section 1 (Police areas) — legislation.gov.uk
The National Archives (United Kingdom) · Legislation · link verified 2026-09-18
SCOPE: the division of England and Wales into police areas. The official consolidated text, read directly. Supports that “England and Wales shall be divided into police areas” and that those areas are the ones listed in Schedule 1 together with the metropolitan police district and the City of London police area. The section is shown as extending to England and Wales (E+W). The extent marker is an anchor: this platform relies on it, so a run that no longer finds it fails.
The National Archives (United Kingdom) · Legislation · link verified 2026-09-18
SCOPE: the statutory guarantee of judicial independence. The official consolidated text, read directly. Supports that the Lord Chancellor, other Ministers of the Crown and all with responsibility for matters relating to the judiciary or otherwise to the administration of justice must uphold the continued independence of the judiciary, and that subsection (2) disapplies the duty where imposing it would be within the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament. The section is shown as extending to the whole United Kingdom (U.K.), and the Scottish carve-out inside it is the reason a U.K. extent does not mean a uniform rule.