POLICE have announced major changes to the Tri-force arrangements Wiltshire has with two other counties.

The county’s police force backed out of an arrangement that would have seen command and control of key roles such as firearm deployment moving to another force.

The announcement was made by Police Crime Commissioner Angus Macpherson, who said: “It’s coming to an end because when we tried to develop it and move it forward there were one or two things not acceptable to the force and certainly not acceptable to me.

One example was armed policing. He said: “As the person that is elected by the people of Wiltshire and Swindon, I want to hold someone to account when someone pulls the trigger and shoots someone.”

He said if the person he needs to speak to “is the Chief Constable of another area, I have no relationship with them to ask why did you do that? No formal way of holding them to account.”

Chief Constable Kier Pritchard said the collaboration model that was set up in 2014 with Gloucestershire and Avon and Somerset was one where they would share resources, but it had become clear that without shared systems it was highly difficult to administer.

It meant that without a common IT platform officers could not see what resource they had available. “A duty inspector coming on duty in the Tri Force would not be able to electronically see all the people on duty, all the skills and disciplines they had because they had three different systems.”

Officers in the Tri Force would returned to the Wiltshire fold yesterday. The Chief Constable said that to continue with the roll out would have been at a risk to the force because it would have meant that control of the Tri Force would have been passed to Avon and Somerset.

“That was when it became a question of whether that was something we were prepared to release. I had always had the command and control of firearms operation, but in the new model parts of the decision making would go out of the area.”

He said Wiltshire would continue to partner to the two other counties in other areas such as murder investigations, counter-terrorism, forensics, intelligence and training.