The home secretary has announced a blueprint for reforming what she called the “broken” policing model in England and Wales.

Shabana Mahmood confirmed the shake-up will create a new National Police Service (NPS) to fight the most complex cross-border crime and could also see the number of local forces in England and Wales cut by around two-thirds.

She told the House of Commons she also intends to make better use of technology – including the “largest-ever rollout of facial recognition”.

“This government’s reforms will ensure we have the right policing in the right place,” Mahmood said.

“I set out reforms that are long overdue and define a new model for policing in this country, with local policing that protects our communities and national policing that protects us all.”

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said the Tories would oppose the plans to merge forces and said “huge forces will be remote from the communities they serve – with resources going towards the cities”.

Philp said the home secretary’s statement “was striking for what it did not say”, blaming the Labour government for falling national police numbers.

Mahmood previously unveiled plans in November to get rid of elected Police and Crime Commissioners, and recently spoke of plans to create a “British FBI” which she said will free up forces to tackle everyday crime.

The home secretary also confirmed on Monday that she wants to create a licence to practice for police officers similar to the one for doctors, and to give herself the power to remove a chief constable for poor performance.

The proposed new NPS will bring together the existing National Crime Agency (NCA) and Counter Terrorism Policing.

It will also include some functions currently carried out by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), the National Police Air Service (NPAS), and the College of Policing and will be responsible for delivering a national forensics service.

Mahmood told Parliament the NPS will be run by a National Police Commissioner accountable to the home secretary.

Officials say that they hope to have the NPS fully operational some time in the next parliament.

Supporting the proposed new NPS and its wide remit, Graeme Biggar, the director general of the National Crime Agency said: “The threat is changing, it is becoming more complex and more interconnected.

“Terrorism, hostile state threats, and organised crime gangs increasingly overlap.”

The plan to reduce the number of forces is driven by a desire to reduce duplication, and to reduce the huge disparities in performance between forces.

Scotland merged its eight forces in April 2013 to create Police Scotland. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) was established in November 2001. It replaced the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) as part of the Good Friday Agreement reforms.

A Home Office source told the BBC: “The charge rate for home burglary is 2.8% Hertfordshire and 13% in South Wales. Where you live determines the service you get from your force.”

Home Office sources insist that reducing the number of forces will not make policing less local.

Mahmood’s new proposals are titled “From Local to National: A New Model for Policing” and the ambition is to provide a police service council ward by council ward.”

In order to help local police officers the government is promising to cut “excessive” bureaucracy so that officers are no long “fighting crime with one hand tied behind their backs”.

The changes come at a time when the Home Office said “public confidence in the police is falling” and that “police performance has declined”.

Officials hope to pass the legislation to make police mergers more straightforward in this parliament and to get through at least one “pathfinder” merger before the next election.

But they concede the majority of mergers would happen in the next parliament.

Elsewhere, the Home Office is funding 40 more Live Facial Recognition vans after the technology proved successful in South Wales and London.

There are also plans to set up a new National Centre for AI in policing.

The idea is to develop new AI tools for police officers to help with things like going through CCTV footage and transcribing and redacting documents.