A £230 million plan to speed up police response times announced in the Budget could see drones used as “first responders” to major incidents.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said on Wednesday the technology must be deployed “where appropriate”.
As part of the Treasury reforms, police will use drones to assess incidents such as traffic collisions.
Live video and information will be fed back to control rooms to help forces decide the seriousness and resources required to deal with it.
Drone units often assist police divers in operations to find missing people believed to have fallen into the water.
The Metropolitan Police use them to monitor pro-Palestine supporters marching in central London calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The funding may see other changes to emergency services, including allowing victims to report crimes by video call and artificial intelligence to cut admin scan times by a third.
AI will be used on the 101 non-emergency service to triage callers.
Mr Hunt told the Commons: “So we will spend £230m rolling out time and money saving technology which speeds up police response time by allowing people to report crimes by video call and where appropriate use drones as first responders.”
He added: “Violence Reduction Units and hot spot policing have prevented an estimated 136,000 knife crimes and other violent offences as well as over 3,000 hospital admissions since funding began in 2019.
“Every crime costs money - so we will provide £75m to roll that model out in England and Wales.
“Police officers waste around eight hours a week on unnecessary admin – with higher productivity, we could free up time equivalent to 20,000 officers over a year.”
