Home Office and wider CJS face significant challenges to realise promises of uplift in police numbers, say MPs

In a report today PAC welcomes a Home Office programme “which looks to be on track” to deliver a promised 20,000 uplift in police officer numbers but warns that reaching the final year’s target will be “challenging” - and realising the benefits of more police may be much more so.  

The government promised that the additional 20,000 officers would help to cut crime, get criminals off the street and keep people safe – but the Committee says focus to date has been “on getting people through the door” with “the way officers have been assigned to forces out of date by at least 7 years”.   

To reach the programme’s final target the Home Office must recruit an additional 6,500 officers by March 2023, at a time when the labour market is changing and public trust and confidence in policing, particularly London, has been damaged.

There is a “pressing need to reform aspects of police culture and make forces more representative of the communities they serve” but the recent Strategic Review of Policing concluded that the police uplift programme was “having a negligible impact on workforce diversity”.  

 Dame Meg Hillier MP, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said:  

“If the Home Office does hit its target of 20,000 new police officers by March 2023 the PAC will be delighted to be able to recognise a programme delivered on time, and see government learn lessons for other programmes.  

“But it appears this success will only be on the narrowest metric of numbers through the door – the process for assigning which force’s door these recruits go through is years out of date and the exercise does not appear to have progressed the urgent need to make forces more representative of the communities they serve.  

“If the promises of this recruitment are met, there will be a substantial increase in the number of criminal prosecutions brought before the courts which PAC recently reported are already facing a record and worsening backlog of cases. The Home Office and the wider criminal justice system do not yet seem to fully understand the extent of this impact and the serious risk it poses to any promised gains, in terms of cutting crime and increasing public safety, from the increased police numbers.” 

PAC report conclusions and recommendations: 

1. The Department has so far successfully met its objectives for the Programme. Forces have recruited 13,500 additional officers against the target of 12,000 by the end of March 2022. Fundamental to this achievement has been the Programme’s tightly defined objectives and high degree of collaboration across the Home Office and policing bodies. The Programme is being managed by a joint team made up of staff drawn from across these bodies. The makeup of the programme team has remained stable, which has not always been the case on other Departmental programmes we have examined. The Department recognises the potential for other major programmes - both in the Home Office and government more widely - to learn from the Programme. It has also committed to identifying what lessons it can learn about how police forces recruit, train and deploy police officers. 

Recommendation: The Department should systematically capture and disseminate lessons from what has worked with this programme to benefit its major programme portfolio and policing more widely. It should summarise and publish these lessons by April 2023 to support learning across government. 

2. The Programme has demonstrated the value of standardising recruitment practices across police forces. Our work has repeatedly highlighted the importance of collaboration between police forces and consistency in their approaches in improving value for money. The creation of the Programme has helped converge standards and approaches relating to recruitment and training across the 43 police forces in England and Wales. This included the adoption of a single online assessment process and a standardised vetting process to improve the consistency of decision making. This standardisation is welcome, and hints at what might be possible beyond the scope of the Programme. 

Recommendation: The Department and the NPCC should identify and pursue other opportunities for standardisation across policing (for example procurement and IT) to achieve better value for money while respecting operational autonomy. It should outline in its Treasury Minute response which other areas of policing have the potential to benefit from a more joined up approach across forces, and how and by when this could be achieved. 

3. We are not yet convinced that the new training routes introduced by the College of Policing best meet the needs of police forces. The College of Policing introduced the Police Education and Qualifications Framework (PEQF) in 2016 and initially planned for the new approach to be fully in place by December 2019. In part due to the unprecedented number of new police officers under the Programme, the transition has now extended to April 2023. The PEQF requires new officers to either hold or to earn a degree as they train. Most forces have already begun using the PEQF. However, views among stakeholders differ about whether it is necessary or desirable for all police officers to hold or work towards qualification at, or equivalent to, a degree-level, and whether this requirement could exclude or deter some from joining the police, irrespective of the route taken to achieve that qualification. 

Recommendation: The College of Policing should review the impact of the Police Education and Qualifications Framework to ensure it meets the needs of both new police officers and their forces. It should outline when it will publish the results of this assessment in the Treasury Minute response.   

4. We are concerned that the distribution of new officers may not give police forces what they need to respond to the demands they face. The Department has set recruitment targets for each police force based on the Police Allocation Formula (the Formula). But it was already significantly out of date when we last examined it in 2018. We are disappointed that four years later the Department has failed to act. The Department asserts that, in the absence of an alternative, it is confident that this was the right approach to allocate new recruits to forces but recognises that it nonetheless needs to update the Formula. Using this formula will also result in some police forces having a greater number of police headcount than previous highpoints, and other forces continuing to be smaller even after the uplift. The Metropolitan Police, for example, is expected to be 11 per cent higher on headcount when compared to 2010 at the end of the programme whilst West Midlands Police will be 7 per cent smaller.  The Department has committed to working with forces to manage the implications of any imbalances or gaps when it eventually revises the Formula but this could result in some forces having to reduce officer numbers to ‘right size’ based on the new formula, whilst other forces continue to recruit. More broadly, the recruitment of 20,000 additional new police officers will focus on entry level officers rather than those with specialist skills and experience.    

Recommendation: The Department should set out, as part of its Treasury Minute response, by when it will revise the funding formula and how it will support forces in transitioning to their funding allocation under the new approach. 

5. Despite their successes so far, the Department and its partners face a challenging final year to deliver the remainder of the Programme. We are encouraged that the Programme met and exceeded its second-year target of recruiting 12,000 additional officers. To achieve the 20,000 extra officers promised, it still needs to recruit a further 6,500 before 31 March 2023. As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy recovers, the employment market is becoming increasingly competitive. Furthermore, the debate about public trust and confidence in policing in places like London has put the Department in a more difficult position than before. There is a tension between recruiting more officers quickly and supporting police forces as they diversify their workforce. The Department has not set targets for the Programme for the recruitment of officers from ethnic minority groups or ensuring that forces are representative of the communities they serve, instead leaving this to individual forces to manage. The recent Strategic Review of Policing concluded that the Programme was having a negligible impact on workforce diversity; while the Department does not believe that to be the case, it does acknowledge that it would have wanted the Programme to have had a greater impact on diversity.

Recommendation: The Department and its partners should assist forces in monitoring their workforce by including within each statistical release on progress a table setting out the diversity of individual police forces compared to that of their local populations. 

The Department should also respond to the Home Affairs Select Committee report The McPherson report – twenty-two years on’, particularly the recommendations relating to targets for the recruitment and retention of officers from ethnic minority groups and staff and ensuring that police forces are representative of the communities they serve. 

6. Government has not yet set out what impact the Programme will have on forces’ ability to tackle crime, the public’s trust in policing or the wider Criminal Justice System. The success of the Programme to date is in part due to its tight focus on recruiting 20,000 additional officers. But the public, whose taxes will ultimately fund the £18.5 billion cost of the officers over the next 10 years, will expect to see the promised reductions in crime and improved public safety. The Department estimates that the new officers will help prevent around 505,000 crimes from 2024-25. But an additional 729,000 cases could also enter the criminal justice system as a result of the new officers and result in more convictions. Maximising the impact of the new officers will depend on the resilience and effectiveness of the Criminal Justice System as a whole. The backlog of cases in criminal courts has already increased significantly due to the Covid-19 pandemic and is expected to remain high without significant change. The arrival of 20,000 additional officers will further increase pressure on criminal courts, which are already facing backlogs, as we have reported previously

Recommendation: The Department should: 

• By April 2023, develop a framework to evaluate the medium to long-term impact of the Programme, so that it can demonstrate that the objectives to reduce crime and improve public confidence in policing have been achieved; and
• In its Treasury Minute response, set out how it is working with partners in the Criminal Justice System to provide regular and ongoing analysis on the downstream impacts of the new officers to support better planning and demand management.