Police will be able to boost the number of detectives by up to
1,000 in the next 5 years following new government funding to
develop a national training programme.
The Home Office will work with Police Now, an award-winning
police graduate recruitment programme, to develop the scheme.
The Home Office is providing £2.8 million to support Police Now
in 2018 to 2019 and will provide an additional £350,000 seed
funding for the detective entry programme.
The programme will include digital training to ensure that
recruits are equipped to deal with the changing nature of modern
crime. It will also focus on problem solving, crime prevention
and safeguarding so that detectives on the scheme meet the needs
of forces and communities.
Minister for Policing and the Fire Service said:
Detectives are the fact-finders of our police service. They
play an important role in bringing criminals to justice and
getting to the bottom of complex crimes.
I’m keen to get more new detectives trained up, so I’m
delighted to support this innovative Police Now programme,
which will bring in new talent, train detectives in a matter of
months and complement other measures that the government and
police are taking to keep the public safe.
The programme will include an expanded version of the innovative
summer academy model which Police Now uses to offer accelerated
neighbourhood officer training.
Together these steps will help to ensure forces are matching the
capacity and capability of their workforce to the demands they
face, while also recruiting more people directly into specialist
roles via accelerated training programmes.
David Spencer, co-founder and chief executive of Police Now,
said:
As a former detective myself, I understand the positive impact
that detectives can have on reducing crime, increasing
confidence in communities and protecting the most vulnerable in
society.
Working with forces and the Home Office, we hope this new
scheme will encourage a new group of diverse and brilliant
individuals to enter the police service and contribute to the
outstanding work being done by existing detectives up and down
the country.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of
Policing are also leading work on providing a national assessment
of detectives and developing sustainable solutions to ensure that
forces have adequate investigative capacity.
Chief Constable Matt Jukes, the NPCC’s National Lead for
Detectives, said:
Detectives do a vital job investigating crimes, apprehending
offenders and protecting people from harm. The complex nature
of investigations and our work to protect vulnerable people has
made the role of detectives more challenging than ever.
In order to mirror the changing nature of crime, we need to
recruit and develop a diverse group of individuals, who will
contribute to this vital area of policing and its future,
underlining the critical nature of effective investigations to
public confidence and trust.
Police Now is a national police recruitment programme which
started in the Metropolitan Police. The former Home Secretary
granted more than £5 million to the scheme in 2016, which enabled
Police Now to expand and become an independent charity supporting
multiple police forces across the country.
Police Now currently operates across 25 forces in England and
Wales, and was recognised as offering the best learning and
development initiative in the public and third sector by the
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) in
September 2017.
