5
Recommendation
Fifteenth Report - The Police Uplift Pr…
Accepted in Part
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 …
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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 Police Uplift Programme 7 • 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.
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Government response AI summary
The government agrees to respond to the Macpherson report and the need for police forces to be representative of the communities they serve; it has published a response and made improvements to workforce data, but does not agree with setting diversity recruitment targets.
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HM Treasury
6
Recommendation
Fifteenth Report - The Police Uplift Pr…
Accepted in Part
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 …
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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. 8 The Police Uplift Programme 1 Progress of the Police Uplift Programme
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Government response AI summary
The government agrees to implement a framework to evaluate the medium to long-term impact of the Programme by Autumn 2022, alongside a performance framework to reduce crime and improve public confidence. They will continue to share relevant analysis from the Programme and work with partners …
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HM Treasury