Recommendation 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 But it was already significantly out of date when we last examined it in 2018.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.