Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 5
5
Accepted in Part
Despite their successes so far, the Department and its partners face a challenging final year...
Recommendation
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.
Government Response 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.
Government Response
Accepted in Part
HM Government
Accepted in Part
The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Recommendation implemented The government agrees with the recommendation to respond to the Macpherson report and the need for police forces to be representative of the communities they serve. The government’s response to ‘The Macpherson Report: twenty-two years on’ was published on 26 May 2022. Through the Police Uplift Programme, the government has made significant improvements to workforce data, created an inclusive campaign and worked directly with forces on outreach, engagement and sharing best practice. The previous Policing Minister has written to forces, challenging them to fully exploit the opportunity uplift provides to make improvements to force representation levels. These letters compared progress between forces, demonstrating the ministerial drive to make diversity improvements. The data was also reviewed at the National Policing Board in March 2021. Diverse recruitment is not an exercise in meeting a quota – it is about making lasting improvements to diversity and inclusion in policing. For this reason, the government does not agree that the setting of diversity recruitment targets is the right lever to support forces recruitment and retention practices however the oversight of progress across all forces is critical. Population demographics vary by force area and each force should be striving to be representative of the communities it serves. Forces are maximising the opportunity to increase their representation, Across the service, 8.1% of officers are from ethnic minority groups. Across new intakes since April 2020, 11.7% of new recruits are from ethnic minority groups. Forces will be able to build on the work of the uplift programme beyond its lifetime to continue to grow their representation.