Does The Met Have A Recruitment/Retention Problem?

Last updated on November 5th, 2023 at 06:39 pm

Last updated on November 5th, 2023 at 06:39 pm

Does the Met have a Recruitment/Retention problem? I didn’t really think so until very recenttly.  The savagery of Theresa May’s cuts caught up with them eventually, but apart from that I didn’t really think that they had a specific problem.

However, a serving officer contacted me recently, to inform me that, for the first time in its history, the Met had recruited……….nobody.  That was enough to spark my interest, so I tracked down the Met’s latest workforce statistics.

For August this year, what I had been told was more or less true, there had been NO direct recruitment whatsoever,  The only new entrants into the Met were Transfers and Rejoins.

It is also true that average rate of attrition over the past 10 years has been 6.4%, peaking in 2018/19 at 7.7%.  I’ll leave it to individual readers to decide whether or not that is a ‘Healthy Churn’.

For the remainder of the stats I have crunched the numbers into a series of charts, sho0wing what is happening with the entire Met ‘family’.  Hopefully that will be quicker and clearer than me trying to explain them all, and will be obvious.

At the risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious, with the exception of the Specials, all groups are showing an increase in Joiners, but also an increase in the Leavers.  The Specials are currently experiencing more Leavers than Joiners, and the Civil Staff, whilst overall levels are on the rise, they have not yet got back to where the were pre #Austerity.

Taking a closer look at the Leavers, more are joining than leaving, but their reasons for leaving should be worrying to the management (and the Mayor).

The things that would worry me about the last two charts (no more, honest) is that the largest group on both sectors is Voluntary Resignation.

In years gone by that would have been unheard of but various versions of this government, led by Cameroan and May post 2010, have eroded Ts and Cs, in particular the Pension Scheme, so there is no incentive to stay on any more.   Which is exactly what NPCC and the Collage wanted when they launched their Healthy Churn idea.

To answer my own question, it would seem that the Met does currently have a problem with Recruitment and Retention, which will probably suit the Home Office very well.  I can’t tell you if other Forces are suffering a similar problem as most Forces only publish their Workforce Data twice a year.

I have written previously about the problems with staffing the Met, but it’s even worse when you look at the whole family.  I have also mentioned in passing that the Met was the only Force in the country not to recruit their target number of ‘New’ officers. For that, the Home Office withheld £31 Million of funding

For many reasons, as far as the Met is concerned, TJF.  Who would want to join or stay with so many people (IOPC) looking to do your legs at every opportunity.