Police Uplift Programme – Almost The End

Last updated on October 14th, 2023 at 11:24 am

Last updated on October 14th, 2023 at 11:24 am

Boris Johnson’s Vanity Project, otherwise known as the Police Uplift Programme comes to an end at the end of this week. Chances are, not long after, we’ll have the Home Secretary and the Policing Minister, maybe even Rishi, the College and NPCC,queueing up to get on Breakfast TV to crow about how successful it has been.

I thought I’d get in first, I don’t need to wait till the weekend.

So, I have written this;

Any day now the government will be all over our TVs and newspapers telling us how successful the #PoliceUpliftProgramme has been, meaning that they have succeeded in giving us 20,000 ‘extra’ Police Officers. In September 2010, just after Cameron managed to form a coalition,

England and Wales had a grand total of 140,253
officers, not including BTP. They promised us 20,000 more by 31st March 2023. Well they really need to bet a wriggle on. The latest freely available total is for 31st December 2022.

The total number of Police Officers in E&W on that date was 145,658. In round numbers just about 5,500 more. They must have absolutely smashed it in that past 3 months.

The government will no doubt crow about how successful they have been, but their world commences in 2019 after years of ‘Austerity’ cuts. They may well have succeeded, by any number of dubious methods, in increasing the vastly depleted total in 2019, but the Cuts commenced many years before.

Hardly 20,000 ‘Extra’ officers, no wonder they have subtly changed it to ‘New’.