Last updated on October 13th, 2023 at 08:32 pm
Last updated on October 13th, 2023 at 08:32 pm
Reading Time: 3 minutesApologies for the delay, but I appear to have survived moving this blog site to another host, so off we go. Just over a month ago, at the end of March, the Police Uplift Programme reached its end. Its intention was to add 20,000 extra officers to the world of Policing in England and Wales. Did they succeed?
The final update for the Police Uplift Programme doesn’t include all of the workforce data I would like to see so I’ll have to wait until July time to make an absolutely final assessment of the PUP, but I’ll do my best to put some context on it until then.
Did they reach their target? Yes they did, in a fashion. They managed to recruit 20,951 extra officers under PUP. A relatively small number of officers (188) were also recruited under the Policing Precept. However, I can’t really make my mind up how successful they have really been. In order to recruit 20,951 ‘extra’ officers thety actually recruited 40,208, but the 19,257 difference includes PUP recruits that have quit, retirements, voluntary resignations etc.
As I said previously, I won’t be able to update the workforce stats until July time, but the last time I looked Policing looked like this
A year ago, in March 2022, the Police Uplift Programme, together with other factors, had led to a massive increase in officers with less than 5 years service. 12 months later, that can only have got worse.
The majority of the new recruits have been aged Under 26.
As can be seen in the fig above, the number of officers in the Under 26 group has just about doubled over three years, but these are not the final figures, only up to December 31 2022.
So, how did all the Forces do? How many hit their target?
Amazingly 42 out of 43 Forces achieved the target that they had been set. The Met missed their target by very nearly the size of a small County Force, at 1,889 short.
At this point I should give ALL the credit for the below table to Mark Brown as I CBA to replicate it, it’s been a too stressful couple of days (Sorry Mark, let me know if you want me to delete it)
Finally, no decent post on Policing would be very exciting without addressing the issue of Diversity
Briefly
Gender
Male 30.3%
Female 18.1%
Non Binary 0.01%
Preferred to Self Describe 0.1%
Preferred Not To Say 1.1%
Not Stated 50.4%
Ethnicity
White – 85.3%
Black 1.6%
Asian 5.2%
Mixed 3.3%
Preferred not to say 3.3%
Not Recorded 2.2%
The ‘official’ figures are less than perfect but, in my opinion, they haven’t really done a whole lot to address the thorny issue of Diversity, and over 50% seemingly chose not to state what their gender is.
Despite the title of this post, I WILL address the total workforce figures whan the March 2023 stats are released (July I believe)
