Home Office
Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to speak to you today.
I am extremely sorry that I cant be with you in person. I have just come back to the Home Office from a meeting at No.10 with the Prime Minister, and unfortunately when the Prime Minister asks for a meeting its not really optional, and so I was not able to get from No.10 to Stratford-upon-Avon in 20 minutes.
But I would love to be with you next year, and all else being equal I would especially like to come and speak in person, wherever it is held in 2024.
One of the most important aspects of the job that I do is to listen to policing at all ranks, at all levels and across the country to understand where there are barriers that are stopping you doing your job as well as you would like to, and to try and then address whatever problems and barriers may be. I see my role as, amongst other things, the voice of policing in government.
The Police Superintendents Association is a vital part of that. I am very grateful to Paul, Harvi and all of your members for the conversations and discussions we have. I meet with Paul and Dan on a regular basis and always listen to what they have to say and, I hope, often act on their lessons and prompting, and as Paul kindly mentioned in his speech.
Superintendents and Chief Superintendents play a vital role in front-line leadership. You are running the units, the BCUs and other units that are delivering front line policing, and so you are a critical part of policing, you are the glue that holds together the entire policing system.
I see this in my own neighbourhood in South Croydon, Im a Member of Parliament in Croydon, and I work closely with our BCU Commander, Chief Superintendent Andy Brittain and with our new Borough Superintendent Mitch Carr, and I can see the difference that Andy and Mitch are making in Croydon to the way that policing is run.
So I completely see the way your leadership is critical to the way the public get kept safe. And of course we should keep in mind that there is no society, no civilisation without the role that policing perform. Because, without public safety, without law and order we cannot have a functioning society, so I think the work you and your colleagues do up and down the country every day is amongst the most important work any public servants undertake, and that is why public safety, people often say, is the first duty of the state.
I think British policing at its best is truly world class. We saw, for example, both at the funeral of Her Majesty the Late Queen about this time last year and in the coronation a few months ago.
We saw policing, I think, at its best, facilitating those events that passed off safely. The eyes of the world were upon us, and despite the fact there were very specific intelligence reports that we had in the 24-48 hours before the coronation in particular of plots to disrupt proceedings, police responded, I think, fantastically in making that event of huge national significant pass off without significant incident.
I think the Metropolitan Police who led the operation, Thames Valley in Windsor, NPOC, and all of those forces, probably every force in the country who provided mutual aid, did a fantastic job in making sure that event of national significance went so well.
Like Paul, and many people here probably, I was at the Police Bravery Awards a few weeks ago, in fact in July, hearing about not just the fantastic job that the police do in keeping the public safe but about the sacrifices that many individual officers make in the line of duty, and the stories of extraordinary courage were extremely moving.
I saw and met officers who had tackled criminals who were armed with knives or guns, in one case with explosives, and those officers put themselves in the line of danger to disarm those criminals at huge personal risk. There were officers from the West Midlands who had gone onto a frozen lake in an effort to rescue children who were drowning.
Extraordinary stories of bravery from around the country. And of course as Paul mentioned, I am sure on all of our minds today is the memory of Sergeant Graham Saville of the Nottinghamshire force who, just a week or two ago, made the ultimate sacrifice, gave his life in the line of duty, trying to save, in fact successfully saving the life of a member of the public on a railway track, and I know that our thoughts and prayers will be with Sargeant Savilles family at what must be an awfully, awfully difficult time. I know he had two young children as you probably know.
Im sure all of us have seen these kind of sacrifices. As a Croydon MP I think constantly about Sargeant Matt Ratana who was murdered in the custody suite in Croydon and of course, as a Member of Parliament, I remember PC Keith Palmer who lost his life protecting Parliament, and therefore protecting our democracy.
Those are some examples of the exceptional, the ultimate sacrifice made in the line of duty, but I know every day police officers put themselves in danger to protect the rest of us, to keep the public safe.
So I would like to start by saying that, on behalf of the government, the public and my constituency in Croydon, a huge thankyou for the work you do to keep us safe. The bravery, the dedication and the sacrifice that you make, so thank you.
So Paul talked a bit in his speech about resources and police officer numbers, and that is an important topic. And clearly you cannot do your job properly as leaders in the police force without the resources you need, and that of course starts with police officer numbers, and that has been debated a lot.
Speaking from where we are today, as of March 31 this year we had 149,566 officers across England and Wales, which has gone up by about 20,000. It has gone up by 20,591 in the last three years, which has more than made up for the challenges that existed in the years immediately after 2010.
So we now have three and a half thousand, 3,542 to be precise, 3,500 more officers than we had before, including in the Met which has about 35,000 officers, thats about 2,000 more than it had before, which I think does help with that neighbourhood policing work that Paul spoke about and I completely support, and that is one of the places that we would like to see those extra officers getting deployed.
Its also meant your ranks can be reinforced, so again in London every borough now has a dedicated Superintendent, its Mitch Carr in Croydon as well as the Chief Superintendent commanding the various BCUs, but I think adding Borough Superintendents for all of Londons 32 boroughs is important and I hope other boroughs around the country take a careful look at that as well.
So I would like to again say thank you to all the people here, the Superintendents, the Chief Superintendents who were involved in that recruitment campaign to hit those record numbers.
We are now very keen to maintain those record officer numbers going forward and we have designed the financial package that Police and Crime Commissioners receive to make sure the resources are there to maintain those officer numbers.
Im very conscious that the recruitment programme means that a high proportion of officers are relatively new. So to get those 21,000 next extra offices in three years, we had to actually hire about 48,000 offices to obviously backfill the turnover in those three years.
So about a third of officers have less than about three and a half years experience. So that is obviously quite a large proportion, because Im very conscious of the need to properly train them, mentor them, bring them on.
So anything we can do to encourage more experienced officers, particularly those at the 30 year service point, just to stay a little bit longer in the service, even a couple of years, two or three years, just to impart their experience to the next generation is useful and I know that chief officers, Chief Constables do have the ability to fund pension abatement issues in order to make sure that the financial incentive for more experienced officers can be put in place, if that would make a difference.
And I would also echo the points that Paul made about the importance of wellbeing. Obviously policing can be quite a stressful job, emotionally in terms of mental health as well as the physical danger involved and I touched upon earlier so the work of the Police Wellbeing Board is something I take extremely seriously, and Paul sits on that as well.
And there is a lot more I think we can do. Weve got a chief medical officer for policing now. But there is a lot more we can do, I think to make sure were supporting officers on all ranks, in doing this very difficult and very challenging job.
So I think weve got some good news there on police numbers, but Im also very keen to make sure that we are reducing and removing the burdens that can sometimes take time from frontline policing.
And when I was first appointed about a year ago, I spoke to a lot of officers, from front-line officers through to borough commanders to BCU commanders through to Chief Constables and the Met Commissioner, and I heard a few consistent messages, things theyve been asking me to go and try and sort out and one of those was to do with the bureaucracy of the Home Office Counting Rules.
Now Im very keen that we dont spend excessive or unnecessary time , essentially, bureaucracy. Obviously, we need to count crime properly, but we need to make sure its done in a way that is proportionate and doesnt take up too much time. So we made some changes just a few months ago in response to those requests.
For example, removing the need to double record or multiply recorded crimes around stalking, har