Officer Recruitment Must Continue During Pandemic

1 June 2020

Essex Police Federation says it fears that any green shoots the Government has promised “may be cut”, as the Police Minister admits the recruitment of 20,000 additional police officers over three years could be threatened by the Covid-19 crisis.

Police Minister Kit Malthouse said that just over 3,000 new officers have been recruited so far across England and Wales. The drive to hire an additional 20,000 officers was designed to reverse the 20,000+ fall between 2010-2019.

There are now 3,293 police officers in Essex; up more than 200 since last year. Essex Police Federation started the Cuts Have Consequences campaign in 2015, which has helped raise awareness about the severity of past budget cuts.

Federation Chairman Steve Taylor said: “Austerity cut us too deeply, too quickly, and it severely hampered our ability to deliver the very best that we can with the resources we had available. Those green shoots, we fear that they’re going to be cut.

“We fear that’s a possible consequence of the pandemic. We are well into a programme of recruitment and with that comes new financial pressures for the organisation. So for the Government at this point to even kind of contemplate withdrawing the financial support that leads to these 20,000 new officers, I think it’s irresponsible.

“You can’t just go to the cupboard and produce a police officer. It takes time and it takes a level of investment to train and deploy officers on the frontline who are capable of doing the very challenging, difficult job of being a police officer in this country.”

Steve said that it was important for the public to see police officers on the beat because “sometimes you need to see something to believe it”. He said the visibility of officers was linked to public confidence in policing.

He continued: “The complexity of policing means a lot of it is online, it’s out of sight, so it’s important that our communities know that police are there. We have to be visible.”