MPA welcomes boost in police numbers

94/02
17 September 2002

Welcoming the Home Secretary David Blunkett’s announcement of a record number of police officers since 1921, currently 129,603 nationwide, Toby Harris, Chair of the MPA, said:

“We at the MPA our doing our bit by providing more and more police officers in London. Over the first two years of our existence, we have reversed the decline in police officer numbers seen in London over the previous ten years.

“We are not quite as well off as the rest of the country: London has not yet got more officers than ever before. But we intend to keep up the drive until, very soon, we can say the same.

“The Met achieved remarkable success in 2001/2002 by meeting and surpassing increasingly challenging recruitment targets, with 2,748 new recruits joining the Met compared to 1,350 the year before. This is an increase almost equivalent to taking on a medium sized police service like Kent or Sussex.

“At present there are 27,027 Met officers and we are confident that this figure will rise to 28,000 by the end of April 2003.”

New initiatives and processes have all contributed to a 104% increase in the number of recruits joining Hendon Training School compared to the year before.

The MPA has recently set up a taskforce, led by Deputy Chair David Muir, to examine new ways of increasing the number of recruits from visible ethnic minority groups so that the Met is more representative of London’s diverse communities.

Toby Harris also welcomed the “Blueprint to put Bobbies back on the beat”, the final report of the Policing Bureaucracy task force chaired by Sir David O’Dowd.

“We are acutely aware that fear of crime is a major problem for Londoners. We have tackled this problem, with the Met, by increasing the visible presence of policing on the streets of London.

“Anything that speeds up this process, like Sir David’s imaginative proposals, surely has to be good news.”

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