Continuing the theme of exploring the latest police workforce statistics, let’s explore officer numbers across ranks and functions. In this Part 4 finale of the series, we’ll explore promotions and see how the volume of Sergeants, Inspectors and more senior ranks compare against PCs over the years. But I’ll also dive into how Chief Officers are prioritising their available cops, comparing the changing frontline and back office functions.
As a reminder, here’s a quick look back at Parts 1-3 in this interest piece series…
- In Part 1, I started with the big picture, sharing the total officer strength across the UK and Ireland by country and force, comparisons against population growth, the police staff and PCSOs situation, plus a focused update on the Met Police.
- For Part 2, we dove into diversity, including the representation of female officers, minority ethnic comparisons, changes over time, equality of promotion, the impossible challenge of representing the public exactly, plus other protected characteristics in other UK forces.
- Then in Part 3, I looked at the churn of officer leavers and joiners in England and Wales, the growth in resignations, officer length of service, demographic differences, other reasons for leaving, and the challenges of junior leadership inexperience.
Officer Strength by Rank
First, let’s take a look at England and Wales police officer strength across the ranks. In the below suite of charts, I track the officer FTE (excluding long term secondments or absence) for England and Wales from the official police workforce statistics.
In Part 1 I reported record high overall police strength at nearly 148,000 FTE in 2024, a few hundred higher than 2023. The slight increase however comes from all the leadership ranks, from Sergeant through to Chief Officers. The volume of Police Constables dipped by 1,000 officers.
The growth in the leadership ranks perhaps reflects the lag effect of promotions following the officer ‘Uplift’ of recent years. As Chief Constable Craig Guildford QPM puts it in my recent exclusive podcast interview with him:
“The service has recruited at pace and probably has had to promote at pace as well.”
The steep rise in Sergeant promotions in recent years reflects the steep rise in PCs to supervise. Inspector and Chief Inspector growth has also caught up with or surpassed the peaks of 2009-10. The growth in the Superintending ranks has been slower and steadier. Chief Officer strength however is now at record levels (245), with a long term increasing trend over the last 25 years, interrupted only by the austere years of the last decade.
Promotion, Promotion, Promotion…
There have been well over 50,000 officer promotions since the Home Office began recording them in 2007. Rank Success exists to support officers with promotion and leadership CPD. But how many promotions are there in England and Wales forces and what’s the competition looking like? In the below chart I’ve summarised the available promotions data by rank. During the particularly austere years of 2011-2016, promotion competition ramped up as promotion opportunities halved.
The last few years however have seen promotions hit record volumes, averaging around 4,000 per year (note however that the 2017/18 to 2019/20 counts are suppressed owing to lack of data from the Met Police). As you’d expect, these promotions were predominantly across the Federated ranks of Sergeant, Inspector, and Chief Inspector. Rank Success played a significant role in many of those!
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One notable thing about the overall promotion figures is that diving in to forces, there’s great variation between the years. This is in addition to the ‘postcode lottery’ I’ve previously described in terms of how forces choose to promote people!
For some forces, this means massive swings from a handful of promotions one year to dozens or even hundreds the next. Leicestershire, Wiltshire, Staffordshire, West Mids, Avon and Somerset, and Greater Manchester seem particularly volatile over the past decade. Could this volatility indicate a lack of forward planning, with forces every few years realising they suddenly need to mass-promote to fill leadership gaps? Conversely, Thames Valley Police, Durham, Dyfed Powys, Hampshire, North Yorkshire, and Merseyside seem somewhat more consistent year in year out.
On average, forces promote around 20 Chief Officers annually. The record was 40 in the year to March 2022. Around 150 officers are promoted to Superintendent each year, with a surge in 2022/23 to 242. That same year saw a record 2,661 Sergeants promoted.
Promotion Diversity – Sex and Ethnicity
While overall diversity is important for police representation, so is the rate at which underrepresented groups are being promoted into leadership positions. The Home Office provide promotion data for the protected characteristics of Sex and Race (with the latter inferred via the limited definition of ethnic appearance).
Female Officer Promotions
Overall, 33% of police officer promotions last year were female. That’s slightly below the current general officer representation whereby 35% of all officers are female, although is the highest since recording began in 2006/07 when the ratio was 20%
But given the erratic nature of promotion within and between forces each year, it helps to gauge things over a slightly longer timeframe to ‘even things out’ a bit. In the below chart therefore, I’ve averaged the proportion of female promotions for the last three years to March 2024, for each England and Wales force.
How is your force doing? One striking observation is the wide variation between forces around the 31% average for the three years across all forces (dotted line). Also, no forces are near the long-term policing goal of the 50% mark just yet.
At the low end of the scale, women officers in Cambridgeshire and Sussex Police only formed 21% of the promotions over the three years. This is not just comparatively lower than other forces but is also far lower than their own respective female officer proportionality. Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, and Avon and Somerset were similarly low. Could this speak to current challenges and barriers to women in leadership being disproportionately felt in those forces?
Exploring the Home Office figures further and summarising, we find that women formed a slightly higher 34% of the three years of overall E&W promotions among just the senior ranks of Superintendent to Chief Officer.
Minority Ethnic Promotions
Over the same three year period, the average rate of promotion for minority ethnic groups was 8.6%. This is similar to the overall officer diversity of 8.4%. However again, there is great variation between forces.
Here’s an interesting exercise: Review your own force. How do the rates compare against the general population where you are? More importantly, are the rates of promotion proportionate to the minority ethnic make-up of officers within your force?
Note that for ethnic group, I show the proportion in a minority (aka ‘BAME’, which counts only visible minorities) excluding the ‘Not Stated’ category. This allows for more valid comparisons against the general population, given that there’s no such ‘Not Stated’ cohort in the 2021 Census. While some officers choose not to declare their ethnic group for personal reasons, this is rare. Most of the time, the non-recording comes from simple recording omissions by the forces themselves, originating from specific timeframes of recruitment and so suggesting a force process issue, not a personal one for officers.
Among the most affected forces, Devon and Cornwall Police have exceptionally high volumes of ‘Not Stated’, whereby they simply didn’t record the ethnicity of those officers joining between 2013-2017. Surrey Police did similar between 2015-2018. The Met Police have somewhat unusually high volume of ‘Not Stated’ ethnicity joiners between 2017-2019, and Northumbria for most of the last decade.
These issues may therefore affect apparent ethnic diversity reporting in these forces, because much of their data is simply missing. In turn, it is entirely possible these forces are unaware of the issues, because no one tends to scrutinise the data like this.
Officers Moved Away from Front Line
While the government and PCC decides the overall funding available to Chief Officers, it is down to Chiefs as to how they prioritise their resources. How much of their funding do they put into the officer/staff/PCSO workforce mix? In what departments and functions do they then place these people?
Many cops bemoan how their sections on response and neighbourhood functions have been depleted over the past decade. Indeed, in my recent blog about the Met Police strength, I demonstrate some ‘reprioritisation’ there, along with the severe reductions in PCSOs and Specials as part of the in-force workforce juggling. But what’s the situation across England and Wales for officer functions?
Before we dive into things, I’ve summarised the complex Home Office categorisation in the following table. These are the teams which they define as front line (visible and non-visible) compared to the more ‘back office’ support functions.
So starting broad, are more officers being placed on the front line or not? The following chart is directly from the Home Office workforce report itself, showing the proportion of officers in the ‘front line’ roles (visible and non-visible front line, as a proportion of all roles excluding those ‘Excluded’ above).
During the particularly austere years of 2011-2015, dwindling officer numbers meant forces kept a higher proportion in their front line functions. Since 2017, the available officer resource has been increasingly moved to business support or other functions. The overall proportion of officers in front line roles stands at 90%, the lowest since such records began, and despite the recent influx of ‘Uplift’ direct to response and local policing functions.
In their more detailed data, the Home Office only provide comparable functions information back to 2015, due to changes in counting methods. However, this detailed information is insightful as to how forces are choosing to prioritise their available resources. In the below chart, I’ve plotted where all officers proportionally are (including the ‘National/Other’ category), splitting out the overall functions as per the colour coding of my table above.
Over the last decade, forces have clearly chosen to have proportionately fewer officers in the main visible and operational front line duties. This category has steadily reduced from 55% of all officer strength in 2015 down to 50% in 2024, with the decline driven predominantly by Neighbourhood Policing and Traffic functions. It should be noted that bucking this overall trend is the fact that forces have increased officers in Incident/Response Management functions by 13,000 since 2015.
Observing the absolute volume of officer strength in FTE (below) tells a similar story but with additional context. During the austerity years, and where Chief Officers made the savings against their officer strength, they did so predominantly from the visible and operational front line. Officer strength in non-visible frontline and back office support functions were conversely protected. The phase of ‘Uplift’ during 2020-2023 saw the majority of officers being placed again in those visible front line positions (particularly in Incident / Response Management), though the non-visible and support functions have also seen significant investment.
Exponential Growth of Professional Standards, HR, Training…
In the table below, I zoom in on the detail behind those ‘Front line support’ (yellow) and ‘Business support’ (dark grey) functions. Where have Chiefs focused their available cops since 2015?
It seems most of the investment has been into the performance review, professional standards, force command, HR, and in particular training. All of these have seen massive growth in officer strength. There are also hundreds of police officers occupying positions traditionally considered relevant only for non-sworn staff.
There has been a similar reprioritisation of the Police Staff workforce profile, with big increases in forces’ HR, legal, training, PSD, IT, marketing, and other back office support functions. Civilian staff in visible frontline functions have remained stable, while those on Front Desk have reduced.
A Decade of Change Across Forces
What do you think about these figures? Have you explored how your force is prioritising its resources at all? To give you a head start on the latter question, I’ve compared each force on their spread of police officers in front line vs. other functions below, set a decade apart…
Kent is one force that’s significantly deprioritised the visible operational front line compared to other functions over the decade, in terms of where it chooses to place its available officers. Cleveland, Cumbria, Dyfed-Powys, Leicestershire, North Yorkshire, Northumbria, Staffordshire, and Warwickshire are others. Some forces have bucked this trend and moved the other way.
Either way, it’s fascinating to see how vastly differently the 43 forces each choose to manage their available resources to police their respective regions.
The Shifting Sands of Time…
So we’ve seen an apparent de-prioritisation of visible frontline functions by Chief Officers over the years. How does this situation happen? Well, under the strains of austerity to 2019, it’s clearly easiest to make savings by simply salami slicing where you have the biggest groups of people. This action saves £millions at a time, is easier to implement (since officers cannot be made redundant), and it requires no assessment of the organisation’s priorities and associated use of resources.
Secondly in terms of movement internally, let’s say Superintendent X has a bright idea to create a new team/department to focus on some area of vulnerability, crime, or other specialty the force wants to do better on. Or indeed to bolster existing functions suffering with high demand or a need to improve, like Professional Standards or training (or one of the new departments just created several years prior). They take a business case to a strategic meeting Chaired by the force Chief Officers. Everyone there agrees what an innovative use of police officers this would be and ‘approve’ it.
But they can’t just magic the officer team from thin air, they must be pulled from elsewhere. Response has the most officers, so that’s usually the place pillaged for the required cops. Far easier to just ‘salami slice’ from the biggest cohort; much harder to properly assess across the organisation and its various moving parts how they interrelate, and where is less of a priority than the innovative idea being presented in that moment to draw resources from there instead.
Now imagine doing this multiple times over a decade plus. There’s very little corporate memory of historic organisational changes because the key people have long moved on. The side effect over time is the organisation becomes more complex in structure, the more ‘traditional’ front line local policing and CID roles become depleted, while at the same time somewhat deskilled (because they increasingly must defer task Y or Z to the specialist Y or Z unit).
One thing’s for sure: Few are making any serious case to replenish core visible front line policing, by drawing officers back out from the specialist or business support functions in which they’ve accumulated over time. That is, unless there’s specific ‘Uplift’ funding available to forces. Now that funding has dried up, officer strength is stagnating. What might the future hold for frontline policing from here?
I hope you’ve found this series diving into the 2024 police workforce statistics interesting and insightful. Let me know what you found most useful or eye-opening across the four detailed blogs. If you like this work and insights and want to help out, subscribing to my podcast is one way to contribute to future free content.
Kind Regards, Steve
Seeking police promotion? Want to get a massive head start right now? Hit the ground running with your personal digital promotion toolkit, and/or my market-leading Police Promotion Masterclass. There’s nothing else like it to effectively prepare you for success in your leadership aspirations. You can also contact me to arrange more personal coaching support. Or try my podcast for your ongoing police leadership CPD covering a range of fascinating subjects.
