Derbyshire Police exceeds recruitment target – but policing across county needs ‘years to recover’ from underfunding

Derbyshire Police has easily exceeded its target of recruiting new officers under the Government’s Police Uplift Programme, according to new figures from the Home Office.

Tony Wetton, chair of the Derbyshire Police Federation, said that policing would take many years to recover from an extensive period of underfunding and the damage this had caused – despite the influx of new officers.

The force was allocated an extra 283 officers when the scheme was launched in 2019 but has actually recruited 351. It now employs 2,178 officers, compared to 1,827 when the uplift campaign began.

It now has more officers than it did in 2010 when the Conservative government started to cut officer numbers due to its austerity measures. The number stood at 2,100 but the headcount had fallen as low as 1,723 by the end of 2018 after years of funding cuts.

Tony welcomed the increase in officer numbers and said he looked forward to working alongside the new recruits, but he added: “The figures show we have more officers than we did when the funding cuts began so that is positive news but in real terms we are still behind where we need to be.

“The three year Uplift Programme has only replaced those hundreds of officers that we lost over that ten-year period and policing has suffered during that time and will take some considerable time to recover – probably years.

“Let’s not allow ourselves to be fooled into ignoring the damage done over those years through the completely unsustainable pressure on officers, both in terms of huge workloads and the many extra hours and days that they had to work to keep policing running.

“We also have to consider that the demands on policing have increased considerably in that time too.

Tony said that the force needed to focus on retaining these officers – and called for a pay rise for those working to keep Derbyshire’s streets safe.

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“The challenge now is to retain the new recruits, and indeed their more experienced colleagues, so we will be looking at pay and conditions, training, equipment and resources and making sure that police officer wellbeing is at the heart of the service.

“Officers need to feel valued, respected and well-supported in their work so we need to see a genuine commitment to long-term investment in the police service and also an increase in pay to make up for all the years where officers have received a real terms pay cut.”