Written evidence submitted by the Metropolitan Police

Police and BME Recruitment                           

This note is provided to Members ahead of the evidence session scheduled for Tuesday 12 April. It provides an outline of steps taken by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) to improve recruitment, retention and promotion of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) and female police officers.

The MPS is committed to creating a workforce that looks and feels like London. Since 1999, BME and female police officer representation has consistently improved:-

• In 1999, 3% (890 officers) of the workforce was BME, 15% was female.
• In February 2016 our officer workforce comprised 12.4% BME (3,900 officers) and 25.8% female.

The recruitment picture has also changed:

• On all our external recruitment campaigns for new Police Constables, over 40% of applicants that express an interest are now from BME backgrounds.  This increases to over 50% when we require a second language.
• Between April 2015 and February 2016, 27.3% of our new recruits were BME and 33% female. 
• This compares to 2014/15, when 16.2% of recruits were BME and 28% female

A table showing current police officers strength at all ranks as at the end of February 2016 is included at Appendix A.

A number of key initiatives have contributed to the increase in diversity:-

London Residency Criteria

• In 2014 the MPS introduced new criteria whereby Police Constable Applicants were required to have lived in London for three of the last six years. This has helped increase BME recruitment to 27% in the last financial year (16/17).

Language campaign

• An important element of having a service that reflects London is recruiting officers with different capabilities. The MPS ran a recruitment campaign in July 2015 which focused on recruiting officers who can proficiently speak one or more of the 14 most spoken languages in London.

• We anticipate this will result in around 180 recruits, with at least 26% female and 50% BME based on the numbers who have already progressed through the assessment centre and those candidates that are yet to do so.

• A second language campaign was launched in January 2016. This increased the number of languages to 25, taking into account operational needs. From this we anticipate securing around 110 officers with similar representation as the first campaign.

Police NOW

• Police NOW is an initiative developed to attract high calibre graduates to the MPS. This differs from traditional graduate recruitment in that the offer is focused initially on two years of service in some of our most challenging roles.  We have reached out to the brightest and best talent. 

• The first Police NOW campaign took 69 new officers, all of whom are now deployed as Dedicated Ward Officers on our most busy Boroughs.
• Applications for a second campaign closed in December 2015. 110 new recruits will start in July 2016, of which 27% are BME and 55% female.

• Police NOW is an important development as we recognise we are in competition to attract the best graduates into policing, and importantly to attract the best graduates from a diverse background - something which many major employers in the public and private sector are seeking to do.  Coupled with our innovative use of direct entry, this will help to secure a more diverse leadership pipeline for policing in the next 10 to 15 years.

Direct Entry Superintendent Programme

• In 2014, Government legislation enabled entrants to join the police service directly at senior ranks. This move supported the national policing vision in helping to bring exceptional leaders into the police service to make an immediate impact on culture, efficiency and effectiveness. The Met has been the strongest advocate of this scheme.

• The programme is designed to attract the brightest and best leaders from outside the police service, with successful applicants bringing a new and fresh perspective to policing using the leadership skills they have developed in the private and public sectors.

• Ten candidates have been selected for the direct entry superintendent scheme over the last two years, of which 30% are BME and 60% are female. 

Positive Action

• We fully exploit positive action throughout our Police Constable Recruitment process.  This includes ‘Meet the Met’ events at the start of the process, on line and face to face tutorials to prepare candidates for assessment centres, and targeted coaching and training for areas such as functional skills.
• We also use positive action for internal promotion processes at all ranks.  This ranges from webinars, face to face training sessions and one to one coaching.

Supporting Career Development for Under-represented Groups

• As well as attracting high quality candidates from a range of backgrounds, we place significant importance on the development and progression of staff within the MPS.

• We have run promotion processes at every rank in the last 2 years and in the majority of cases have seen under-represented groups promoted in proportion to the numbers in the feeder ranks and in some cases we have done better. (Appendix B shows our last 2 years of promotion process data).

• We are also working hard to attract more BME and female officers into specialist roles.  A number of open days, coaching and mentoring programmes are now in place

• We plan to launch a new Career Development Service in the next few weeks which will broaden the development offer for BME and female officers.  Using new technology we will provide access to virtual career fairs, a new on line mentoring portal, training courses, and one to one career coaching to open up new areas of the Met (whether this be on promotion or lateral development) to officers from minority groups.

Exit rates

• Overall, the resignation rate among all MPS officers is under 2% and there is no evident disproportionality between white and BME officers.  

• BME resignations are at virtually the same rate - they have been just 0.1% higher than the overall rate for the last two years running - 2% and 1.9% as opposed to 1.9% and 1.8% respectively. 

Robin Wilkinson, Director of People and Change, MPS

Appendix A

Appendix B