The National Policing Improvement Agency will launch an annual employment report pulling together statistics on equality and diversity across all roles and ranks in all 43 police forces, Personnel Today has learned.
Chief people officer Angela O’Connor said the report would list for the first time a national perspective on how ethnic minority staff and women were recruited into the Police Service and when they got promoted, to establish what needed to be done to improve diversity quotas.
Speaking at the Metropolitan Police Authority inquiry into race and faith at the Met Police, O’Connor said: “I don’t think we’ve got a clear evaluation of the problems [in recruitment, retention and progression] supported by the evidence,” she said.
She later told Personnel Today: “We are aiming to produce an annual employment report that would produce those stats nationally. Forces hold it individually, but it will be useful for 10-year workforce planning to develop a report nationally.”
Without the data, she added, it was near impossible to explain problems around promotion, for example. When asked at the inquiry why no black or Asian officers made it on to the strategic command course last year, which prepares officers for leadership, she simply said: “Because there aren’t enough [minority] numbers out there.”
The first annual employment report is due by 2010.
