Met surpasses recruitment targets

The drive to put more police officers on the streets of London led to the Met recruiting well above its target for the last financial year.

Both recruitment and workforce strength targets for 2002/03 have been exceeded with 3,489 new officers joining against a recruitment target of 3,413. Officer strength has now reached 28,477 against a workforce target of 28,412.

Within these figures there were encouraging increases in the numbers of visible ethnic minority (VEM) and women recruits, says the Metropolitan Police Authority. VEM officers made up 11% of recruits, increasing total representation within the workforce from 4.8% (April 2002) to 5.5% (end March 2003); and women officers made up 20% of joiners, increasing total representation from 16.1% (March 2002) to 16.7% (end March 2003).

However, these figures are below recruitment targets of 7.9% for VEMs

and 17% for women.

Rachel Whittaker, Chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority's Human Resources Committee, said: "The Met has recruited record numbers of police officers over the past year and they are to be commended for their efforts. The training centre at Hendon has introduced double shifts to cope with the increased number of recruits. The MPA is committed to putting as many of these officers onto boroughs to increase visible policing and public confidence.”

The Human Resources Committee was also told that there were 513 trainee PCs in post at the end of 2002/3, surpassing the 500 target for the year, and the recruitment campaign for C3i staff has progressed steadily during the current year with a total of 483 communications officers recruited.

(GMcG)