Gavin Hales
speaker
22 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Gavin Hales’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So how we've got to where we are is a history of kind of boom and bust in neighbourhood policing, which started with a great deal of investment in the early 2000s.
We then got to austerity from 2010 and neighbourhood policing was one of the victims of austerity in policing.
And now we've got a new government and they're making a commitment to reinvest in neighbourhood policing.
And so suddenly it matters a great deal that we can count exactly how many people work in neighbourhood policing today.
I think that through the austerity years, there were in some cases police forces who perhaps tried to mask the impact of cuts by, for example, deciding that all of their response police officers responding to 999 calls would be counted as neighbourhood police officers.
And in a way, that was perhaps an attempt to preserve the impression that neighbourhood policing had been protected when it hadn't.
The number of police officers in neighbourhood roles was thought to be 13,424 the last time these figures were published last July.
The amended figure for them is 10,664.
So it's a reduction of more than 2,700 officers or about 21% in those neighbourhood roles.
For the police community support officers, they actually found that there was slightly more than was previously thought.
So they've gone up from 6,210 to 6,359, which is an increase of 149 or just over 2%.
So I should say that these numbers all apply to England and Wales.
And the last time the police workforce data was published, there were 147,000 police officers in England and Wales in September 2024.
And at the same time, there were 7,417 police community support officers.
So one of the pieces of evidence we can bring in here is from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which is a survey of householders in England and Wales, which typically asks them about their experiences of crime-related social behaviour, but it also asks them about things like whether police patrols are highly visible in their local area.
What that tells us is that there was a fall from 40% of respondents reporting highly visible foot patrols in their local area in the years between 2009 and 2012, to only 12% of people reporting that by 2023-24.
So the public have noticed that the police are no longer as present in their local communities.
And clearly this policy to increase the number of native police officers is in part an attempt to address that gap.
So it's not enough just for police officers to be seen in public.
They also need to be actively tackling the problems that are affecting local people, whether that's crime or antisocial behaviour.
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