Police: Recruitment Criteria

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

It is absolutely right that good-quality candidates should be allowed to come forward. That is why there are a variety of options available to candidates. As I said to the noble Lord earlier, it is important that candidates do not necessarily need a degree to be able to go into the police force, but that they are educated and trained to degree level going forward, to make the best police officers.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the purpose behind the College of Policing’s accreditation system is to do two things? First, as the Minister has already said, it aims to make sure that the training received is of a high standard—surely we all agree with that. At the moment, 50% of police officers recruited are graduates already. Secondly, for officers who have worked for 30 or 40 years in some cases, perhaps investigating murder, cybercrime, rape and other policing matters, it is really important that we accredit to graduate standard, because it allows those officers to move on to other careers at the end of their police career. It is not good enough to carry on as we have in the past, where we have not accredited great skills—but that does not mean to say that everyone has to be a graduate.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord is absolutely right and, of course, speaks from the highest experience. To be able to go on and do something else with the skills that you have accrued through, say, policing is really important. On the point about accreditation, it has to be recognised that the pattern of crime, and therefore of policing, has changed so much over the years. Police need to be trained in the new and emerging activities that criminals are undertaking—digital crime, for example.