Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of the College of Policing’s Executive Leadership Programme.

The Government is committed to ensuring there is strong and consistent leadership across policing and a pipeline of diverse and talented candidates for chief officer appointments. The College of Policing’s Executive Leaders Programme aims to open up access to a wide pool of officers, who have the skills, experience and potential to become chief officers, ready for substantive appointment to a chief officer role.

Neither the Home Office nor the College of Policing issues guidance to police forces on the specific number of candidates they should recommend to the Executive Leaders Programme. Recruitment is managed locally by individual police forces, following national guidelines and the application, assessment, and selection framework set by the College of Policing.

The Home Office does not collect data on the number of candidates attending and completing the Executive Leaders Programme.

The College of Policing has undertaken a review of the effectiveness of the Executive Leaders Programme, which was carried out in 2023-2024 on the first two cohorts. Based on the recommendations of the review, further improvements were communicated to forces and implemented in subsequent cohorts of the programme by the College of Policing.