Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many women police constables have been employed by police forces in England & Wales in each of the last ten years for which figures are available.

The Home Office collects and publishes data on the size of the police workforce in England and Wales on a biannual basis in the ‘Police workforce, England and Wales’ statistical bulletin, available here: Police workforce England and Wales statistics - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Information on the total number of police officers, by rank, and police community support officers as at the 31 March each year can be found in the workforce open data tables published at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1005761/open-data-table-police-workforce-280721.ods

Due to the implementation of the Police Workforce Data Standards, from 2021 the police workforce data collection was updated to collect information on both the sex and gender of the officer. Previously, data collected and presented in this table referred to the sex of the officer only, limited to male or female. For some forces, this change has led to a large proportion of officers with an “unknown” gender or “unknown” sex. While the expectation is that this will improve in future years, a hybrid approach was taken in 2021 to account for cases with an “unknown” gender recorded. Where gender data are not available, analysts have instead used sex data, and vice versa (see the user guide for more details).

While the ‘Police workforce, England and Wales’ statistical bulletin remains the key measure of the size of the police workforce, the Home Office also publishes a quarterly update as part of the Police Officer Uplift Programme. This quarterly bulletin includes the number of officers (headcount terms only) in England and Wales, broken down by both sex and gender. Data are available here: Police Officer uplift statistics - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Table U5a of the accompanying data tables contains information on the number of officers broken down by sex, and Table U5b on the number of officers broken down by gender. We continue to work with NPCC and police forces to improve the recording of gender and sex data.