Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many police officers in each force area were assigned to response in each year since 2014.

The Home Office collects data annually on the function of police workers. Workers with multiple responsibilities or designations are recorded under their primary function. The data do not therefore provide a complete picture of all officers assigned to response functions.

The number of full time equivalent police officers primarily employed in ‘Incident (Response) Management’ roles can be found in the data tables published alongside the annual police workforce statistics publication.

Data as at 31 March 2015 and 31 March 2016 can be found in the Table F1 and Table F4 of the police workforce statistics published in July 2016:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/544954/police-workforce-tabs-jul16.ods

Data as at 31 March 2014 were collected under a different framework, with different definitions, and are therefore not directly comparable with data as at 31 March 2015 or 2016. Data on the number of officers primarily employed in ‘Response’ roles as at 31 March 2014 can be found in the supplementary tables of the police workforce statistics published in July 2014:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/330345/police-workforce-supptabs-mar14.ods

Decisions on the size and composition of the police workforce are operational matters for Chief Officers working with their Police and Crime Commissioners and taking into account local priorities. What matters is how officers are deployed, not how many of them there are.