Police: Road Traffic Control

(asked on 29th November 2016) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many full-time equivalent traffic police have been employed in England and Wales in each year from 2010 to date.


Answered by
Baroness Williams of Trafford Portrait
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms (HM Household) (Chief Whip, House of Lords)
This question was answered on 15th December 2016

The Home Office collects and publishes data annually on the primary function of police officers, as part of the police workforce statistics. These data include officers whose primary function is “Road Policing”. Officers with multiple responsibilities are recorded under their primary function.

The data requested are provided in the table. Data for years prior to 2015 were collected under a different framework, with different definitions, and are therefore not directly comparable with data as at 31 March 2015 or 2016.

Table 2: Number of fixed penalty notices issued for motoring offences, and the number of poisitive breath tests, 2010 to 2015, England and Wales1
Calendar year:Number of FPNs issued for motoring offencesNumber of positive breath tests
20101,839,15184,436
20111,439,78380,761
20121,309,05476,179
20131,144,53070,675
20141,022,35265,585
20151,016,82760,019
1. Data on the number of FPNs issued from 2011 onwards are extracted from PentiP and are not directly comparable with data from the previous system.

Some forces are unable to make a clear distinction between certain functions and therefore record the majority of, or all, employees under one function. 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.

The Home Office does not hold information centrally on the number of people who have been stopped by the police, resulting in action being taken for road traffic offences. The Home Office collects and publishes data annually on the number of positive breath tests and the number of fixed penalty notices (FPNs) issued for motoring offences each year. These figures are provided for each year since 2010 in the tables. The latter data only relate to motoring offences that were dealt with via an FPN, and do not include offences where the driver was offered and accepted a driver retraining course, or was prosecuted.

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