Gloucestershire bobbies on the beat figures artificially inflated (2025)

The official number of Gloucestershire bobbies on the beat was artificially inflated and has now been revised downwards by 66 per cent.

Previously, officers with specialist functions and investigative resources were mistakenly counted as neighbourhood police in the county, it has been revealed. The Home Office published corrected neighbourhood policing numbers in March after inaccuracies were found in the previous government’s police workforce statistics.

The issues were uncovered as part of a data validation exercise commissioned by the Home Secretary and carried out by the National Police Chiefs’ Council to establish an accurate picture of the number of officers serving in neighbourhood roles. They say it comes after long-standing concerns from both the Home Office and police forces about the accuracy of previously published workforce figures for neighbourhood policing.

Of the 43 forces in England and Wales, 29 advised that their published combined neighbourhood officer and PCSO numbers should be revised down, while four forces revised their figures upwards. This resulted in an overall downwards revision of 2,611 compared to the figures published last year.

In Gloucestershhire, the Constabulary says they the administrative error which caused the inaccuracy has been corrected. The Home Office said the county’s numbers had been revised downwards because specialist functions, investigative resources, and patrol had previously been included in the neighbourhood policing category in error.

“The inaccuracy of the original data appears to be primarily related to the unique post identifiers in a recently implemented HR System, which Gloucestershire are looking to update,” according to the Home Office. The constabulary said they have updated the Home Office information and fixed the issue on their system.

“When we first submitted our data return to the Home Office it incorrectly included some teams which had been miscoded in our new HR System,” a Gloucestershire Constabulary spokesperson said. “Once the administrative error had been identified, we updated the Home Office with the correct figures and the issue has since been resolved on our system.”

The force has been asked what the revision downwards of neighbourhood police officer numbers by 66 per and the slight decrease in PCSOs equates to in total numbers. Gloucestershire Live is awaiting this information.

While the inaccuracies do not mean that the overall police numbers were incorrect, the Home Office says it demonstrates that the real number of neighbourhood police officers working in communities across the country has been artificially inflated in recent years.

The Government is clear that the public – who have seen and felt the reduction in neighbourhood officers and police community support officers on their streets in recent years – deserve far better than this. The revised figures come as the government is introducing the Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee, to ensure that everyone has a named contactable police officer.

As part of the data validation exercise, all police forces were asked to verify the previously published workforce data published under the “neighbourhood policing” category for March 2024. The work revealed substantial discrepancies between the previously published data and the updated figures being provided by forces which more accurately reflect the reality on the ground.

Forces have cited several reasons for revisions to their March 2024 data which have now been thoroughly tested by the Home Office with individual forces. Some forces say they made human resources (HR) errors after restructuring their neighbourhood policing model or relied on outdated HR systems.

Others incorrectly categorised student officers in neighbourhood policing as default, despite them still being in the classroom and not out on our streets, fully trained. Errors also occurred through the incorrect categorisation of officers who perform roles that span multiple functions as in some cases, officers were recorded as working in neighbourhood policing roles when in reality they covered multiple duties, such as incident response.

“This blurring of the lines between officer duties did not accurately reflect the real number of dedicated neighbourhood officers patrolling our streets,” a Home Office spokesperson said. “It is vital for both the government and police forces that they have a clear and accurate understanding of the state of neighbourhood policing in our communities.

“The Home Office has now issued new instructions and guidance directly to forces on the categorisation of neighbourhood policing to ensure that we are recording them correctly, particularly on the distinction between response officers and neighbourhood police officers, and how to categorise classroom-based student officers.

“This means that systems are now in place to prevent these errors from happening in the future and to ensure that the data can be relied on going forward. The department will now require robust neighbourhood policing data returns from individual forces on a monthly basis to track the neighbourhood policing workforce more closely.

“This will be aligned with a strong performance framework harnessing national data to monitor performance and direct improvements in order to raise standards across the service.”

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