Staffordshire Police has met its target of recruiting new officers under the Government’s Police Uplift Programme, new Home Office figures show.
The Force was allocated an extra 300 officers when the scheme was launched in 2019 but exceeded that figure by 32 to bring in a total of 332 new recruits.
It now has 1,980 officers compared with a headcount of 1,648 when the uplift campaign began but is still short of the 2,120 officers it had in 2010 when a decade of cuts to police funding got under way.
Officer numbers had fallen to 1,518 by the start of 2019 as result of the Government’s austerity programme.
Staffordshire Police Federation chair Lee Robinson said: “We are pleased that officer numbers have gone up but there’s no getting away from the fact that we have fewer officers now than we did in 2010.
“Police cuts have obviously had a massive impact on how the Force operates and our members have had to deal with the extra workloads and increased demands that came as a direct result of that underfunding.
“For now, the Force has to ensure the Police Uplift Programme recruits are properly looked after, valued and respected and that means fair pay and working conditions, being properly trained and supervised and being given the correct equipment to do their jobs.”
The latest Home Office figures show that a total of 20,951 extra recruits have joined the service across England and Wales under the Police Uplift Programme and the only Force that failed to meet its target was the Met.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Twitter: “In 2019 we promised to recruit 20,000 additional police officers in England and Wales to make our streets safer and protect communities. Today, I’m pleased to say we have delivered that promise.”
Home Secretary Suella Braverman described it as a “historic moment for our country”.
She said: “We should be immensely proud of what we’ve achieved in the last few years.
“Many said we couldn’t do it but this is a police success, a Home Office success and a Conservative Government success.”
She denied that policing was the “failure of austerity” and insisted the new recruitment figures were a success.
Asked whether it was fair to say that cuts to the police service in previous years had created problems across policing, she replied: “No. Since 2010, we see that overall crime has fallen. “When you take out fraud and online crime, it’s almost 50 per cent lower than it was in 2010.”
