- Conference
- 2025 Police, Probation and CAFCASS Conference
- Date
- 5 June 2025
- Decision
- Carried as Amended
Conference is aware that there are almost 90,000 police staff employed by UK Police Forces, and police staff are predominantly female (62.7 percent). Conference is also aware that while the gender breakdown of officer ranks by gender is tracked, this is not the same for police staff but it must be acknowledged that if female officers are over represented in lower ranks, it is likely that there is over representation of female police staff in lower grades.
The police allocation formula (PAF) is a calculation that uses various data sources (such as population density) to share money across police forces in England and Wales. It is not a calculation of absolute need and does not estimate how much each force needs independently of other forces, nor does it consider the number of police officers for each force.
Conference acknowledges that the police funding formula was devised 2006 and despite numerous calls for revision, the government is yet to act. There is now almost universal agreement that the police funding formula is not fit for purpose.
The Home Office report for The Police Uplift Programme 2022 – 2023 acknowledged that the current funding formula is out of date and has publicly committed to reviewing the formula before the next General Election.
The National Audit Office has twice raised concerns, with a report in 2016 describing the arrangements as ‘ineffective and detached from the nature of policing’. There are two basic problems.
The formula doesn’t account for the wide variation between forces in relation to the proportion received through each funding source. At one end of the spectrum, Cleveland Police gets just over a quarter (28 percent) of its money from the council tax precept, and Surrey Police raises more than half (55 percent) of its funding locally. In 2010 when the Home Office began to reduce police funding, they did so by making the same percentage cut to each force. This meant that forces which relied more on Home Office grants than on the precept sustained deeper cuts leading to a growing inequality between forces and, critically, in the service they can offer to the public. Another example is police officer numbers. Hampshire have 900 fewer police officers than Kent yet receives an additional £30 million in funding.
A key problem is that much of the data underpinning the formula is nearly two decades old and not a reliable indicator of demands on police time. Population figures are based on the 2001 Census, but since the early 2000s London’s population has grown faster than average across England and Wales. Similarly, the formula relies on ‘activity-based costing’ data taken from the early 2000s and is not an up-to-date or accurate assessment of how long core policing tasks take.
Most importantly demands on police time have changed significantly since 2006. ‘Traditional’ offences like burglary and car theft have dropped significantly, while ‘complex’ crimes – serious violence, domestic abuse, sexual offences and fraud – have gone up. ‘Non-crime’ demand has grown steadily, with police increasingly picking up the slack due to gaps left by other public services, around mental health, missing children, and anti-social behaviour. Added to this, the workforce mix has changed with investigators and staff supporting these changes to working practices often being police staff, not officers. These changes in the work and the workforce are not reflected in the way money is allocated.
In July 2019, the government announced plans to recruit an additional 20,000 police officers (Operation Uplift) in England and Wales by the end of March 2023. Conference notes the impact that Operation Uplift has had on the job security and career progression of police staff.
Conference believes that the financial arrangements surrounding the pledge are forcing Chief Constables to place police officers into roles that would otherwise be done by police staff.
The uplift programme risks entrenching the inequalities further by adopting the existing funding formula and faced police forces with further budget restraints. Approximately eighty five percent of the total financial settlement is wages, both for officers and staff. Police forces now routinely leave staff posts vacant either entirely, or substituting an officer as a tactic for saving money. Police staff are losing their livelihoods, face permanent uncertainty and the disproportionate impact on female workers is unacceptable. The public have been deceived by the uplift pledge. Organisational change, new ways of working, and redundancies systematically ensure women feel the brunt of these cuts. There has been a rise in rejections of flexible working requests and women are being forced into redundancy situations exacerbating the gender pay gap.
Unless the Government takes a different approach, every police funding settlement will continue to exacerbate inequalities between forces, in the resources they have available, and disproportionately impact on women employed in policing.
Conference calls upon the Police, Probation and CAFCASS Service Group Executive to:
1. Highlight the impact that Operation Uplift is having on police staff roles and on female staff;
2. Work with the National Women’s Committee (NWC) to lobby the Home Office Minister and the Policing Minister to commission an independent review of the funding formula;
3. Support all the sector committees of the service group to campaign and fight for a change in the police allocation formula.
4. Continue to publicise the essential role of police staff via its ‘We are Police Staff’ campaign.