Theresa May: all-white police chief line-up 'not good enough'

Home Secretary Theresa May will tell police forces in England and Wales that they must increase their ethnic and gender diversity to represent the communities they serve.

Speaking at the National Black Police Association conference, she is expected to say that it is "not good enough" that there are no ethnic minority chief constables in the country.

Around 28 per cent of the 126,800 officers in England and Wales are female, while officers from black and ethnic minority backgrounds account for just 5.5 per cent. "Increasing diversity in our police forces is not an optional extra. It goes right to the heart of this country's historic principle of policing by consent," she is expected to say.

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"We must ensure that the public have trust and confidence in the police, and that the police reflect the communities they serve."

The College of Policing has said it is trying to improve recruitment of ethnic minority officers "but there are no quick fixes", reports the BBC.

The Home Secretary's demand comes amid sizable cuts to police budgets. The coalition government reduced central police funding by 20 per cent in real terms and Chancellor George Osborne has warned that further cuts could range from 25 per cent to 40 per cent under the Tory government.

For a sector in which the majority of its budget is spent on police officer salaries, this has led to a reduction in officer and staff posts, long recruitment freezes and no promotions over the last five years.

Since the coalition government came into power in 2010, more than 16,000 police posts have been cut, the equivalent of losing all the police officers in Wales twice over. Police staff numbers have been hit much harder, partly because they are eligible for redundancy, unlike their police officer colleagues. Unison, the public sector trade union, argues that this has had a disproportionate effect on women as they make up the majority of the police staff workforce.

Metropolitan Police Chief Constable Bernard Hogan-Howe has previously requested positive discrimination in the appointment of police officers, where one minority ethnic officer would be recruited for every new white officer, says The Guardian. "But this would require a change in the law," says the newspaper, "and the plan was received coolly by the Home Office."