Police ‘illiterate in English’ recruited in diversity drive

APPLICANTS to the police who can barely write in English are being accepted by the Met in an effort to improve diversity, one of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has said.

HMI Matt Parr said that while it was entirely “noble and right” that Scotland Yard was aiming to be more representative of the community it policed, it should not be at the expense of standards. In 2021 Dame Cressida Dick, the then Met Commissioner, declared it was the force’s aspiration to recruit 40 percent of its officers from the black and ethnic minority communities by 2023.

But despite the Government’s uplift programme, which began a massive recruitment campaign across policing, the number of officers from black and ethnic minority communities in London remains at less than 17 per cent.

Mr Parr said setting ambitious targets both around the uplift and diversity was understandable, but it increased the risk of lowering standards and recruiting people who were not suited to the job.

He said there was anecdotal evidence that some applicants were being accepted even though they were “functionally illiterate in English” and had difficulty writing up crime reports.

Mr Parr said: “We completely support the idea that London – which will likely be a minority white city in the next decade or so – should not be policed by an overwhelmingly white police force.

“That is clearly wrong. It is not just wrong from a legitimacy point of view, and from an appearances point of view, it is also operationally wrong because it means the Met does not get insight into some of the communities it polices and that has caused problems in the past.

“So we support the drive to make the Met much more representative of the community it serves than it is at the moment.”

However, he added: “We have a risk of recruiting the wrong people. You will hear people from their training school say that they are taking in significant numbers of people who are, on paper at least, functionally illiterate in English and therefore just writing up crime reports has become quite difficult in some areas. So in that drive there is at

least anecdotal evidence that they have lowered standards.”

Mr Parr said since taking over as Met Commissioner in September, Sir Mark Rowley had made it clear he wanted to “dial down the requirement to meet those targets” and focus on ensuring the force recruited the right people.

A review of recruitment and vetting by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary Fire and Rescue Services published in November warned that as many as 10 per cent of police officers should never have been admitted into the police.

Mr Parr said when it came to vetting he was not advocating a “zero-tolerance” approach to minor misdemeanours, but rather one of managed risk.

He said young black men tended to have a greater involvement with the criminal justice system in London than any other group but that did not mean they should be barred from the police.

David Spencer, a former Met officer who is head of crime and justice at the Policy Exchange think tank, agreed that the pressure to meet the uplift and diversity targets increased the risk that standards would be lowered.

He said: “When you are making a risk assessment, if you are trying to hit a target your capacity for risk is going to increase.”