Conservatives pledge to recruit 8,000 more police officers

The Policing Minister took to the airwaves today to discuss the Conservative Party’s pledge to add a further 8,000 police officers to boost neighbourhood policing across England and Wales.

Speaking to Kay Burley on Sky News, Chris Philp MP said that the £818m required to pay for the additional officers would come partly from changing the charging regime on immigration visas with the remaining £200m from “the £6bn we will save by clamping down on tax evasion.”

The new officers would be in addition to the 20,000 officers recruited since 2019 as part of the ‘uplift’ programme. He said that overall police numbers are currently just below 150,000.

He described measures to reduce crime including trials of facial recognition technology which he said was being piloted in his own south London constituency.

Launching the third week of the election campaign and this focus on law and order, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said, “People deserve to feel safe in their neighbourhood. More bobbies on the beat and increased powers will give police forces the tools they need to drive down neighbourhood crime even further.”

The Labour Party has already pledged ‘to put 13,000 extra neighbourhood police and PCSOs on the beat that will give every community a named officer they can get in touch with, so policing gets back to doing what it’s supposed to do. ’