Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department has taken to introduce the national action plan to tackle the shortage of detectives recommended by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary in its report Police Effectiveness 2016.

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services’s (HMICFRS’s) recommendations are primarily for police leaders to take action and ensure progress is made. In its 2016 Effectiveness report, published on 2 March 2017, HMIC (as it was then named) called on the National Police Chiefs’ Council, working with the College of Policing, to review by June 2017 what is being done to tackle concerns over the number of police detectives. HMIC recommended that these bodies should put in place a national action plan by December 2017.

We welcome the work done by Chief Constable Matt Jukes on behalf of NPCC to improve analysis of the nature and scale of the reported shortages of investigators and to form an action plan.

HMICFRS continue to monitor forces’ progress though their Effectiveness inspection programme and their next report will be published shortly.