Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Written Statement of 19 April 2018 on Police Funding, HCWS626, what estimate his Department has made of the number of hours that would be made available if every officer maximised the productivity benefits referred to in that statement.

Following a 2017 sample of eight forces, the Home Office estimated that if all forces could deliver the same one hour per officer per day of productivity benefits from mobile working as the best, this has the potential to free up the equivalent of 11,000 extra officers nationally to provide the proactive policing that committed police officers want to deliver. The Home Office has established a small team who are working with the police through 2018 to contact a wider audit of the level of opportunity from mobile working, identify which approaches work best, highlight best practice, and help forces and the Home Office take the right decisions to maximise the gains from the use of mobile digital working.