Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what proportion of working time police officers in each police force spent on frontline policing duties in England and Wales in each of the last five years.

The Home Office does not hold this information centrally.

The Home Office does however collect police officer functions data which is
used by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary to calculate the number of
operational frontline police officers in each police force area. These figures
(and information on visible police
officers) are published from 2010 onwards as part of the ‘Valuing the Police'
inspection programme, which can be found at:
http://www.hmic.gov.uk/data/valuing-the-police-data/. These figures relate to
each officers predominant function over the year, rather than the proportion of
their working time.