Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what formal definition her Department uses for frontline policing roles.

Frontline policing is comprised of visible operational frontline roles and non-visible frontline roles, each of which contains specific functions. Further information on the functions included under visible operational frontline and non-visible frontline, including the definitions of each function can be found in Table F4 of the data tables accompanying the ‘Police Workforce, England and Wales’ publication here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67d965ab594182179fe0877f/police-workforce-mar24-tables-240724.ods.

In 2015 the Home Office adopted the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy’s (CIPFA) Police Objective Analysis (POA) framework. The POA framework does not include a specific function for ‘community policing’ but does include the function ‘Neighbourhood Policing’.

Since 2015, published statistics on the neighbourhood policing workforce have come with a caveat from the Home Office that the data was not considered to be robust due to the conflation of figures relating to neighbourhood officers and local and emergency response teams.

As a result of these concerns, in 2025 the Home Office carried out a data validation exercise, asking all police forces to verify the previously published data for police employees in the 1a Neighbourhood Policing category. This exercise showed that data reported under the previous government were inaccurate and did not reflect the true number of neighbourhood officers.

Subsequently the Home Office revised previously published neighbourhood policing data here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/provisional-revision-to-neighbourhood-policing-data-at-31-march-2024. The Home Office has issued guidance to police forces on the categorisation of 1a Neighbourhood Policing to ensure that those working in neighbourhood policing are being recorded correctly, particularly on the distinction between 1b Incident Response Management and 1a Neighbourhood Policing, as well as classroom-based student officers.