Interest in becoming a police officer falls by nearly a third, figures reveal

There has been a substantial fall in the number of people interested in becoming police officers, according to new data released by the largest national police recruitment jobsite in the UK.
Figures released by Allpolicejobs.co.uk, which receives over a million visitors a year, reveal that interest in becoming a police officer plummeted by nearly a third in 2021/2022 compared to the previous year. Nearly every other policing role recorded a rise in interest for the same period.**
Richard Place, Allpolicejobs.co.uk managing director said: “Our huge traffic figures mean we are able to accurately measure statistical trends in police recruitment. We know exactly how many people click on new recruitment vacancies and how many then click through to the application page.
“Our latest data shows that what we’re hearing anecdotally from individual forces is reflected nationally and that is less people are interested in joining the police service. Given the Government’s commitment to recruiting 20,000 new officers over three years, this is a worrying trend.
“All sectors are struggling to recruit people and it is likely that policing has been impacted, but there will be other factors, some of which are within the control of policing, some of which aren’t. The concern is that if the pool of applicants is shrinking, will the police service be able to continue to recruit the highest quality recruits?”
Despite the fall in interest in vacancies for new recruits, many other policing uniform and non-uniform policing roles saw a sharp rise in visitors. There was significant growth in interest from serving officers looking for promotion. The number of people looking to work in Police IT, Technical Support and Project Management has also risen considerably.
This is the first time allpolicejobs.co.uk has released data on national police recruitment trends.
Richard Place added: “As the largest police jobsite in the UK with 1.3m visitors, we have rich and valuable data that allows us to measure and analyse interest from potential applicants in policing based on a range of criteria.
“This vital information will allow forces to understand a whole range of factors that have implications for their recruitment strategy including what jobs people are most interested in and where, when the high traffic periods are and how their job advertisements perform against other adverts of a similar type.”
The full report on national police recruitment trends will be published in the coming weeks and will be available to all. If forces would like to discuss accessing individual force data and how it compares to others, please contact: Richard@chestnutmedia.co.uk
** Just over 112,000 visitors to allpolicejobs.co.uk clicked ‘new recruit’ vacancy in 2020/2021 compared with just under 81,000 in 2021/2022, a fall of 28 per cent.
Notes for editors:
· Founded in 2007, Allpolicejobs.co.uk is the largest national police jobsite in the UK and receives 1.3m visitors to its website every year
· Around 25,000 people a week visit allpolicejobs.co.uk.
· Allpolicejobs is the only jobsite to list all current vacancies in policing in England and Wales.
· The most visited vacancies include transferees, admin support, communications, civilian investigators, scientific and technical support.
· Fastest growing areas of interest include police superintendents, analysts, financial forensics and project management.
· Over a quarter of people who view an advert on becoming a police officer ‘click’ through to apply. The average for all roles is 17 per cent.

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