Can Civilian Investigators weather another funding storm

As the UK’s biggest police job site, listing all vacancies across UK policing, APJ collects huge data, allowing us to identify emerging patterns. This month, we’ve taken a look at the role of a civilian investigator.

In the post-covid year of 2021, All Police Jobs (APJ) listed 791 different vacancies for civilian investigators nationally, as advertised by police forces. 

In 2022, this increased to 1148 vacancies across the country. However, during 2023, the number declined to 921 and continued to decline in 2024 when 683 jobs were advertised. 

Last year, there were only 596 vacancies listed for civilian investigators, half the number in 2022.

After drilling down further, we discovered this pattern was reflected regionally (See table* below)

As you can see, civilian investigator vacancies have fluctuated over the last five years with a more downward trend emerging the last couple of years.

This is interesting because when the Police Uplift programme to recruit police officers was introduced in 2019 (and funded up until 2023), one of the criticisms was that because funding was ringfenced, other frontline civilian roles would suffer. 

These figures suggest that didn’t happen with regards to civilian investigators, given that civilian investigator vacancies peaked in some regions (Eastern, South East, North East, North West) in 2022 at the same time forces were receiving £425m (2021/22) to support police recruitment.

 This suggests that vacancies for civilian investigators remained largely robust in the face of the Uplift programme and, in fact, it is only more recently that some regions appear to be rowing back (North West, North East, South West, Eastern) on recruiting civilian investigators.

Civilian Investigator roles are traditionally very popular on APJ and always receive high traffic so it could be that many vacancies are filled and attrition rates are low.  

However, it could also be a casualty of the current budgetary shortfall across policing and, unlike neighbourhood policing which is protected via ringfenced funding, civilian investigator vacancies could feel the squeeze. 

We continue to monitor vacancies and, so far, they appear to be remaining steady but, with five months left it remains to be seen if the role of the civilian investigator will weather the funding storm for a second time.

If you’re interested in recruitment data related to your police force, we can help. Contact us here to discuss your traffic figures.

*Please note the number of vacancies do not add up to the totals in the paragraph above as we also run jobs for non – geographic forces and one off adverts on request for other police forces outside of England and Wales.

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