Rishi Sunak is due to announce that the government has successfully recruited 20,000 police officers since 2019, as critics point out that a similar number have been cut by Tory-led administrations since 2010.
In a statement, the prime minister said: “When I stood at the steps of Downing Street six months ago, I made clear that I would do whatever it takes to cut crime and make our communities safer. At the heart of that pledge is recruiting 20,000 additional police officers.
“We await the final statistics … but, as I have previously set out, I am confident we are on the cusp of meeting that promise.”
Before the 2019 election, the Conservatives under Boris Johnson pledged to recruit 20,000 more police officers in England and Wales by March 2023. The official data will be published on Wednesday.
Last week, Sunak told MPs at prime minister’s questions before the official release of the figures that there were “20,000 more police officers”, in what was a technical breach of data rules.
In March 2010, the total number of police officers in England and Wales was 143,734. By March 2016, that figure had fallen to 124,066.
The home secretary, Suella Braverman, is due to give a speech on Wednesday, calling on police officers to no longer “pander to political correctness” and focus instead on catching criminals.
Braverman is to say at the Public Safety Foundation thinktank launch in central London: “My mantra at the Home Office is simple: more police, less crime, safer streets and common sense policing.
“My vision for common sense policing is as clear as the public’s. It means focusing effort on deterring and catching criminals, not pandering to politically correct preoccupations.”
Earlier this month, Braverman claimed “political correctness” was to blame for signs of child sexual abuse being overlooked by institutions, and that it was a factor in failures to tackle grooming gangs of British-Pakistani men who drugged and raped white girls.
In response to being challenged that a Home Office report in 2020 found grooming gangs were most commonly white, the home secretary said there had been several reports about the “predominance of certain ethnic groups, and I say British-Pakistani males, who hold cultural values totally at odds with British values”.
Braverman, who is supported by the Common Sense group of Conservative MPs, in January declared her opposition to “politically correct nonsense” in the Home Office. In October, she criticised Leicestershire police for “politically correct campaigns” after the force tweeted that “deadnaming” a transgender person, meaning the use of the name that person had before their transition, could be a hate crime.
