How ‘positive action' in police recruitment became anti-white discrimination

Telegraph

11-04-2025

I was a special constable with Devon and Cornwall Constabulary for five years, giving me a front-line view of policing as I simultaneously worked as a senior civil servant at the Home Office.
You very quickly learn two things about 'the job'. First, that when people are having the worst day of their lives the quality of your response makes a profound difference. Second, when the wheels fall off, you need a person in uniform standing next to you who can have your back. When you strip away all the progressive verbiage pumped out by policing quangos on what matters, the public expects two things, above all: moral and physical courage.
The disclosure this week that West Yorkshire Police has put a temporary block on hiring white British candidates, as part of its attempt to boost the proportion of ethnic minority officers, might, however, suggest that the public's basic expectations are being overlooked by police chiefs.
The debate over diversity in policing can be traced back to the 1981 Scarman report following the Brixton riots, in which an angry crowd of largely black, working-class young men attacked Metropolitan Police officers following tensions over the treatment of the country's black population by police, including the use of stop and search powers.
Lord Justice Leslie Scarman, a senior judge tasked by William Whitelaw, the home secretary, with investigating the incident, concluded that while there was 'no doubt racial disadvantage was a fact of current British life', the Met Police as an institution was not racist.
Scarman did warn, however, as Whitelaw put it, that 'vigorous action is required if the composition of the police service is to become more representative of the community it serves'.
Whitelaw told the Commons: 'I agree. He rejects quotas or a lowering of standards. I also agree. We need to look closely at why candidates from the ethnic minorities have difficulty with the entrance test. We need to be sure that these tests are free from cultural bias. New tests will, therefore, be scrutinised by independent experts before they are introduced. We must also ensure that where candidates fail the written English tests, but would otherwise stand a good chance, they do not for ever lose the opportunity to join.'
He added: 'We must encourage more candidates to come forward. We shall also explore how best to help forces improve selection procedures so that we can be confident that recruits have the qualities of character, ability and impartiality needed for policing in the next two decades.' The discussion that followed included the importance of using the special constabulary of volunteer officers, which, in London, had a higher proportion of ethnic minority recruits, 'as a bridge for future recruitment for the regular police'.
In the last decade in particular, though, that careful avoidance of blunt instruments appears to be waning.
The contemporary push for diversity in policing has roots in the seminal Macpherson report, which was published in 1999 after the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. In that report, the Met, which bungled the homicide investigation, was labelled 'institutionally racist'. In 1998, only 2 per cent of officers in England and Wales were from a black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) background and Jack Straw, Tony Blair's home secretary, set a target of 7 per cent by 2009 – a figure that was only attained a decade after that, when BAME people made up 17 per cent of the population at large.
This strategy was replaced by the Equality Act in 2010 which permitted employers to take 'positive action' to help ethnic minorities to 'overcome certain barriers'. This could not, however, be done in a way which amounted to 'positive discrimination' – unfairly disadvantaging other groups – which remained against the law.
For police forces, positive action meant steps to level the playing field for non-white applicants, with initiatives including targeted recruitment fairs and mentoring or removing stringent requirements that disadvantaged ethnic minority recruits, such as the need to have a record of volunteering.
But problems have arisen from these largely well-meaning policies due to their misapplication by some overzealous HR departments. In 2019, an employment tribunal found that Cheshire Police had discriminated against a potential recruit because he was a white heterosexual man.
Very often personnel departments appear to believe that the 'protected characteristics' in the Equality Act pertain only to minorities, when in fact people of all colours and nationalities are covered by the legislation.
It is an expensive mistake to make. Last year, a tribunal found that a positive action scheme at Thames Valley Police resulted in the discrimination of three white police officers. The policing and crime commissioner for the force ordered a review of Thames Valley practices and found that the operation of the positive action scheme there resulted in 'uncertainty and divisions among colleagues in the force'.
In the most recent controversy this week, whistleblowers within West Yorkshire Police (WYP) alleged that applicants are being quietly ranked according to their ethnicities, with white applicants being at the back of the queue when it comes to filling training spaces. WYP dispute this characterisation and insist that they have an obligation to improve the representation of non-white officers while still operating a policy of selection on merit.
It is, however, unclear what impact these schemes are having on the ability to recruit and retain white officers in the most challenging policing environment for a generation. In an inspection last year, WYP was praised for its inclusivity strategy and criticised for its performance in investigating crime. The people who pay for policing in that locality might expect a different balancing of the force's priorities.
We still have an undeniable and troubling underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in policing. In 2024, 8.4 per cent of officers in England and Wales were from ethnic minority backgrounds, compared to around 18 per cent of the population. In London the disparity is even worse: the proportion of ethnic minority officers in the Met is 11.7 per cent, compared to 46.2 per cent of London residents overall who identify with Asian, black, mixed or 'other' ethnic groups.
But should this shortfall be rectified by opaque and sometimes unlawful catch-up strategies that can alienate white officers?
Alex Marshall, the former chief executive of the College of Policing quango, which issues guidance on recruitment, thought that the law needed to be changed to speed things up. He called for legal changes to allow positive discrimination – that is, explicitly favouring less qualified candidates on the basis of their ethnicity, for rapid diversity gains. Far from solving the problem of underrepresentation, though, such a move would surely destroy rank-and-file morale, already in freefall.
But these efforts only tinker at the edge of the calamity facing policing in this country. Public confidence in policing has collapsed to a record low of 54 per cent. The moral injury of expecting too few front-line officers to do too much with too little, while many lawyers and politicians champion the rights of perpetrators over the police, is driving people out of policing in record numbers – whatever their skin colour.
The turnover has undermined the Conservatives' claims to have added 20,000 officers to our forces since 2010. Last year alone, an unprecedented 56 per cent of officers who left the force did so through resignation as opposed to retirement, nearly five times the rate in 2012.
Add to this a cadre of police chiefs staggering under the weight of misconduct allegations, and permanently distracted and mesmerised by policing thought over deeds, and you have the real crisis.