UK Police Forces Spend More Than £10 Million on ‘Diversity’ Officers Per Year

LONDON, ENGLAND - JULY 06: Police officers join the parade during Pride in London 2019 on
Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Pride in London
Kurt Zindulka

British police forces are spending more than £10 million to employ workers solely focused on diversity, inclusion, and equality, a freedom of information request from a group of Conservative MPs has revealed.

Results from a freedom of information request submitted to all 48 civilian police forces in the UK by the Conservative Way Forward group of backbench Tory MPs reveal on average each force employs five full-time diversity staff, at an average collective salary of £210,000 per year to ostensibly promote issues for sexual, racial and religious minorities.

In addition to the £10.2 million spent per year on diversity, inclusion, and equality officers, police forces also spent another £3.6 million and committed 24,100 staff days to host “equality training programmes,” The Times of London reported.

The cost of putting on such events does not include the money given to external activist organisations, which often run the struggle session-style training. For example, Essex police forked out £167,000 to just one company to host a diversity session.

Some local police forces are more invested in the scheme than others, with the West Yorkshire Police hiring the equivalent of 16 full-time staff members to mainly or solely focus on diversity issues, at a stunning cost of £500,000. In the West Midlands force, the assistant director of diversity and inclusion, alone, earns up to £82,000 annually.

“West Midlands police is the second largest police force in the country and it’s vital we build a workforce which is representative of the diverse communities we serve,” a police spokesman said.

The practice of public bodies spending hard-earned taxpayer money on promoting woke causes is not unique to the police in Britain, with the National Health Service (NHS) — which constantly claims that it is suffering from underfunding — spending around £40 million on diversity officers throughout the country. The NHS also reportedly spends another million on supporting LGBTQ+ and racial staff networks.

However, the disclosure that police forces are spending over £10 million a year on diversity officers will likely draw the ire of Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who is tasked with setting policing policy for the nation. Braverman, a Brexit hardliner seen as representing the right-wing of the governing Conservative Party, has on multiple occasions called out police forces for focusing on woke issues rather than solving actual crimes.

At the Conservative Party Conference in October, Braverman decried the impacts of politically correct thinking on policing in general, noting the failures by police — and others — to confront the scourge of predominantly Muslim Pakistani grooming gangs that preyed on mostly young, white girls for fear of being perceived as racist.

“To those who dismiss political correctness as a conservative obsession, I say this. Visit Rochdale. Visit Telford. The grooming gangs scandal is a stain on this country and it’s what happens when political correctness becomes more important than criminal justice. More PCs, less PC,” Braverman said.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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