P5 - Review the methods used by Public Services to ensure they have a diverse workforce

The Police Service are trying to recruit more female officers as well as more people from minority groups with an aim to have a more diverse workforce who can relate more to the public.
Recently, it has been brought up that there is still institutional racism within the Police force, this, as well as many other reasons such as negative stereotyping, informal bias and assumptions from ethnic minority groups themselves are reasons why people from minority groups are less inclined to join. The Police have introduced a number of ways to try and create a more diverse workforce. Some of these methods include, improving the data collected on the age, gender, ethnicity, race and disability of their members so that these can be analysed and assessed to see which areas are weakest and need strengthening to ensure that the officers reflect and relate to the community they are working in. Another way is positive advertising, for example, the ‘Could you?’ campaign which is the police’s national recruitment campaign which once set up, the police received expressions of interest from nearly 100,000 people, 40% of whom were found to be women. They set up targets regularly for the different regions to recruit and retain ethnic minority officers and females. In 2003 The Metropolitan Police decided to allow foreign nationals to sign up to join the police force for the first time to help meet ethnic recruitment targets due to being told that 25% of its workforce had to include people from minority backgrounds. Since then the police have been working hard to create a more diverse workforce.

The Fire Service have a goal of the minority ethnic employees being the same or a higher percentage than the representation in the working age population. This is because, in order to protect the public