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Police will be able to boost the number of detectives by up to 1,000 in the next 5 years following new government funding to develop a national training programme.

The Home Office will work with Police Now, an award-winning police graduate recruitment programme, to develop the scheme.

The Home Office is providing £2.8 million to support Police Now in 2018 to 2019 and will provide an additional £350,000 seed funding for the detective entry programme.

The programme will include digital training to ensure that recruits are equipped to deal with the changing nature of modern crime. It will also focus on problem solving, crime prevention and safeguarding so that detectives on the scheme meet the needs of forces and communities.

Minister for Policing and the Fire Service Nick Hurd said:

Detectives are the fact-finders of our police service. They play an important role in bringing criminals to justice and getting to the bottom of complex crimes.

I’m keen to get more new detectives trained up, so I’m delighted to support this innovative Police Now programme, which will bring in new talent, train detectives in a matter of months and complement other measures that the government and police are taking to keep the public safe.

The programme will include an expanded version of the innovative summer academy model which Police Now uses to offer accelerated neighbourhood officer training.

Together these steps will help to ensure forces are matching the capacity and capability of their workforce to the demands they face, while also recruiting more people directly into specialist roles via accelerated training programmes.

David Spencer, co-founder and chief executive of Police Now, said:

As a former detective myself, I understand the positive impact that detectives can have on reducing crime, increasing confidence in communities and protecting the most vulnerable in society.

Working with forces and the Home Office, we hope this new scheme will encourage a new group of diverse and brilliant individuals to enter the police service and contribute to the outstanding work being done by existing detectives up and down the country.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing are also leading work on providing a national assessment of detectives and developing sustainable solutions to ensure that forces have adequate investigative capacity.

Chief Constable Matt Jukes, the NPCC’s National Lead for Detectives, said:

Detectives do a vital job investigating crimes, apprehending offenders and protecting people from harm. The complex nature of investigations and our work to protect vulnerable people has made the role of detectives more challenging than ever.

In order to mirror the changing nature of crime, we need to recruit and develop a diverse group of individuals, who will contribute to this vital area of policing and its future, underlining the critical nature of effective investigations to public confidence and trust.

Police Now is a national police recruitment programme which started in the Metropolitan Police. The former Home Secretary granted more than £5 million to the scheme in 2016, which enabled Police Now to expand and become an independent charity supporting multiple police forces across the country.

Police Now currently operates across 25 forces in England and Wales, and was recognised as offering the best learning and development initiative in the public and third sector by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) in September 2017.