Police Force spends £1.5m per year on equality and diversity staff

A Freedom of Information (FOI) Act request has found West Yorkshire Police employs 19 diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) staff at a total cost of £1,069,188. The roles at the force include:

• Head of DEI costing £91,536

• DEI manager costing £57,252

• 3 DEI officers costing £45,924 each

• Uniformed officers include a 'Positive Action' Inspector costing £94,272 and a 'Positive Action' Sergeant costing £79,716.

• A 'Positive Action Progression Officer' costing £45,924.

• 6 'Positive Action Ambassadors' - uniformed Police Constables - costing £59,844 per person. 

• An equality and diversity police staff trainer costing £45,924

• 2 DEI communications and marketing staff - a 'lead' costing £53,412 and an officer costing £42,492

• 2 administration staff costing £30,912 per person.

The FOI request also revealed the force has paid £351,000 to an external provider of equality and diversity training, with the "final payment yet to be finalised".

Unsurprisingly, this revelation has led to calls for the roles to be abolished and the money put into hiring more frontline police officers.

If this is the amount taxpayers’ money being wasted on pointless DEI initiatives that don’t solve any crimes in just one police force, imagine the scale of the cost across all of our forces nationwide!

The UK has a mix of regional and specialist police forces. In England and Wales, there are 43 territorial police forces of varying size; 39 in England and 4 in Wales. If just one of those is spending c. £1.5m per year on DEI staff, then extrapolated across England and Wales, this could mean that our police are wasting in excess of £66million per year on DEI staff and training. And that is before adding in the cost of painting their panda cars in rainbow colours, attending pride parades, investigating pointless non-crime hate incidents, and arresting citizens for posting hurty words on social media, and all of the other DEI initiatives that our police forces divert essential resources into.

And who sets the pay grades for these roles? Who has decided that the role of ‘Positive action inspector’ warrants a salary of £95k?! And a DEI Manager deserves to be paid almost £60k! The markets can’t possibly be setting these rates. How can roles that require no formal qualifications or professional accreditations possibly deserve such inflated pay rates? The DEI con has gribbed our public services, and the influence of organisations such as Stonewall has convinced many of our public bodies that these unnecessary and non-value-adding roles somehow demand salaries far in excess of their worth, dwarfing the salaries paid to actual police officers and other essential frontline staff.

For context, the average salary for a paramedic in the UK is around £39,000 per year. The average salary for a nurse in the UK is around £33,000 to £35,000 per year. And the average salary for a firefighter in the UK is only £32,524 per year. These jobs require not only extensive training, but they also involve a significant duty of care to the public, as well as in many cases being dangerous for the people undertaking them. And yet the average fireman in the UK earns just over a third of the salary that West Yorkshire Police Force is spending on each of its ‘Positive Action Ambassadors’. What does that job even mean? And why is it needed?

This lunacy must end. In the US, President Trump has cut all DEI roles from public departments. We must do the same in the UK. For too long now, the progressives in this country have insisted that the woke agenda should take priority over everything else. They have created a huge cottage industry for DEI throughout both the public and private sector, inventing many job titles that simply are not needed. If all of that wasted money were reinvested back into front line services, then we could give our pensioners back their Winter Fuel Allowance, and fund public services properly.

It is time for our government to reprioritise.