Despite their successes so far, the Department and its partners face a challenging final year to deliver the remainder of the Programme. We are encouraged that the Programme met and exceeded its second-year target of recruiting 12,000 additional officers. To achieve the 20,000 extra officers promised, it still needs to recruit a further 6,500 before 31 March 2023. As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy recovers, the employment market is becoming increasingly competitive. Furthermore, the debate about public trust and confidence in policing in places like London has put the Department in a more difficult position than before. There is a tension between recruiting more officers quickly and supporting police forces as they diversify their workforce. The Department has not set targets for the Programme for the recruitment of officers from ethnic minority groups or ensuring that forces are representative of the communities they serve, instead leaving this to individual forces to manage. The recent Strategic Review of Policing concluded that the Programme was having a negligible impact on workforce diversity; while the Department does not believe that to be the case, it does acknowledge that it would have wanted the Programme to have had a greater impact on diversity Recommendation: The Department and its partners should assist forces in monitoring their workforce by including within each statistical release on progress a table setting out the diversity of individual police forces compared to that of their local populations. The Police Uplift Programme 7 • The Department should also respond to the Home Affairs Select Committee report ‘The McPherson report: twenty-two years on’, particularly the recommendations relating to targets for the recruitment and retention of officers from ethnic minority groups and staff and ensuring that police forces are representative of the communities they serve.