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Police: Travellers

Question for Home Office

UIN 161153, tabled on 5 July 2018

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many (a) Gypsy, (b) Roma and (c) Irish Traveller (i) police officers and (ii) civilian staff are employed in each police force in England and Wales.

Answered on

12 July 2018

The Home Office collects information from police forces in England and Wales though the Annual Data Requirement (ADR) under the Home Secretary’s statutory powers. A number of these data requests require police forces to provide detailed information on ethnicity, for example, the ethnicity of a person being stopped and searched, or arrested.

The Home Office currently uses the 16+1 ethnic categories, as defined by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the 2001 Census, in most data collections. For the 2011 Census, the ONS updated ethnicity categories to include ‘Gypsy, Traveller or Irish Traveller’ as a specific group. To reflect these changes and to gain a better understanding of police interactions with other ethnic minorities, work is underway with force IT leads to investigate a move to the newer 18+1 ethnic codes for the 2019/20 data collection period.

The Home Office does not hold the information requested on the police workforce centrally. Data on the ethnicity of police officers and civilian staff are collected at the aggregated 5+1 level (White, Black, Asian, Mixed, Chinese and Other ethnic groups).

Those from Gypsy, Roma, or Irish Traveller backgrounds will be included in the White totals, but cannot be separately identified. Data on the police workforce, as at 31 March 2017, can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-workforce-england-and-wales-31-march-2017

The next instalment, covering the situation as at 31 March 2018, is scheduled for release on Thursday 19th July.

Answered by

Home Office