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White men may wait three years to get into the Metropolitan Police White men wanting to work for the country's largest police force are having to wait up to three years to join under a drive to make it more ethnically diverse.
Under Metropolitan Police rules, recruits waiting for a place at its training centre in Hendon, north London, are prioritised if they speak a second language or have "knowledge or experience of a community group". Government targets stipulate that 25 per cent of officers from the Met must be non-white by 2009. The proportion is currently around seven per cent, although ethnic minorities account for about 17 per cent of all new recruits. The Met said it wanted to make the force as diverse as possible, but insisted that it did not operate a policy of positive discrimination towards ethnic minorities or other groups. However, the Metropolitan Police Federation said the new recruitment rules, designed to ensure that the force mirrors the general working population, were "bound to cause resentment". Glen Smyth, its chairman, said: "All forces have got challenging targets in terms of what make-up the force should be. "And to try and achieve this they are putting in place policies to recruit more ethnic minorities as soon as possible. "We have been advised by the Home Office that this does not break the law, but in trying to achieve something that in many ways is laudable they are at the same time discriminating against another group of people. This is not desirable." Des Keenoy, the Metropolitan Police Federation's constables' chairman, said: "There is positive action which is legitimate, and positive discrimination which is not. "The line between the two is getting very narrow indeed. The criteria for joining should be the same for all - can you do a very complicated and difficult job as well as the next person? "We need diversity, we need an eclectic mix of skills and knowledge, but by focusing on certain elements it may be to the detriment of the service overall. It is a debate that needs to be had." A spokesman for the Met insisted that its recruitment policies did not include "a lowering of standards or a rejection of suitable non-ethnic minority candidates". He added: "Candidates may in future be prioritised on to intakes at Hendon by virtue of their 'life skills' and second languages, skills that will prove invaluable to the people of London." But Martin Tiplady, the Met's human resources director, said: "There is the potential that some white males will have waited up to three years to get in." In February, Sir Ian Blair, the force's commissioner, said it was considering using a quota system to raise the number of ethnic minorities. He said his force could adopt a similar procedure to the quota system operated in Northern Ireland, where a policy of hiring an equal number of Catholic and Protestant officers applies to its police service. But he said the use of positive discrimination would be a "last resort" if other measures failed. |