Leicestershire Police needs to improve staff vetting, report says

Vetting at the force has been judged effective overall

Inspectors have said Leicestershire Police needs to improve the way it monitors decisions on vetting its officers and police staff.

A new report has found the force did not put officers and staff into posts without first obtaining the correct level of vetting.

However His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) judged the force's system effective overall.

The force said it had made the change.

At the time of the inspection, in September 2021, the force was due to implement a new IT system.

The report said: "The force recognises the additional work involved in moving to the new vetting management system and has recruited additional personnel."

'Area for improvement'

However, it said the force only considered two protected characteristics when vetting - ethnicity and gender.

"The current system doesn't cater for other characteristics," it said, but added the new IT system would collect wider data.

The report also said the force did not analyse the proportion of rejections for applicants with a particular protected characteristic.

"This means the force has no way of understanding the reasons for any disproportionality, so it isn't taking any action to address it," it said.

"As a result, we have identified this as an area for improvement."

Det Supt Rich Ward, head of the force's professional standards department, said: "At the time of the inspection which occurred in September 2021, we were informed that 'The force is good at the management of vetting its workforce'.

"We note the area of improvement by the HMICFRS, however we can confirm that we did already monitor disproportionality within our vetting decisions and have done so for some considerable time.

"What the report highlighted was that this this was limited in scope due to the limitations of the software we were using at this time.

"We have now implemented a new vetting software which will allow us to us monitor all protected characteristics.

"The force continues to robustly vet all of its officers, staff and volunteers and we will always look at ways to improve the effectiveness and implementation of our current process if needed."