PSNI recruitment to decline 'for the next eight years'

The number of police officers recruited in the North will be low for the next eight years, it was claimed today.

Only 50-60 will be admitted annually following a major overhaul of the force, the DUP said. That depends upon no major escalation of the paramilitary threat.

The Conservative government at Westminster has ended 50-50 recruitment which favoured Catholic applicants over Protestants. The policy was one of the recommendations for policing reform made in the 1999 Patten report.

East Derry DUP MP Gregory Campbell said: "There will be a small tranche of recruits assuming the current climate remains unchanged."

He warned that depended on the dissident republican threat, with the danger high at present after several security alerts this week alone which brought parts of Belfast to a standstill.

The 50-50 process was introduced to increase the numbers of Catholics joining the police.

When it was introduced in 2001, Catholics made up about 8% of the police service. By 2010, the level had risen to just over 27%. Currently, 29.76% of officers come from the Catholic community.

Sinn Féin policing spokesperson Alex Maskey has said it was not the right time to end the practice.

He added a police service cannot simply expect the total support of the community if it is not fully representative of that community.

Under the new system, DUP South Belfast representative Jimmy Spratt said over the next eight or nine years he expected 50-60 new officers a year to be recruited. The workforce will be kept at around 7,200 police officers and there will be some more police classes going into service over the next couple of months.

North Down DUP representative Peter Weir welcomed the end of 50/50. He accused Ulster Unionist peer Ken Maginnis of initially advocating the policy and said the UUP had its fingerprints all over the Patten report.

Mr Weir said: "Choosing someone to be your police officer on the grounds of what church they go to is to my mind as illogical as choosing a police officer on the colour of their eyes or the colour of the tint of their hair.

"It is something that does not add up and as such the discrimination against the Protestant community in Northern Ireland has been palpable."

He said the process was not good for Protestants or Catholics who had to live with the feeling that they were not good enough.

"It has been bad for policing whenever you get a system which chooses not on the basis of merit but on the basis of quotas," Mr Weir said.

The system was designed so that all who entered the final pool from which new recruits were drawn were all good enough to join the force, including Catholics and Protestants.

One Protestant who made the final group but did not succeed was Mark Baxter, 32, an electrical engineer from Donaghcloney, Co Armagh. He was rejected in 2002 and is now a DUP candidate in the local government elections.

"I was not successful because of who I was, that is the sad thing," he said.

"I do see it as sectarianism to a degree and that is what we are trying to move away from."