Consideration given to recruiting 50% women to newly formed PSNI, records show
Hundreds of files are being opened for public viewing under the 30/20 year rule at the Public Record Office in Belfast.
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Your support makes all the difference.Consideration was given to recruiting women into Northern Ireland’s new police force on a 50:50 basis with men to address their “severe under-representation”, declassified files have revealed.
However, legal advice was that a policy that half of new recruits to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) should be women was “not viable”, a memo from 2002 said.
Stormont officials did seek legal advice that year on whether the new force’s policy of recruiting 50% of all officers from the Catholic community could be challenged as discriminatory towards ethnic minorities.
Details are contained in documents held at the Public Record Office in Belfast.
Hundreds of the files are being opened for public viewing under the 30/20 year rule.
The majority of the files deal with events in 2003, although some are from earlier years.
The PSNI replaced the RUC in 2001 following a number of reforms proposed by Lord Patten.
Catholics had been under-represented in the RUC, so a 50:50 recruitment policy ran for the first decade, meaning one Catholic recruit for every one person from a Protestant or other background.
A file shows an exchange of emails between civil servants in the Office of the First Minister/Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) following a PSNI human rights conference hosted in October 2002.
One of the emails was seeking further information on comments at the conference about recruiting people from ethnic minorities to the force.
A responding email said: “It’s all about the Patten formula of 50/50 recruitment: 50% Roman Catholic and 50% Protestant and Others. Minority Ethnics fall into the Others.
“The issue, at present, is that most applicants still fall into the latter category (around 65% from memory) so this increases the competition within this grouping and makes the candidate less likely to be successful – this could therefore disadvantage Minority Ethnics.
“Joe (Stewart) suggested that options could be to move Minority Ethnics to the Roman Catholic Category or alternatively create a 3rd category, say of 2%.
“The issue needs further consideration including how any requirement for change could be progressed.”
Consideration was also given to including women on a 50-50 basis but legal advice at the time was that this was not viable
Another email adds: “When the Race Directive was being negotiated, we drew NIO’s (Northern Ireland Office) attention to the 50/50 recruitment policy and suggested they might want to take this up as we thought it could potentially be discriminatory on the grounds of race (likely to be proportionally more non-RC ethnic minorities than RC).
“NIO did not not pursue.”
Within the file there are clippings from media reports at the time where concern is being raised about the impact of 50:50 recruitment on police numbers after then PSNI chief constable Hugh Orde announced he was axing the force’s band due to resource pressures.
Another internal email was then sent on December 12 under the title “50/50 Recruitment and Race”.
It says: “Consideration was also given to including women on a 50-50 basis but legal advice at the time was that this was not viable despite their severe under-representation in the police force.”
It says the “50:50 split Catholic/non-Catholic has recently survived a legal challenge”.
The email continues: “There may still be a point (although unpopular to argue) that the percentage ethnic minority is too small to claim disadvantage/indirect discrimination – ironically the higher the percentage population of ethnic minorities, the stronger would be the claim for advantage/indirect discrimination because the lower the chance of recruitment to the PSNI (ie because the larger the share of the non-Catholic pool).
“Interestingly, a stronger challenge could be brought by a young person for age discrimination whom statistics consistently show is more likely to be not religious and so in the ‘non Catholic’ pool.
“Politically, there could be difficulties because there is a high profile agenda in GB at present to recruit ethnic minorities into the police service post-Macpherson/Lawrence.”
There is also a draft note seeking legal advice on the issue which states that the 50:50 recruitment policy “would seem to be incompatible with the implementation of the (Race) Directive”.