What does the pledge mean?

Labour’s 2024 election manifesto says: “Labour will introduce a new Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee, restoring patrols to our town centres by recruiting thousands of new police officers, police and community support officers [PCSOs], and special constables. Communities and residents will have a named officer to turn to when things go wrong.”

A version of this pledge was previously announced in 2023 as the Community Policing Guarantee. It consists of a number of initiatives aimed at helping people feel safe within their communities by increasing the visibility of the police, and reducing crimes such as anti-social behaviour and shoplifting. It will apply in England and Wales, as policing in Scotland and Northern Ireland is devolved.

In December 2024, in a speech to unveil his “Plan for Change”, the Prime Minister provided further detail on the Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee (NPG), saying it would deliver: “13,000 extra neighbourhood police, visible on the beat, cracking down on anti-social behaviour. A named, contactable officer in every community.”

The Plan for Change set out six aims of the NPG, which itself is part of the government’s wider “Safer Streets Mission”:

• Police back on the beat: a neighbourhood policing team in every local area, carrying out intelligence-led and visible patrols, including in town centres and on high streets.
• Community-led policing: a named, contactable officer for every neighbourhood, responsive to local problems.
• Clear performance standards and professional excellence: a new Police and Crime Performance Unit in the Home Office which will agree a single performance framework for policing.
• A new neighbourhood policing career pathway: new training for officers and standards for professional excellence.
• A crackdown on anti-social behaviour: piloting the new Respect Order to enable swift enforcement against prolific offenders, and a dedicated lead officer in every force working with communities to develop a local antisocial behaviour action plan.
• Safer town centres: neighbourhood policing teams will crack down on shop theft, street theft and assaults against retail workers.

Because Labour’s manifesto committed to “introducing” the NPG, this page looks at whether that’s been achieved. We’re looking at the aims of the NPG, including the recruitment of 13,000 neighbourhood police, in turn.

What progress has been made?

We are rating this pledge as “achieved”, as the government launched the Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee in April 2025. Since then, police forces have been able to access funding “on the basis that they demonstrated growth in their neighbourhood policing teams”.

On 10 April 2025 the NPG performance framework was published setting out five pillars of the Guarantee and its associated commitments.

These five pillars are broadly the same as the six aims set out in the Plan for Change, but the commitment to “A new neighbourhood policing career pathway” is no longer its own individual aim, and instead sits under “Clear performance standards and professional excellence”.

The performance framework states that the NPG’s “key headline measure” will be the recruitment of 13,000 extra neighbourhood police, which we’re monitoring here, and that recruitment numbers will be published at a force level every six months.

A range of other “headline” metrics will publicly track wider progress on the “five pillars”, the various components of which we’re monitoring here.

The performance framework stated that the government planned to launch a dashboard tracking these metrics “later in 2025”, although as of February 2026 this is yet to go live.

The government has also outlined plans to increase police budgets to achieve its neighbourhood policing aims. In June 2025, the government’s Spending Review said there’d be an average real terms increase of 2.3% a year in “police spending power” from 2023/24 until 2028/29, to “support frontline policing levels across England and Wales and help restore public confidence in policing”. The chancellor Rachel Reeves said this was the equivalent of an additional £2 billion.

According to the National Audit Office, police core spending power will increase by an average of 1.7% per year in real-terms over the period from 2025/26 to 2028/29.

Police budgets comprise a mix of central government grants and local council tax receipts, meaning some of this increase is expected to be funded by higher council tax precepts.

In its 2025 Budget the government said that since the Spending Review it had also “repurposed” savings achieved through “clamping down on consultancy in the Home Office” towards frontline police. It didn’t specify exactly how much this was worth, however.