Officers will need to speak a second language from list of 14
A recruitment pilot to hire more staff who speak and understand a foreign language was launched by the Metropolitan Police this week.
The employer will initially target its hiring efforts on 14 foreign languages, which are in frequent use across the capital including Yoruba, Hebrew, Turkish, Portuguese and Bengali.
French is not on the list of desired languages, although German, Italian and Spanish are included, but Chinese Mandarin is also notably absent.
For at least the next month, candidates who apply for a police constable role will be assessed for skills in a second language as part of the selection process.
Last year, the Met introduced a London Residency initiative, to ensure that staff have a strong link to London and that they fully understand the capital’s wealth of diversity.
In 2013, the employer offered its 31,000 officers courses to learn one of a list of 18 foreign languages, which were comparable to gaining a GCSE in the subject.
Commenting on the latest recruitment pilot, Met commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan Howe said: “We know that almost 300 languages are spoken in the capital. We need to recruit and deploy officers with second languages in areas where those languages are spoken. I believe it will help boost confidence, help to solve crime more effectively and support victims and witnesses.”
Foreign language skills have been in demand in the UK for some time. The 2015 CBI/Pearson Education and Skills Survey revealed that 60 per cent of businesses were concerned about school leavers’ lack of foreign language skills. Almost half (45 per cent) of employers said they recognised proficiency in a foreign language as beneficial to their business, although they may not necessarily have it as a recruitment requirement.
The UK also lags behind the rest of the EU for foreign language skills. In 2012, the European Commission’s Survey on Language Competencies discovered that only 9 per cent of 14 and 15 year olds studying French were capable of using the language independently. The European Commission also found that just 39 per cent of UK adults were capable of holding a conversation in a second language, compared to the EU average of 54 per cent.