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Ministry of Defence Police: Staff

Answer

The Ministry of Defence Police (MDP) is critical to securing Defence assets and people. Recruitment is kept under constant review and is driven by Defence requirements and takes account of the number of leavers and joiners at any given time.

At the end of December 2025, Defence saw an increase in workforce that delivers the policing, guarding, and security effect across the delivery groups under a single authority (SJC). We are accelerating recruitment of Ministry of Defence Police, MOD Guard Service through targeted campaigns and implementation of targeted retention bonus for hard to recruit locations and there are now some 250 more Military Provost Guard Service than in 2020. This steady growth is supported by plans to increase this in coming months. Defence takes security seriously, which is demonstrated by the carve outs from civil service recruitment freezes and voluntary exit schemes.

The annual budget for the Ministry of Defence Police (MDP) are shown below:

Financial Year	Budget £ million
2019-20	152.881
2020-21	157.726
2021-22	167.2
2022-23	167.676
2023-24	160.848
2024-25	182.7

The workforce numbers for the Ministry of Defence Police are below. Note that the 2025 figure reflects workforce plans set under the previous government:

Year	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025
MDP ¹	2643	2768	2701	2593	2407	2139
NUCS ²	227	235	230	221	211	196
Total	2869	3003	2931	2814	2618	2335

¹ Ministry of Defence Police officers

² Non-uniformed Civil Servants

Year	Total recruited	Recruitment Target
2020-21	320	320
2021-22	244	250
2022-23	252	270
2023-24	121	275*
2024-25	101	125
2025-26	109 to 14 Dec 25	250

* Original target. Target was replaced during the course of the year by site specific recruitment targets because of ongoing reviews to reduce the number of MDP posts across the UK resulting from introduction of a new operating police model (OPM), reprioritisation of security risk and the replacement of MDP with alternative policing/security providers.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

98608

Session

2024-26

Grouped for answer

Yes

Subjects

Staff Ministry of Defence Police

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk