British Transport Police PC Recruitment

The issue with doing that is that the HO forces will never be able to commit the officers to a specialist unit. It's not like you can just have a certain number of rail-trained officers. What happens if they're not on duty? There would have to be a specialist unit within each force area - and there's no incentive for the forces to maintain it, and they'll constantly be sent on regular calls. You can't stop officers moving around laterally or getting promoted - and if they leave the skills will be gone, and the force will be back to the BTP Authority (or whatever is its future equivalent) cap in hand for more money.
If you ringfence officers in regional groups for "rail only" all you have effectively done is recreate the BTP but worse. The only place I see it working would be London, where the Met could create a Tube/train BOCU a bit like they have for the buses - but that wouldn't solve the problem of officers leaving and having to constantly retrain.
The thing that the government has been more keen on is a national infrastructure police force, combining CNC, BTP and MDP. If there are savings to be made, quite possibly that might be the way to go.
In terms of the station closures - its just a mess, and the idea of having no presence at all north of Preston tells you how much they value the service. It's going to be a case of leaving it and letting the local county / city force deal with whatever it is and BTP only showing up to serious or track-related incidents.

Sounds like they want to push to merge with home office forces.
They started some joint training in Leeds recently with West yorkshire police training on railway with BTP.
I've put my applications in for HO forces now I will have been waiting 3 years in April for BTP.

Hi there I recently had me vetting done for BTP for the B division. I was suppose start in September but there was delays, I wanted to ask have you seen this happen where there are delays before based on your experience
Also, recruitment for back to me and said. It’s prioritised for the next intake but I was going to ask when there is freezes on recruitment how regularly are the intakes. At the moment, it will definitely looks like it will be next year but I don’t know when

I'm afraid "based on experience" has no meaning because we're in different times, and what someone's experience was a few years ago is completely different from what it is now.
It's all economics, unfortunately. When there is shortage of officers, its easier to get in. When there is money they have more training places and take more people. 15 years ago, there was a lot of cops, so the standards for entry were very high - you needed prior experience, speak another language, live locally etc. Starting about 7 years ago, they started recruiting massively because numbers fell dramatically when Theresa May was Home Sec. So they dropped all the extra requirements and started taking people in like crazy. From around 2017-2019 the Met was a madhouse - they had two training sites packed with recruits doing training on two shifts per day. Then it all fell apart - partly due to covid but mostly because the degree requirement came in and they just couldn't recruit anyone. In the past few years they've been trying to get people in because the numbers are so bad - but now the new government has come in and there are dramatic cuts and there's no money. The forces are still short, so the requirements are low - but there are also no training places - and this means backlogs of recruits.
This is for policing in general. For BTP the situation is even worse. They need to make significant cutbacks and the only way they can do that is to not recruit. It doesn't matter how short teams are - there aren't going to be new officers. You've already seen how long the waits are up north (C Div) - I think that will likely become the situation for the foreseeable future. B Div might have the odd class going through every now and then, although frankly if things are as bad as they say, the cheapest thing they can do is not run recruit training and only do transferees because transferees have a 0% chance of failing training and don't need a probation phase.
My advice would be to ask yourselves why you actually want this job in particular. What exactly is it about BTP? Unless you are a train enthusiast I suspect in some (not all) cases it's because people think that BTP is an easy option - outside of London, almost all the time the jobs will be dealt with by the local force and you just turn up to take over the aftermath, and there is pretty much no domestic violence. If you're not wedded to the BTP idea, apply to HO while you still can and start your career that way.

What is quite strange is that all this is going on while BTP is infact understaffed and yet it’s happening anyway. I read somewhere they are short about 300 officers out of a total of only 3000.

There's no money. The government has raised the amount of NI that employers (i.e. BTP) has to pay and under the funding settlement BTP can't ask for more money from the train companies (who don't really like giving money to BTP anyway). The only central government money to BTP comes from counter terrorism grants which only affect certain specialist units, and a few other minor funding streams.
"Going understaffed" is the point. That's the only way they can save money. And one of the only ways to do that is to not recruit. They're already doing the other thing (closing stations) which is even more crazy. You can always recruit more officers if funding increases. You can't generally open new police stations.

How many intakes do you think there will be for the B Divison next year, usually they recruit 3 times for the intakes, one in April , one in June and another in the fall of September.

How many intakes do you think there will be for the B Divison next year, usually they recruit 3 times for the intakes, one in April , one in June and another in the fall of September.

Any news for anyone aside from the generic email they sent out after christmas?

Anyone on here going through/already been through the process of joining BTP as a PC? Applied in June last year, held conditional offer since August last year, and I haven’t had anything from the recruitment team besides a generic ‘we are working to get you started as soon as possible’ email. C Division as well if it helps.

I've been on wait list since November 22 for C Division

2022!!! I thought my 14 months were bad, I may have a longer wait still