West Yorkshire Police officers are flocking to the neighbouring North Yorkshire force in search of a better quality of life.

In the last two years, up to 40 bobbies are said to have swapped inner-city working for the quieter challenges of rural policing championed by TV's popular Heartbeat show.

Tom McGhie, chairman of West Yorkshire Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, said officers were switching for a better quality of life and a different policing challenge.

He said: "People move for their children, perhaps for better schools, or they find driving to work in the centre of a city like Bradford is a chore.

"I am sure that doing the job in a different rural policing style applies to a lot.

"Officers are under a lot of pressure in our towns and cities. They feel they don't always have time to devote to a job before moving onto the next one. They feel that in North Yorkshire you get the chance to see a job through from start to finish and integrate better with the people they are dealing with."

However, Mr McGhie said it was a concern that the force was losing officers who had been trained. He said: "We seem to have lost between 20 and 40, maybe more, officers to North Yorkshire in the last couple of years.

"North Yorkshire took a lot of our firearms officers and were recruiting some of our best detectives. We have lost some officers with top skills. It is a concern when we have invested in these people and another force takes them from us. We have to replace them and invest in training new people."

Mr McGhie said the standards of West Yorkshire officers were very high and they attracted attention from other forces. "We do lose them because of that," he said.

A spokesman for North Yorkshire Police confirmed the force did recruit a lot of officers from West Yorkshire but did not target their neighbours.

He said: "While it's very different to working in a large urban conurbation, it is still tough and it is challenging, though in a different way.

"It is also a quality of life thing because North York-shire is a nice place to live.

"It can be more challenging to be a police officer in North Yorkshire because of the huge range of work we do. They also have to get used to dealing with things on their own. There are two million acres of land in the county and your nearest colleague can be 20 miles away.

"We don't target West Yorkshire officers when we are recruiting. At the moment we are not recruiting at all. We are full up and there is a queue of people who really want to work for this force, so we take the absolute cream."