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The national perspective - Foul, not fair, play (Police Review 15th April 2011)
In last week’s Police Review, Nick Herbert, police minister, wrote of the importance of ensuring that fairness is enshrined in his government’s policing reforms. I am not sure what surprised me more: his startling use of the word ‘fairness’ to describe the ruthless approach with which this government is prepared to slash the policing budget and significantly reduce our terms and conditions, or the shock the government appears to be experiencing that 140,000 police officers throughout England and Wales will fight back to stop the erosion of the service we provide to our communities.
In a matter of weeks we have faced Tom Winsor’s review of police terms and conditions, Lord Hutton’s review of public sector pensions and, more recently, the Home Office has published Peter Neyroud’s report on police leadership and training. Over the horizon, we also have the introduction of directly-elected police and crime commissioners. This attack is not just on the pay of police officers but on the whole framework of the service; the people it employs and the people it serves.
Let’s be clear, the government has chosen to cut the police budget by 20 per cent, in the same way it chose to ringfence NHS spending, cut defence spending by seven per cent and increase the overseas aid budget by billions. Only last week the government gave Pakistan £650 million and accepted potential liability in excess of £4 billion for the bailout of the Portuguese economy. They seem to have failed to recognise that a government’s first duty is to the safety of its citizens.
So much of government policy is a house of cards. It claims it wants to protect the front line without actually being able to define what the front line is. Additionally, it appears to have got its figures so wrong that we are being told that we have to choose between jobs or wage cuts. The government chose to cut the police budget by 20 per cent. To suggest police officers have to choose whether to keep our jobs or take wage cuts is outrageous. They need to reverse these cuts as a matter of urgency or there will be, as Bill Bratton, a former New York Police Department chief, pointed out on a recent visit to the UK, ‘unintended consequences and real risks’ following such a policy.
Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, said at the TUC conference last autumn that the public sector is not to blame for the economic crisis. Well, it does not feel like that in the police service at the moment.
Mr Herbert talks about ministers playing their part and says that ministers have taken a five per cent pay cut and a pay freeze for the next five years. But a Downing Street press release last May stated a decision had been taken, shortly after the coalition government was formed, which actually saw the combined ministerial and parliamentary salaries of most junior ministers rise by 36 per cent. For ministers of state, such as the police minister, their combined ministerial and parliamentary salaries rose by 50 per cent, while salaries more than doubled for most members of the Cabinet.
With 23 of the 29 Cabinet members ranked as millionaires by The Daily Mail last May, this does not seem to me to be something that we are ‘all in together’. Compare this with Mr Winsor’s proposals for police officers’ pay.
For an officer who has not yet reached the top of their pay scale, they will be at the same pay point for at least the next two years. If they are at the top of their scale and they are in receipt of a competency-related threshold payment, they will lose £1,212 a year. The proposed abolition of these payments means that every officer has lost the potential to have £1,212 added to their pensionable pay. That means that their annual pension when they retire will be more than £800 a year less.
I am concerned that Mr Winsor is drawing officers’ attention to the new allowances in his recommendations without also pointing out how they will lose out. According to Mr Winsor, his report ‘is good news for frontline or operational officers. By 2012/13, a 24-hour response constable with seven years’ service and level two public order training, working a standard shift pattern, may receive approximately £1,770 more than in 2010/11. That includes an additional £1,320 for having to work unsocial hours. This is despite the proposed progression freeze and likely increases in pension contributions.’
However, if that same constable had simply been allowed to progress up the current pay scale, he or she would have been over £2,000 better off by 2012/13. So even with Mr Winsor’s proposed unsocial hours payment and expertise and professional accreditation allowance, this officer is still worse off than he or she would otherwise have been without his recommendations.
None of this includes the effect on the officer’s take-home pay of inflation running at five per cent recently, increased pension contributions together with a potential two-year public sector pay freeze.
If this officer is one of the ‘winners’ under Winsor, there seems little hope for the losers. What is perhaps most disturbing is the sense I get from the police minister in his recent article, that as well as being unfair, the existing arrangements for police remuneration are out-dated. This is surprising, since some of Mr Winsor’s major targets include competency-related threshold payments and special priority payments. These were brought in as part of the last comprehensive reform of police pay in May 2002.
When Mr Winsor was appointed to conduct his review we were reassured by his comments that he would be guided by the evidence. Yet characterising police pay as outdated is unfair and ignores the evidence.
I have to question whether the police minister is fully aware of the impact of the Winsor recommendations. Aside from removing £485 million from the police pay bill and the financial impact this will have upon individual police officers, has the minister considered the impact of this on the police service and communities we serve?
Tom Winsor looks back several times in his report to what he sees as the unfinished business of the 1960 Willink Commission, which sought to take police officers out of the group of workers that can qualify for overtime. Society has changed and the context of modern policing has changed since this commission.
I would have hoped to find at least one reference to either Lord Scarman’s Report following the inner city unrest of the early 1980s or the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in Mr Winsor’s 300-page report. Times have moved on since the 1960s and we need to continue to attract the right calibre of individual into the police service.
The service employs more women officers than ever before. In 2009, 20 per cent of women constables, 24 per cent of women sergeants and 13 per cent of women inspectors worked part-time. Mr Winsor’s report makes no proposals that would benefit flexible working in the service to support the operational resilience demands we will face with falling police numbers. Unsurprisingly, his online calculator for estimating the impact of his changes does not even work for part-time officers.
We need to maintain the safeguards and protections to the quality time which all officers need with their families. We need to ensure that the service is one which welcomes and accommodates officers, recognising that they too have families, many with caring responsibilities. The service has benefited from more flexible working and the government must understand and maintain this if we are to continue to deliver a diverse and resilient service to the public.
It is enshrined in legislation that the Police Federation of England and Wales stands for the welfare and efficiency of the police service. Where changes have a positive impact on our members, the police service and communities they serve, we will embrace them. When they do not, it is our duty to draw attention to dangers facing both our members and the public. We are open to new practices but opposed to reckless policies which are ill-thought through and will damage our members and the communities we serve.
Paul McKeever is chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales This article is reproduced courtesy of Jane's Police Review
You can see Paul McKeever’s latest video comments here: http://www.polfed.org/federation_videos.asp
