News from the New Party

Police pay deal must be honoured

The British police have a tough time of it these days: beset by woeful leadership, hindered by stifling bureaucracy and distracted by politically correct irrelevancies and now cheated by government.  As a result the morale of the police service is dangerously low, and the relationship between the police and the public is suffering.  The Telegraph comments:

We now live in a society in which trust is breaking down between the Government and the police, the Government and the public, and - most worryingly - the police and the public. A few years ago, most readers of this newspaper would have instinctively taken the police's side in a conflict with Whitehall.

They probably still do, but with less enthusiasm. Two problems are ruining a relationship that was once the most successful in the world: the transformation of police forces into politically correct police "services"; and the fact that many officers spend more time apprehending traffic offenders than tackling street crime.

The public is rightly fed up with this state of affairs. But so are most serving officers. The police did not ask to be turned into an arm of social services. Their change of image was forced on them by a Labour government and a cohort of ambitious officers who speak and think in clichés, of whom the supreme example is Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Commissioner. In addition, ordinary police officers are not to blame for a shortage of police in residential areas.

Now, on top of everything else, police officers are about to be cheated by the government.  It is not unreasonable for the government to have a pay policy for public sector workers.  However the police are in a separate category to the rest of the public sector because they are statutorily unable to take industrial action.  In return for depriving the police of this right, an arbitration system has been in place for twenty-eight years to agree police pay.  For twenty-eight years the results of arbitration have been honoured by the government of the day: until this year.

By refusing to back-date the 2.5% pay increase agreed for police officers from December 1st to September 1st, the 2.5% increase has been effectively reduced to 1.9%.  This is a canny piece of creative accounting from one point of view - an underhanded and dishonourable confidence trick from another.  In present circumstances police morale hardly needs to be dealt a further blow - least of all a blow below the belt.  The Home Office should abide by both the spirit and the letter of the arbitration arrangements: police officers should be given their 2.5% in full.