Current Issues - 2008

February 2008

Fair Play for Police - PoliceBeat Editorial

Last month over 22,000 police officers – not 16,000 as quickly spun by the Home Office – from all over the United Kingdom walked in a dignified march through the streets of London. Amongst their number were officers from the Scottish Police Federation who despite having been granted the pay award in full wanted to show their solidarity together with the central committee of the rank and file of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland. As a disciplined service the protest of all the officers on behalf of their 170,000 colleagues, was constrained by their professional respect for order.

The Government knows this and will do its utmost to ride out the anger and sense of betrayal felt by all members. This is a Government with an inconsistent approach to settling public sector pay. Teachers have just been awarded 2.45 per cent and, less understandably unless you are a cynic, in England & Wales, police support staff, including PCSOs, had their 2.5 percent awarded from the due date 1st September, thereby avoiding the reduction to 1.9 percent imposed on the police. Each public sector group deserves its award but clearly what has swayed the Government into breaking its own 2 per cent limit has been its awareness of the electoral damage of a strike by either grouping which would, in the case of teachers, seriously dislocate the schooling of millions of voters’ children and for police support staff, probably bring chaos to the administration of policing. When the threat of strike works, it is little wonder that police officers ask if this is the only way that Government can see the light.

Very few officers want to go on strike but the Government should not feel smug about this sense of public obligation ingrained in the police, a sense of commitment evidently not shared by Ministers. But if the police service is to be dismissed as just another public sector mouth to feed, then we are seeing the tearing up of the social covenant between society and the police, a two way contract which has been recognised by both parties since the Edmund Davies report of 1979. Each year our pay award has contained an implicit acknowledgement of our readiness to put our lives at risk and that we cannot improve our terms and conditions through the right to withdraw labour. It is quite clear that the Home Secretary wishes to destroy the Police Negotiating Board and introduce a pay review body, which the Federations of the UK will fiercely resist.

Government of course is papering over the quite evident cracks among ministerial and party colleagues in its portrayal of unity. Gordon Brown has placed his hapless Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, between a rock and a hard place whereby she will almost inevitably become a political casualty of this dispute.

In the meantime the Police Federation for Northern Ireland will give its full support in the fight for the retention of a national pay award mechanism which recognises the unique aspects of policing and which will continue to attract recruits of the highest quality. The Government will not see an end to this dispute without recognising the just claim of the service it most depends upon