Britain’s police officers and the society they police have changed significantly over the past 30 years. We have become less deferential to authority, with drunkenness and antisocial behaviour continuing to cause serious disorder and crime. We also demand more of our public services than ever before. Parliament has passed a raft of new, highly prescriptive and complex criminal legislation and the police face much higher levels of public scrutiny.
The police have changed markedly too. Now, women make up a third of recruits. The average age of new police officers is 28, not 18. Increasing numbers focus on specialist disciplines such as counter-terrorism, serious and organised crime, domestic violence, public protection and complex fraud.
In 1978 all police officers expected to work shifts for most of their careers. Now more than 40 per cent work 9 to 5 in offices.
The present pay system for the Police Service is rooted in the reforms brought in after the inquiry into police pay carried out by Lord Edmund-Davies in 1978. Thirty-three years later, following so much change, fundamental reform is long overdue.
In most police forces in England and Wales, more than 80 per cent of expenditure goes on paying the service’s most important resource — its people. At a time of serious financial restraint, it is imperative that the money provides the most efficient and effective policing.
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Currently the system of police pay continues on the assumption that all police officers are the same, do work of equal importance and face the same demands. It rewards years in the job, not what is done and how well. That is a source of great division and resentment among police officers.
One officer told me of the night when he and his colleague ran towards a fight outside a pub, where broken bottles were the weapons and tempers were hot. He was earning £9 an hour and his colleague was on £13. They both faced the same danger, and were about to tackle it together. They ran just as hard.
In the past six months, I have seen a great deal of the culture of the police. It is a culture of determination, courage, hard work and achievement, of facing any challenge or danger and confronting it in full measure. There is a considerable degree of goodwill in the police, in making sacrifices — personal or otherwise — to protect the public, deter crime, disrupt criminal networks, apprehend criminals and so make communities safer. Nothing should be done that might jeopardise that.
In too many respects some police officers have the notion that they are relied upon but not valued. But the hard-working police officer is not Tommy Atkins, the private soldier of Rudyard Kipling’s invention, despised by polite society in ordinary times but the saviour of his country “when the guns begin to shoot”. Police officers are more highly respected than they believe and they deserve that respect.
There is just as much unfairness in being paid differently for the same work as there is in being paid the same for doing work that is almost completely different. Police officers are not motivated by money but they do want to be treated fairly, with full respect and acknowledgement of their hard work and professionalism.
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Every day in the community they deal with injustice. They do not deserve it in the ways they are paid.
The reforms I have recommended have been devised in severe economic circumstances. I have identified £1.1 billion of savings in the police pay bill in the next three years, through the abolition or suspension of discredited allowances that belong in a different era. For example, of officers who applied for special skills awards, 97 per cent received them, although far fewer truly qualified.
Overtime, which makes up 4.7 per cent of the pay bill, should be tightened, and ratcheted pay rises that are time-based rather than skills-based should be stopped.
With these savings, it is possible to return £485 million to the taxpayer, and divert £625 million to frontline policing. This means that it is possible to pay additional sums to police officers doing the most arduous duties, on our streets at night, in the cold and wet, facing angry and dangerous men. It also allows extra money to go to those with specialist skills, such as detectives, child protection officers, firearms police and those who patrol our communities. It intensifies frontline policing, and so strengthens the blue line that protects us all.
Tom Winsor is author of the independent review of police pay and conditions published by the Home Office yesterday