The claim
“We want to see police on the streets fighting crime, not stuck behind their desks fighting paper.”
David Cameron, Prime Minister’s Questions, March 11, 2011
The background
The Government’s drive to reduce the national deficit means cuts across the board, and the 43 police forces in England and Wales haven’t escaped the axe.
Police budgets are being cut by 20 per cent over the next four years. But ministers say sharing back-office functions and other efficiency savings mean the frontline won’t be affected.
Now, as FactCheck found out earlier this month, there’s a good deal of confusion about what “frontline” really means, but that’s another story, which may or may not be cleared up by Wednesday’s report on the definition of the term by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary.
David Cameron and Theresa May have repeatedly said they want to see officers fighting crime rather than getting bogged down in paperwork.
But police forces up and down the country have announced that they’ll have to lose police officers to implement the budget cuts being handed down from Whitehall.
There’s only one small problem: you can’t make a police officer redundant.
And FactCheck has learned that that simple fact could mean the Government is in for a whole world of pain when it comes to stretching the thin blue line.
The analysis by Patrick Worrall
Nobody knows exactly how many police jobs will have to go to satisfy the need for cuts, but with about 80 per cent of police budgets spent on staffing costs, it’s obvious that someone – whether police officers or civilian staff – will have to go.
The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is sticking to its most recent estimate of 12,000 officers to go over the next four years.
Labour puts it slightly higher – at 12,500 in the same period.
And the Police Federation says 5-6,000 will go a year. So they’re talking about a fall of 20-24,000 officers by the next General Election.
Now police forces have various options if they want to slash the numbers of officers.
They can sit around and wait for people to quit, retire or die – that’s “natural wastage”.
And on paper, it’s likely to play a significant role. The Police Federation says up to 5-6,000 officers could be lost every year through natural wastage.
So technically if a police force did a complete freeze on recruitment for four years in a row, they just might be able to avoid getting rid of serving officers.
Given the need to make budget cuts now and the unpredictability of natural wastage that’s extremely unlikely, and we know that some forces are having to go further.
So how else can they slim down?
Some have been using an obscure police pension rule – regulation A19 – to force officers who have been serving for 30 years to retire.
Labour have released figures showing that 13 forces intend to use this power and 1,138 officers have either been forced to retire already or will have to go by 2015.
Yvette Cooper is extrapolating from those figures and suggesting more than 2,000 would be axed under A19 if other forces followed suit.
ACPO thinks that there might be some Labour spin at work here. A spokesman told us: “A19 is not being used by all forces. Police chiefs won’t want to use it unless they have to.
“Forces actually have to prove to the Police Authority that they need to use it. It’s not being widely used.”
So if a chief constable doesn’t want to go down that road, what can he do? Well, nothing.
The problem is that a fully-sworn police officer is technically not an employee of a police force but a servant of the Crown, and as such, cannot be sacked.
That presents the Government with a bit of a problem if it wants forces to go through with its cuts programme.
Take Greater Manchester Police, one of the biggest in the country, which is shedding 1,377 uniformed officers over four years.
A recruitment freeze means 860 officer jobs will go through natural wastage.
The force is considering using regulation A19, but chiefs estimate that will only lead to 100 or 200 officers being forced to retire.
That leaves a shortfall of more than 300 officers, and as the law stands, there’s no other way of getting them off the books.
The only option appears to be losing civilian staff members and getting police officers to do the jobs that would have been done by them.
That’s what the Police Federation has been expecting to happen for a while. Vice Chairman Simon Reed said: “We had been removing officers from backroom roles and replacing them with support staff.
“That has been a Government programme for a number of years and it’s worked. Now that’s going to be reversed. Those civilian roles will need to be back-filled by police officers.”
The Guardian has now reported the contents of leaked memos from Warwickshire police authority that appear to show that the process has already begun.
Warwickshire has reportedly drafted up to 150 officers to cover back-office functions of civilian staff who have been made redundant.
There’s no suggestion the force has acted unlawfully, but other police authorities who want to follow suit will have to tread very carefully if they don’t want to blunder into a legal minefield.
FactCheck can reveal that the unions are bristling for a fight over “back-filling”. And any worker who feels that they’ve been sacked unfairly so that someone else can take over their role can take it up with an employment tribunal, whether they are a union member or not.
Employment law expert Andreas White from Kingsley Napley said: “It would be a very unusual situation. It might even be unprecedented.
“Employers are free to restructure their workforce in order to make legitimate and necessary budget cuts. But the police have been given very, very challenging targets in terms of cutting their budgets.
“How exactly they go about doing that is a very contentious and difficult subject.
“I think they are probably quite likely to get a lot of lawsuits whatever happens. The public sector in general terms faces a lot more tribunal litigation than the private sector. The workforce tends to be much more unionised.
“They will have to handle it very carefully. However carefully they handle it, I think there are very likely to be all sorts of issues.
“The unions are challenging these things all the way.”
Ben Priestley, Unison’s national officer for police staff, told FactCheck: “Unison will challenge any instances where police officers are used to back-fill redundant police staff posts.
“If police officers are used to back fill police staff jobs, the government’s claims to create the most cost-effective public sector will be made a mockery of. The UK will employ the most expensive 999 call handlers, detention officers and police trainers.
“Police officers are a far more expensive resource than police staff, and should be out there on the streets getting on with the job of fighting crime.”
The Home Office insists that chief constables will be able to cut red tape so fewer backroom staff are needed and bobbies can stay on the beat.
A spokesman said: “We believe that police forces can make the necessary savings while protecting frontline services and prioritising the visibility and availability of policing.
“Forces must focus on driving out wasteful spending, and increasing efficiency in the back office. The effectiveness of a police force does not depend primarily on the number of staff it has, but rather on the way they are deployed.
“The Government will play its part by reducing bureaucracy, driving more efficient procurement, and working with forces to ensure that the savings of over £1bn a year identified by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary are delivered.
“By cutting out costs and scrapping bureaucracy we are saving hundreds of millions of pounds and hundreds of thousands of man hours.”
The verdict
The Government could be in for world of hurt if police chiefs don’t tread very carefully here.
If hundreds of civilian workers get the chop – and they feel they’ve been unfairly treated – the cost of litigation could add to the woes of police authorities.
And with the public service unions pledging to fight the Coalition’s cuts programme tooth and nail, this could be a golden opportunity for them to put the boot into Government plans.
In any event, the revelations in recent days over the use of compulsory retirement and the apparent secondment of officers into backroom roles mean David Cameron’s words ring very hollow.
It all lends power to what the Police Federation has been saying from the outset: you can’t make a 20 per cent cut without affecting the frontline.
