- Conference
- 2015 Police & Justice Service Group Conference
- Date
- 12 June 2015
- Decision
- Carried as Amended
In light of the disastrous election result in May and the resulting announcements that further cuts will be made to public services including Police and Probation. Theresa May has clearly stated in her speech to the Police Federation on May 20th “there is no ducking the fact that police spending will have to come down again”. So, there it is, a clear commitment by the government to reduce spending on police services across the country without any regard for the consequences to police staff and their families.
Conference is extremely concerned that as collaboration between forces moves forward in an effort to find the current and new savings, collaborating forces will focus solely on reducing police staff budgets rather than providing a high-quality service which has public confidence. The brunt of these new cuts to policing budgets will again be borne by Police Staff reflecting the actions taken by all forces faced with finding savings between 2010 and 2015. This will mean a further significant loss of police staff jobs across the UK.
Work that would have been done by police staff would then have to be completed by warranted police officers, thus reducing the number of operational hours the officers could spend working and fighting crime in local communities.
Those police staff who do remain in post will have to pick up more tasks and higher workloads as departments are cut to the bone. If this is allowed to continue in its present form, it will cause more stress and fatigue resulting in higher sickness/absence rates. Higher absence will ultimately result in more capability processes being conducted in individual forces and will lead to further losses of highly skilled and motivated police staff as they leave their organisations under the stress.
Conference we cannot go on like this, patching over the cracks, something will give and that will be our Police Service, a service which is respected worldwide.
Therefore Conference instructs the Service Group Executive to actively campaign in the media to highlight to the general public the problems facing Police Services and the inevitable loss of local policing as these drastic cuts take effect.
Conference further instructs the Service Group Executive as part of that campaign to continue the excellent work seen in the 2014 report and publish a further report in time for the 2016 Police and Justice Conference, highlighting the consequences on local economies and local policing the reductions to police staff across the UK have had since austerity measures were introduced.