- Conference
- 2025 Police, Probation and CAFCASS Conference
- Date
- 18 June 2025
- Decision
- Carried
Conference will know that it took the murder of Sarah Everard and the ensuing reviews by Baroness Casey and Lady Angiolini for constabularies to open the closed doors of police officer conduct to the public, consequently ripping down those curtains that have been pulled tight within our places of work, that have been covering up a multitude of misbehaviours and allowing the culture, the day-to-day behaviours of police officers in our workplaces, to be examined and held to account.
And slowly but surely, we have seen increasing numbers of officers being taken through the misconduct process with many resulting dismissals.
As the experienced reps reading this will know, unfortunately gross misconduct hearings are business as usual for us – we all know our policies which have been consulted on following national negotiations and we are able to confidently support our members through the process.
And I think we would all say that the time has now arrived when staff can actually feel empowered to challenge officer behaviours and pursue a rightful outcome through the internal disciplinary mechanism.
But then that’s where the scales start to unbalance, for as soon as an officer is served papers that they are subject to this process the Federation supports the ‘no comment’ card until they can get legal support in place.
Remember this is not a criminal ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ situation but an internal ‘balance of probabilities’ investigation.
The very fact that a lawyer is now in the mix along with the Professional Standards Department (PSD) workings elongates the time span and our member is becoming increasingly anxious especially as now we find out that if this reaches a misconduct panel situation our member will undoubtedly be cross-examined by the officer’s lawyer – and reminded throughout the process by PSD I’m sure with their welfare head on, that if it feels stressful going through everything with them it won’t be any easier with the lawyer.
Surely this is what we have been hearing in the press from victims over the decades – they couldn’t face going through with it because of the fear of being pulled to bits at court.
So, now that we actually have staff members being heard and their complaints being seriously considered how many of us can honestly say we would be resilient enough to have to endure many months of worrying about the final process when we could be potentially trampled over and spat out by an experienced criminal lawyer.
An officer’s right to be represented by a qualified legal representative from the outset of an internal investigation maybe enshrined in their regulations but this surely cannot be fair in our joint space where we as staff feel protected by our contracted policies up until the time we challenge an officer colleague, when at a best a staff member could have UNISON support; although we battle every day for our members this is not a battleground where we could even begin to challenge a legal counsel – until we take legal representation out of this process staff will never have organisational justice.
Conference calls on the Police, Probation and CAFCASS Service Group Executive to:
1. Work with the Sector Committee in seeking to raise the employers side of the Police Staff Council’s awareness of the imbalance of representation between officers and staff during internal workplace meetings and the adverse impact on our victim members;
2. Seek to gather information from all UNISON police branches on how widespread the use of solicitors by officers is during workplace hearings;
3. Publish and share any best practice local internal hearings procedures that fair to police staff.