Essex Police Federation: “Officers being run into the ground”

ESSEX Police Federation Mark Smith outlines the latest Federation position after the Police and Crime Commissioner said cost-cutting had gone too far in the force and had led to high levels of sickness among officers.

Speaking to EssexFedFocus, Mr Smith (pictured) said cuts to policing budgets and officer numbers are “without doubt the thing that has affected sickness” and that “officers are being run into the ground.”

What is the latest situation with sickness and stress? 

I am trying my best to highlight this to the chief Steve Kavanagh and to the public of Essex because they deserve to know the impact that these cuts are having on officers because that directly impacts on the service that’s provided to the public.

I think as it stands matters are only going to get worse if we have more cuts to police budgets. I don’t blame chief constables. They are policing with the budgets they are given from the Government and doing the very best they can. But the cuts without doubt are the thing that has affected sickness. It is a very big issue.

It is one that is caused by things the force has control over and things that they don’t. Where they don’t its Winsor, pay reform, pensions reform, pay freezes – they have no control over that. But they do have control over the cancelling of rest days, of making officers work more than they are supposed to each shift, keeping them on overtime, not allowing officers to have leave, declaring exigencies of duty constantly, and this knocks onto officers because these are periods of time when they should be recovering from the work that they have been doing and I think that as we move forward and we have fewer frontline officers, it’s going to get worse.

Now the PCC Nick Alston has made a statement saying that that greater investment and a larger budget has been given to occupational health. We welcome that, we asked for that last November. But if the PCC thinks that is the thing that is going to solve our sickness problem, then I am sorry because he is very, very wrong. It is a far bigger issue and officers are being run into the ground.

And the Government keeps pointing to their statistics and saying ‘see, you can get more for less, policing is working, crime is down’, but at what cost? And the cost is higher sickness levels and officers being run into the ground to get these figures. This can’t go on.

What more can be done? 

There needs to be realisation by the government, the PCC, chief officers that we cannot do the same anymore. The Government are pushing us and saying we can. We can’t. Once upon a time we were happy to have 40 on this list before we started cancelling rest days or working people longer, they might have to make that list 80.

And realise that we haven’t got enough officers to work anymore. So we may have to allow these lists of unattended incidents to grow. We may have to start saying to people, ‘no we are not coming round to see you. We haven’t got the resources these days.’ We may have to change the ways of reporting crimes because if you aren’t going to start looking after the welfare of officers then you aren’t going to have the resources to do what you want.

What happens next for the Federation – how are you going to be holding the chief and the PCC to account on this? 

I think they are being held to account by the stories that are being run – about sickness levels and how they have grown. I don’t want to have to hold them to account. I want to work with them to try and find a way of correcting what’s happening by working a bit smarter, by not cancelling rest days, by not declaring exigencies of duty all the time, by trying to bring officer morale up and by working with the force to improve sickness levels.

It’s not for me to hold them to account – it’s for the public. If they public are seeing this and they are not happy then they should be holding MPs to account.