Police Leavers: Improvements in pay and work/life balance will help retention

POLICE officer pay and work/life balance need to improve if the service is to staunch the flow of leaving officers, Essex Police Federation has warned.

The Police Federation of England and Wales’ leavers’ survey found that more than half of officers who resigned between October 2017 and April 2019 (51%) blamed poor morale.

Steve Taylor, Essex Police Federation Chair, said called for better pay for officers, adding: “Retention is not best served when people are out on the front line, facing the most serious types of risk that officers can face, and they don’t feel like they’re adequately compensated for it.”

He also called for a better approach to investigations that would not leave officers in limbo for years before being told there was no case to answer. And shift patterns, resourcing and time off must to be better managed if police officers are to carry on in their roles, he added.

He said: “Retention is not best served when our members are so few that officers’ rest days become things of luxury rather than entitlement, where we put days in the books and we keep on putting off time to rest, recuperate and recover.

“When shifts are messed around at the drop of a hat, with alarming frequency. All these things need to improve if we are to retain more of those good people that we’re losing. What’s frustrating is most of those things are in the gift of the organisations that we work for, and are so eminently achievable.”

The PFEW survey also found that 66% of people would never consider returning to the police service, and that 30% of officers said a better work/life balance would make them reconsider their decision to leave.

One in four said improvements to welfare and a lower workload would make them reconsider.