THE Labour Party has \u201cunequivocally\u201d promised not to use compulsory severance for police officers if it wins the general election in May.<\/p>\n
Jack Dromey, Labour’s Shadow Policing Minister, (pictured) has made it clear that redundancy will not be an option for police officers.\u00a0\u201cWe will not use compulsory severance. Full stop. Clear and unequivocal. Unlike the Home Secretary who leaves her options open,\u201d said Mr Dromey.<\/p>\n
<\/em><\/p>\n Home Secretary Theresa May last year accepted the Police Arbitration Tribunal\u2019s recommendation not to implement measures to introduce compulsory severance for police officers in England and Wales. However, she said that the government and police should continue to consider the reform as an option.<\/p>\n The Police Arbitration Tribunal, chaired by Prof John Goodman CBE, ruled that introducing officer redundancy to the service would be a \u201cmomentous change\u201d and that the case for bringing it into the service was not \u201ccompelling\u201d.<\/p>\n The Police Federation of England and Wales had warned that it would undermine the operational independence of officers, with the threat of redundancy potentially creating perverse incentives.<\/p>\n For officers to work in the knowledge that they could face redundancy despite the sacrifices they make for the force would be\u00a0\u201cdetrimental to the mutuality of commitment between officers and forces\u201d, the Tribunal ruled.<\/p>\n The recommendation was put forward in Tom Winsor\u2019s second pay and conditions review. It proposed the \u201cintroduction of a system of compulsory severance for police officers with less than full pensionable service from April 2013\u201d.<\/p>\n Last February, Deputy Chief Constable Francis Habgood, ACPO\u2019s National Policing Lead for Reward and Recognition, said: \u201cChief constables reluctantly supported compulsory severance because of concerns about the financial situation beyond 2016 but it was always seen as a last resort, only to be used when there were extreme budgetary pressures.\u201d<\/p>\n But Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said she was \u201cdeeply concerned\u201d about the prospect of forces being able to make officers redundant.<\/p>\n \u201cMy fear is that government want to introduce it exactly because they\u2019re planning for those extreme circumstances and they\u2019re preparing for another round of damaging spending cuts,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Mr Dromey said that Labour agreed with Mr Winsor\u2019s proposals to raise the police service to the level of a profession, but said the party rejected his proposed starting salary of \u00a319,000.<\/p>\n He said that a Labour government\u2019s first priorities would be to tackle the \u201cremorseless haemorrhaging\u201d of officers from the police service and to rebuild neighbourhood policing, as well as increasing collaboration between forces to save the jobs of \u201cthousands of police officers under threat\u201d.<\/p>\n He accused the government of reversing a \u201cgeneration of progress\u201d by cutting 16,000 officers and forcing further reductions in the future. \u201cAt the heart of everything we do will be to rebuild neighbourhood policing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" THE Labour Party has \u201cunequivocally\u201d promised not to use compulsory severance for police officers if it wins the general election in May. Jack Dromey, Labour’s Shadow Policing Minister, (pictured) has\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1763,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1762"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1762"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1765,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1762\/revisions\/1765"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}