The \u00a318,000 starting salary for new police apprenticeships is not enough and is of \u2018real concern\u2019 given the basic cost of living in Essex.<\/p>\n
Essex Police Federation Chairman Steve Taylor is concerned the \u2018derisory\u2019 amount for new police recruits, announced by the Home Office earlier this month, will lead to them eventually leaving the force for higher paid jobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe money being offered is just not enough,\u201d he said, \u201cparticularly for us here in Essex which is an affluent part of the country and where the cost of living is so high.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow we have the South East Allowance, but it\u2019s not linked to the cost of living unlike London Weighting payments which are.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, the force can have issues in ensuring officers get the South East Allowance in their pay as its aimed at helping forces both recruit and retain officers.<\/p>\n
Steve said: \u201cI would maintain we have an officer retention issue in Essex, you only have to look at how many officers we lose to the Metropolitan Police for instance, but we have people knocking on the door wanting to be police officers, in fact the issue we have is in processing the numbers.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, all the while the Government links the allowance to retention and recruitment it means we are going to struggle to get that payment awarded to our colleagues \u2013 we\u2019d like to see it linked to the cost of living instead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steve continued: \u201cIt\u2019s not all doom and gloom and there are lots of positives about being a police officer. But equally, the officers we lose have gone through years of training and often have years of frontline experience, so we feel each loss.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe only have to look at the exodus of firearms officers a couple of months ago and the real difficulties that placed us in.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen there\u2019s so few of us having to do more with less, when we lose our experienced colleagues, we do feel that more acutely.
\nThe starting salary certainly doesn\u2019t help the situation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I joined 18 years ago my starting salary then was \u00a317,130 or so \u2013 two decades later and it\u2019s gone up a couple of hundred pounds?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s disgusting, the stresses, the strains the dangers that officers face have increased and yet the compensation for that hasn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The \u00a318,000 starting salary for new police apprenticeships is not enough and is of \u2018real concern\u2019 given the basic cost of living in Essex. Essex Police Federation Chairman Steve Taylor\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":214,"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\/4678"}],"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=4678"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4680,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4678\/revisions\/4680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}