Labour rules out compulsory severance for police officers

THE Labour Party has “unequivocally” 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 made it clear that redundancy will not be an option for police officers. “We will not use compulsory severance. Full stop. Clear and unequivocal. Unlike the Home Secretary who leaves her options open,” said Mr Dromey.

Home Secretary Theresa May last year accepted the Police Arbitration Tribunal’s 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.

The Police Arbitration Tribunal, chaired by Prof John Goodman CBE, ruled that introducing officer redundancy to the service would be a “momentous change” and that the case for bringing it into the service was not “compelling”.

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.

For officers to work in the knowledge that they could face redundancy despite the sacrifices they make for the force would be “detrimental to the mutuality of commitment between officers and forces”, the Tribunal ruled.

The recommendation was put forward in Tom Winsor’s second pay and conditions review. It proposed the “introduction of a system of compulsory severance for police officers with less than full pensionable service from April 2013”.

Last February, Deputy Chief Constable Francis Habgood, ACPO’s National Policing Lead for Reward and Recognition, said: “Chief 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.”

But Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said she was “deeply concerned” about the prospect of forces being able to make officers redundant.

“My fear is that government want to introduce it exactly because they’re planning for those extreme circumstances and they’re preparing for another round of damaging spending cuts,” she said.

Mr Dromey said that Labour agreed with Mr Winsor’s proposals to raise the police service to the level of a profession, but said the party rejected his proposed starting salary of £19,000.

He said that a Labour government’s first priorities would be to tackle the “remorseless haemorrhaging” of officers from the police service and to rebuild neighbourhood policing, as well as increasing collaboration between forces to save the jobs of “thousands of police officers under threat”.

He accused the government of reversing a “generation of progress” by cutting 16,000 officers and forcing further reductions in the future. “At the heart of everything we do will be to rebuild neighbourhood policing,” he said.