Mounting workloads are leading to more stress

WORKLOADS for detectives are mounting, it is taking longer to charge people, and stress and illness are escalating, the Chairman of South Yorkshire Police Federation has warned.

“Our detectives have just disappeared, I don’t know where,” added Mr Bowles. “And if we’re losing officer numbers a fair percentage of them are going to be detectives.”

In England and Wales, the investigation time that led to charge is 10% higher than it was four years ago.

Mr Bowles added: “The bureaucracy that still exists despite all Home Secretary’s and previous Federation Chair (Jan Berry) claiming that they’re going to cut bureaucracy, it just stays there. There’s more work to do to investigate a case, monitor and record disclosure items, get it to the CPS, get the file onto a computer, get it to court and yet we’re under pressure to keep bail dates short.

“You can’t have everything. If we’ve got to investigate something you’ve got to give us time to investigate it.”

He added: “We’ve had to staff up our public protection unit, something like a 1,000% on what they were, for obvious reasons, so those detectives have had to come from the work that they were doing before. And that is an opportunity for detectives in other forces, we are looking for transferees.

Are the workloads also affecting the welfare of officers and detectives? “Absolutely,” added Mr Bowles. “I’ve been asking for trend figures from HR about sickness across the board but I haven’t seen any yet. But I can see that the number of applicants to our treatment centre at Harrogate is certainly on the increase for stress and anxiety. So the workloads are increasing, pressures are increasing, and some people are suffering burnout.

“We are liaising with our HR service, which we share with Humberside, and a holistic wellbeing group across both forces has been set up. We will play an active part in discussions.”