Police Pay Increase ‘Must Have Substance’

“WHAT we really want to hear from the Government is that we’re going to get an inflation-busting pay rise to make up for previous years when we’ve gone without.”

That was the reaction of South Yorkshire Police Federation Chair Steve Kent to the news that the public sector pay freeze would be lifted next year.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that the pay freeze imposed last year would end in April 2022, but the amount of the pay rise is unknown and it may not keep up with inflation, which is currently 3.1% and is predicted to go above 4% by December. On average, police pay has fallen in real terms by 12.4% since 2010.

Steve said: “We welcome the announcement that there will be a pay increase for police officers in 2022, but our members are wondering how much it will be, considering that for the vast majority of the past decade we haven’t received a pay rise.

This pay increase has to have substance behind it.

“Police officers haven’t been recognised throughout the COVID crisis in the way that other public services rightly have. Nobody would deny that the NHS should be rewarded for the hard work it’s done, but we’ve been at the frontline of all this as well.

“We’ve been neglected for way too long. Police pay is down in real terms when you look at inflation, so it really needs to be bumped up quite substantially.”

When the current pay freeze was announced in July, the Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW) withdrew its support and engagement with the Police Remuneration Review Body (PRRB), saying it was “not fit for purpose”.

Steve said that, despite next year’s planned pay increase, the Government still needed to rethink the police pay mechanism.

He said: “The PFEW pulled out of a flawed system. We really do need to look at a fair remuneration board that doesn’t have shackles around its ankles – there needs to be a commitment from Government to allow it to make decisions and for them to be automatically honoured, rather than the current situation where it’s almost like the decision has already been made before it goes to them. That just can’t be right.”