Eight hours of safety training for South Yorkshire officers

THE amount of refresher safety training officers receive every year depends entirely on where officers are based.

In South Yorkshire, officers get eight hours’ training every year, a Freedom of Information Act request has revealed.

The highest amount is up to 20 hours a year, with the average of forces who responded to the FOI at 9.5 hours’ personal safety training annually.

Half the forces who replied to the FOI provided under the average figure, including South Yorkshire..

Neil Bowles, Chairman of South Yorkshire Police Federation, said better personal safety training could help protect officers when they are assaulted by an offender.

He said: “We really do need to identify the exact problem before we can come up with solutions. Better and more frequent personal safety training rather than cutting it down like our forces are at the moment, reducing the amount of days you have to do it.

“[Officers need] self-defence skills like any sort of physical skill, you need to build muscle memory to do the certain actions, if you only do it once a year you just don’t remember to do it when you need to in a street fight.”

The College of Policing sets standards for the learning, delivery and assessment of personal safety training across England and Wales based on the 2009 ACPO Guidance on Personal Safety Training.

That document states – in bold – that “as a minimum, forces must ensure that staff receive assessed refresher and development training on an annual basis, unless an auditable risk assessment clearly identifies why this frequency is not necessary for a particular role.”

It gives no minimum time amounts for officers to receive. Or indeed a recommended set time. And it seems forces have taken that as an excuse to wildly vary what they provide to their officers.

Of the 40 forces that responded to the Freedom of Information request, officers in Cambridgeshire Constabulary are given the most safety training at a maximum of 20 hours – although even here the figure can be as low as four hours a year depending on the role of the officer.

After Cambridgeshire, City of London and Staffordshire Police provide the most safety training at 16 hours per year.

They are followed by Cleveland, Derbyshire, Devon and Cornwall, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, the Met, North Wales, Northumbria, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Surrey, Sussex and Warwickshire on 12.

At the other end of the scale, with six hours’ refresher personal safety training are Dorset, Essex, Hampshire, Lancashire, Norfolk and Suffolk. They are followed by Cumbria on 6.25.