“Performance-related pay for police must be fair”

PLANS to link police officer pay to performance assessments must demonstrate fairness, South Yorkshire Police Federation has said.

Under the new system, police officers with between two and four years’ service will only get pay upgrades if they can prove their skills in certain areas in their professional development review.

But the tests, which will assess officers’ ability to support victims, carry out searches and interview suspects could be “very difficult to administrate. We need to ensure the framework which is adopted is fair and achievable”, according to Zuleika Payne, Chair of South Yorkshire Police Federation.

She said: “Policing, by virtue of it’s nature, is unique, and sometimes its quirky status doesn’t offer a consistency that you can measure. You could be as talented a police officer working in a city centre setting but your experience and practical handling could be totally different to that of an officer working in a rural beat. So how do you even try to assess, quantify and measure?

“There are so many facets of policing; we need to ensure that action plans are realistic.”

The move was introduced by the 2011 Winsor Pay Review, we need to ensure fairness at all times, Zuleika added.

“There are so many potential pitfalls with this. Falling officer numbers mean that you don’t always achieve the work you intended to, during a tour of duty. You could be tasked with a particular assignment or deployed elsewhere at short notice. This could hinder the expectations the officer has been tasked to achieve.

“What if you are an injured police officer and you have come back to work on restricted duties but you have been office-bound. Are you going to achieve the competencies that are required of you? Everyone has got to be looked at on an individual basis. This could prove to be difficult to measure consistently because of the nature of policing.”