Government ‘Uplift’ Needs To Go Further

DESPITE the Government making a fanfare about hitting its recruitment target of 20,000 new officers, South Yorkshire Police still doesn’t have as many officers as it had pre-2010, the Federation has said.

South Yorkshire Police Federation Chair Steve Kent said: “South Yorkshire Police are up to their numbers for now, which is obviously good news. But it is a bizarre thing for the Government to wave a flag about repairing the damage that they caused in the first place.

“We’re still not at the numbers we had pre-2010 in our force, and that doesn’t cater for the growth that, as a force and organisation, we should have. The Government is almost like: ‘job done’. No, it’s not, we need to grow our establishment even further to meet the demands that the public needs.”

Steve added that the fast recruitment to reach Government targets had left forces with a very young-in-service workforce.

He continued: “While we welcome having boots on the ground, and once new officers settle in we’ll have a really motivated, energetic workforce, there’s a serious experience drain.

“That’s not disrespecting the enthusiasm of the officers, but we’re losing a lot of our more experienced officers to retirement and for other reasons. We need to have a very steady growth in the organisation going forward, taking us over and above the numbers that we have now.”