Officers Are Struggling With High Workloads & Cancelled Weekends

Exhausted police officers are having their weekends cancelled due to a lack of resources, South Yorkshire Police Federation said.

The situation was “very frustrating” for officers, who were often being drafted in to help police football matches.

Federation Chair Steve Kent said: “The pressures now are unbelievable and the numbers are just not quite there”.

It followed the Police Federation of England and Wales publishing its Police Leavers’ Survey, which showed 27% of officers were resigning before reaching pension age.

Most cited low morale and poor job satisfaction as the main reasons for walking away from their career, disillusioned and burnt out.

The survey found that 63% of people who resigned pointed to the job’s negative impact on their family and personal life as a critical factor.

Steve said the impact was being felt across all roles in policing, from frontline and neighbourhood officers, to detectives and traffic cops.

He continued: “It’s massively worrying and it’s not getting any easier.

“For a force that has more limited resources than most, this is felt even keener here with our numbers, which are still nowhere near enough for what they need to be.

“We hear a lot of our officers who are having their days off disrupted for football matches, and they’re obviously very frustrated about that because that’s precious weekends that they’ve not got now with their families and friends.”

Steve said many accepted busy shift patterns were “life in the pursuit” of being police, but the cumulative effect over decades was wearing thin on people.

He added: “Which is why people get to the point where they’re like, ‘I’ve had enough of this. I don’t want to put up with this anymore’.

“It all ties in with the larger question of resourcing and funding for policing, because if we had adequate resources and adequate funding there would be more officers to share this out.”

Officers also told the PFEW survey how staff shortages often led to increasing workloads and the inability to meet unit demands.

This issue was cited by 60% of police who resigned from their roles.

Steve said: “The pressures now are unbelievable and the numbers are just not quite there.

“We desperately rely on retaining experience in the police and if we start having a churn where people see it as a 10-year career and they move on, it’s going to cause us significant problems.”