Dec 2007 12

The police pay deal4

PolicewestminsterIf this were simply another case of public sector workers complaining about a poor deal from the Government because they weren’t going to get another inflation-busting pay increase the TaxPayers’ Alliance wouldn’t be particularly sympathetic.  Public sector workers have had a pretty good deal over the last decade and most have very little to complain about.  Taxpayers have to foot the bill and are hard pressed as it is.

However, the debate currently going on over the police deal isn’t really about the money.  The police themselves will tell you – if you push them on the subject – that they’re pretty reasonably paid.  Their deal is tough but in the harder economic conditions we’re facing at the moment a lot of people are having to tighten their belt.  This dispute isn’t about pay restraint but about the way the Government went about securing pay restraint.

Essentially, the police pay deal is negotiated each year but often isn’t negotiated in time.  When that happens the pay is backdated so that the torturously slow process doesn’t leave officers out of pocket.  This year was particularly difficult and, in the end, went to arbitration.  That means an external body taking over and, after both sides have made their case, deciding on what the final deal will be.  The body in question is ACAS and their decision is binding upon the police – they have to accept it – but not legally binding on the government.  The arbitration is not legally binding on the government but is clearly, in some sense, morally binding if the arbitration is not completely meaningless.  The arbitration did not go the Government’s way and they’ve responded by refusing to pay the backdated pay which means that the police will only get their rise for nine instead of twelve months this year.  They understandably see this as a huge breach of confidence.

The way to avoid disputes like this isn’t to throw ever higher salaries at public sector workers.  A deal that was financially identical but reached in a less dubious manner would not have gotten the police nearly so wound up.  Instead we need to address the real problem which is that ministers without the management experience to run an organisation on the scale of the police service – Jacqui Smith was a teacher – made a complete mess of the negotiating process.

The police are quite reasonably paid but they see other public workers striking, the government backing down and those workers getting more generous deals.  The classic example was the Warwick Agreement where they backed down on essential reforms to public sector pensions.  At the same time their morale is sapped by targets that prevent them getting on with their job.  Just today it was discovered that the police now spend barely one hour in seven on the beat deterring crime – "incident-related paperwork" is keeping them busy.  The present crisis is a result of these problems and the mishandling of the negotiations.  It is right that the Government should try to control public sector pay but it will take good management, which centralised politics cannot provide, to do this without compromising services.

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  • oliver fisher

    Your comment is spot on. I am a serving officer and I’m preparing for the protest march on 23rd January not because the government is doing me out of £100. It wouldn’t matter if it was £5. I’m marching because I have lost faith in the arbitration process that all officers rely on. The fact that we can’t strike means we’re uniquely vulnerable to draconian pay deals. Officer don’t want to strike. All we ask is that when pay deals are finally agreed on, it is back dated to whenever we were supposed to have been awarded it in the first place.
    The government has picked a fight with a group of people that are only asking for fairness. I don’t see them winning.

  • James Gardner

    I belonged to a small police unit based in the East End of London that at one stage was suffering 25% casualties from stabbing each year for three years. When you have officers exposed to that sort of risk the pay doesn’t seem quite as high. Even so I think our pay is pretty good for what we do. I am angry not at the amount of money in dispute but the sheer duplicity of the government. Their refusal to backdate the award was not something they thought up on the spur of the moment they must have known what they intended to do even whilst the negotiations were under way.

  • David

    Interestingly, I haven’t seen one comment about whether any account has been taken of the “gold plated” Police pension scheme during pay negotiations. Virtually every private sector pay settlement in recent years (as well as some public sector ones e.g. Royal Mail) has involved some trade-off between pay increases and pension provision, usually the withdrawal of final salary pension for new entrants. The Government will have to grasp the nettle sooner rather than later on this issue.

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