It is fair to say that the morale of the police staff and police officers is extremely low. There is plenty of evidence on that from all the surveys. The committee has heard the narrative around the staff survey but will not have read the comments that were made by the staff, which were extremely telling. The inspectors, superintendents and sergeants have all done surveys and they all come out with the same stuff.
There is some work going on around that and, like the ASPS, we are involved in that. However it is a slow process and the police staff need to see some change now. Our police staff and police officers are giving more than they have ever given, with fewer numbers. We are cutting rank ratios at the moment, without knowing our demand profile and where we need our officers to be. That is against a backdrop of the comments from the surveys, which suggest that people are already doing too much. The staff are doing more than they did when there were eight forces.
We have set up a wellbeing group. Our internal occupational health has changed and is perhaps not as good as it was before in providing support. We need more work on that and I hope that the wellbeing group will provide some of that.
In terms of pay freezes and looking at reducing terms and conditions to free up more money for front-line policing, Calum Steele’s comment that
“it would be unforgivable to expect police officers to pay the price for keeping policing”
applies to police staff, too. What he is asking is whether it is fair to ask those staff to pay for the policing function.
We have fewer police in our rural areas and we are closing more and more offices. There is a concern about visibility in our rural communities. We have national departments, but they draw resources away from our towns and rural areas. The national resources can be dispatched when there is a problem, but they are not there for the public on a constant basis.
We have a workforce that is stretched to breaking point and can only see more work coming its way. That is not necessarily because of the reduction in numbers. There is an increased demand on us because of a changing society—things come to us and we have to deal with them.