Warning police officers will leave to get better-paid jobs as result of poor pay

The government announcement that all police officers would receive a £1,900 pay rise in September, which is seven per cent for new recruits but just two per cent for chief inspectors, is still below the inflation rate of 9.4 per cent, the federation has said.

Chair Zoë Wakefield said: ‘It’s good that those officers who are younger in service, who are on the lowest pay, are getting the most. But we’re not rewarding experience and rank, and I think the government needs to be careful, because we’re going to lose a lot of experienced officers who’ve had far too many pay cuts, and this is effectively another one.

‘They don’t feel appreciated, they don’t feel valued, and they’re going to leave and get jobs in the private sector. We’ve just had one officer leave, she’s got about 18 years’ service and she’s found a job four days a week earning more money than she was as a police officer working five days a week.

‘I think the government is worried about the uplift, getting the numbers in. So they thought: “Let’s increase the lower pay scale so it’s more attractive to people joining. But we don’t like the police enough to give it to them across the board, so this is how we’ll get around it”. They’ve given a lump sum that is very divisive.’

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Zoë said this wasn’t the end of the police pay campaign, and that the national federation had much more work to do.