Police officers are supposedly the lucky branch of the public service following the Government’s decision to grant them a 2% pay rise while nurses and other public workers continue to wait to see if and when they too will be exempted from the seven-year cap of 1% on their pay rises.
But even the police are far from happy.
Ken Marsh is the chairman of the Metropolitan London branch of the Police Federation, representing 30,540 police up to the rank of Chief Inspector. That is a quarter of all police officers in the country.
He spoke exclusively to Felix Magazine about the new pay-rise awarded to police.
“We are very disappointed in relation to the rise,” he said. “The Government has hung its hat on the peg of saying that they would adhere to the Police Remuneration Review Board (PRRB) throughout. The PRRB is an independent body and annually they set what they think should be the pay rise and conditions for police officers.”
“We had all this nonsense prior to the summer holidays when the Government kept saying ‘we’re going to look at the PRRB, we’re going to look at the PRRB’. All quite promising but then they’ve come back from their recess and given us this – how do I put this – ‘incredible’ pay rise of 1%, plus a 1% bonus.
“What the Government mean by that is our pay and conditions are set in statute so that they are aligned to pensions as well. What they have done is say we can have 1% which is aligned to our pension and 1% as a bonus, but that’s not what the PRRB recommended at all.
“Their recommendation was 2% completely aligned to our pension. So when the Government has come out over the past two days waxing lyrical about the ‘incredible’ thing they have done for us and they have adhered to the PRRB, the public should understand, they haven’t. That is a lie.
“The problem that’s thrown up for us as police is that we don’t get bonuses. What does a bonus mean? Do my colleagues go out and issue more tickets to get the bonus? Did they have to do something which is over and above their normal duty? What are we talking about here because the public have come back very quickly and said, you will be issuing more tickets and doing more of this and that so you get a bonus? It causes the public to have some distrust in us as police officers.
“Let’s cut the nonsense and say when we got a pay rise it should have been 2% in line with pensions. This isn’t. And if you look at the rise of inflation, which has come out this week, it’s 2.9%, so we are nowhere in line with that. Over the last five and a half years we have lost around about 15% in real terms of inflation which we’ve had no recompense for and we end up with this 1% plus 1% bonus.
“It’s just playing with words. The politicians think they’re far clever than everyone else but they are playing games; it’s smoke and mirrors. We don’t go along with it at all, it’s unfair. It’s every single ranked officer in the Met which is 30,450 that it affects but it’s the whole country that got this pay-rise, all police. But I’m speaking for those in London as chairman of the Met Federation.
“The actual financial remuneration is not a lot. Between £25 and £30 a month more, something like that, it’s still got to be worked out. Mind you, that is after tax. My members are telling me they’re disgusted. They are absolutely agog with what this Government has yet again come out with. This is not a fair pay rise in anyway whatsoever. It doesn’t keep up even with growth.
“It is also a case of divide and rule by giving the police and prison guards a rise and ignoring all the other sectors like the nurses and fire brigade and teachers and all the rest. It’s very much like that. The only caveat I’d add to that is that we, as police officers don’t have the ability to strike. We are not allowed to, we are governed by regulations.
“I am not a massive fan of Jeremy Corbyn, but I think he has this exactly right when he says there needs to be fairness right across the public sector.“
by Bob Graham
The post Politics: Tories “Lying” About Pay appeared first on Felix Magazine.
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