PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Probationary Police Officers: Cost of Living - 6 February 2023 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

It is a pleasure to introduce the Adjournment debate this evening, and I thank the Minister for being in his place at the outset. It is important to set the tone for this important issue, and that is that in Northern Ireland we have a police service that is in crisis. It is in crisis for several reasons, which need to be addressed if the problems with the recruitment of police probationers, and of new blood into the service, are to be thoroughly and properly addressed.

The crisis is such that it is not unusual to hear statements in the local media, from Police Federation chiefs and other senior police officers, about their concern that the growing levels of criminality in Northern Ireland are because the police have a budgeting crisis. That deepening budget crisis needs to be nipped in the bud before the policing crisis becomes so deep that we cannot deal with it.

Let me set the scene. The Police Service of Northern Ireland faces an unprecedented operating shortfall of some £226 million for the next three years. There will be a net loss of more than 300 officers in this financial year alone. But that tells only half the story. On average, 36 officers leave the PSNI every month. Many of those officers are probationary officers who joined the service wanting to make a difference, but who then realised that they cannot afford to do the job. Unlike any other service, they are being squeezed from both sides. The arrangements that we have in place say that there should be 7,500 police officers in Northern Ireland, and we are about 1,000 short. So officers are squeezed because they have to do more duties to try to keep up—they are running just to stand still and maintain where we are. On the other side, they face a budgetary crisis which means that they are not properly rewarded for the extra hard work that they are doing.

I commend my hon. Friend for introducing the debate. This is a big issue, which is why we are all here to support him. We all hear of young PSNI officers leaving to work in car dealerships and even, in one case I heard of, in Tesco, because of what was described to me as “low morale”, but in fact it is clear that the stress of working for the PSNI is not compensated enough. Many realise that the negligible pay is not enough and we must urgently review that. In other words, we must provide better wages to retain the quality officers that we now have.

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. In setting the scene, I will come on to some of the detail in a moment, but he has put his finger on what police officers are being forced to do in their private lives to try to make ends meet.

Northern Ireland now has the lowest number of officers since the formation of the PSNI. I remember being on the Police Board at the time when the PSNI came into existence, and we were promised that the number of police officers would keep pace with the developing needs of the community. We reduced the service from between 12,000 and 13,000 officers right down to 7,500. Today we have between 6,700 and 6,800 officers, which frankly is not enough.

We should recognise not only that are we 800 below where New Decade, New Approach tells us that police levels should be, but that Northern Ireland’s population has risen in recent years. In fact, it has risen by 300,000 people since the Patten report recommended that police numbers should be cut from that high point. If we were doing a fair calculation, a more realistic revised figure, against the backdrop of Northern Ireland becoming a peaceful society without terrorism, would be having 8,600 police officers, given the size of our population, but that is not the case. Police officers, including young officers and probationary officers, joined the service and realised that they are being squeezed because there is an insufficient number of colleagues to do the work and they are not being properly rewarded for doing the job.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this Adjournment debate. He is right to outline the figure of 7,500 officers provided in New Decade, New Approach. Contained in New Decade, New Approach was also a commitment from the UK Government indicating that the PSNI would receive the appropriate and necessary levels of funding to continue its efforts in tackling paramilitarism and organised crime, and to continue the work of the paramilitary crime taskforce, yet the Government have been found wanting on that taskforce. Does he agree that that commitment needs to be delivered by the Government and that, while policing and justice have been devolved, there are commitments on terrorism and paramilitarism that the Government still need to be honour?

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point; he makes it well. The fact of the matter is that policing in Northern Ireland cannot be done on the cheap, and that is essentially what has been asked for. Not only do we have to tackle the crimes that are prevalent across this part of the United Kingdom, but we have an added layer of serious and organised crime that derives from paramilitary activity. That puts even more pressure on the policing budget. My hon. Friend is quite right to outline that this additional pressure makes the PSNI like no other police service in the United Kingdom. With 42 other comparisons to look at, the issues that our officers have to tackle are completely unique. They operate in a unique environment and under unique circumstances. With a hangover of policing the past, as well as trying to cope with the present and laying sound foundations for the future, it is almost impossible for them to do it on a shoestring budget that needs to be agreed year on year.

I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. I want to highlight the number of young officers who come into the force and are left having to do additional duties, which is driving down morale. They do not have a proper work-life balance; never mind just the pay issue, the work-life balance is a serious issue for young officers.

Of course, if there was not the opportunity for overtime, police officers in Northern Ireland would absolutely be on the breadline.

Again, in setting the scene, let me add a layer that is unheard of and rarely reported in this part of the United Kingdom. Last year there were 2,500 assaults on police officers in Northern Ireland. Of a force of 6,800 officers, 2,500 of them were seriously assaulted, with broken bones or having to be off duty. In fact, 900 of them are unable to serve at present because of injuries. That is a serious pressure on our police. There have been four attempted murders of police officers in the past 12 months. One of them from earlier this year we cannot talk about—it is subject to a court case—and there were other very serious ones, including a stabbing, a bomb under an officer’s car and an attempt to fire a projectile at a station where an officer worked.

Our officers in Northern Ireland work under a unique set of circumstances where the threat against their lives and the targeting of them continues when they leave work and go home to be with their partner and family. That is a very different stress level from that of other officers. Not only do we have that aggressive targeting and attacks on police officers; we also have what I can only describe as a woke culture developing in Northern Ireland that says the police should not be allowed to use certain weapons to defend themselves from attacks. We all know of the benefits that Tasers give to police officers in the United Kingdom. If a police officer feels they are under attack, they can use a Taser to keep the assailant at a distant and under control. We have only 100 officers in Northern Ireland who are allowed to use a Taser, and the Taser has been deployed on only 21 occasions in the past year. Why has it been deployed so rarely, when we have so many attacks on police officers? Because there is an agenda to stop a Taser being rolled out to every single officer so that they can use it in a proportionate and balanced way when they face a threat.

Water cannon, which are not regularly used on the British mainland, are used for large crowd dispersals in Northern Ireland. CS spray is offered to our police officers; they also have baton rounds and are routinely armed with sidearms, but they do not like to use or deploy them because that would mean a fatality. In the past year, there were 400 withdrawals of a sidearm from a holster to point at a person, so severe was the threat to our police officers. Let me just put that into context: there have been 400 withdrawals of a gun from a holster, to point at a citizen of the United Kingdom, because there was a threat so serious that an officer felt his life was in danger. Thankfully, because of good, proportionate policing, there was only one discharge of a weapon.

We need something in between. Tasers may be one of those things; I certainly encourage the Chief Constable to apply for Tasers to be used and to make sure that they are widely issued. The Home Secretary offered £6.7 million to the other 42 United Kingdom police services to look into using Tasers as a proper mechanism for defending police officers. That offer was made to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, but it has not yet been taken up. I encourage the PSNI to take it up, so that we can create an atmosphere in which young police officers feel confident, in which their morale is not under threat and in which they feel able to use everything in their quiver to properly defend themselves and their actions.

I turn to the key issue, which is how young probationary officers are being treated in such a way that the cost of living crisis is putting real pressure and a real squeeze on them. It is important to put that into context. There is a benevolent fund in the police service that is run by the Police Federation. It was essentially set up to assist retired police officers and their families after they leave the service, but in the past year, more claims on and payments from the fund have been made for serving officers than for retired officers. That includes payments for home heating, for food for children and to assist with getting through the month. More currently serving officers than retired officers are having to rely on the police benevolent fund—that is an appalling picture for police officers.

I was chatting to an exceptional probationary police officer who lives in my constituency. He serves in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell), but he was seconded to do some work in a market town in my constituency while he was operational out of another part of the country. He was, quite frankly, brilliant. His conduct was brilliant, and so was his ability to deal with the public, help to resolve crimes and get on with doing the ordinary job in which every police officer takes regular pride.

That police officer came to see me in my office one day and said, “I want to show you my bank account.” He had 17p left in it. He is not a drinker, he is not a smoker, he is not a gambler; he has two young kids, and he was trying to organise his kid’s birthday party the next week. He had to drive a 45-mile round trip every day to do duty. He said, “I’ve maxed out my credit cards. How am I to get to work, let alone care for my kids and do this job? As a probationary officer, I’m on less than £26,000. My buddy who lives a few houses away works in a supermarket and is paid £7,000 or £8,000 more a year. He doesn’t face the same problems and stresses that I face”—the picture that I have outlined of the conditions under which police officers are operating. That story, unfortunately, could be repeated over and over again.

My hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned officers taking second jobs. This month, in the news magazine of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland, there was an account of a police officer who had to get a second job as a delivery van driver. That might be okay here in Great Britain, but the one thing that I am told, our colleagues are told and police officers are told in Northern Ireland about our security is “Do not engage in any regular activity. Do not allow anyone to say, ‘On such-and-such a day, that person does such-and-such.’ Change your system: change the way you operate.” A regular van driver cannot change the way he operates, and is therefore an easy target for those who wish to target him; but this is what that officer had to do in order to make ends meet. What is more, according to the article, he referred eight colleagues to the same job, encouraging them to earn extra income in order to live. It is not appropriate, in this day and age, for police officers to need to do that. It sends a clear signal that they are not being properly rewarded.

Last month the chairman of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland, Liam Kelly, wrote to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee outlining what an ordinary constable would receive. I am pleased to report that at the weekend there was an uplift in policing budgets, although they are still behind where they need to be. A probationer who would normally be on about £25,000 a year is now on about £26,500, a trainee officer who was on £21,500 is now on about £24,000, and an officer must reach year 5 after being a probationer to earn about £30,000.

It is a huge struggle for those people to remain in the job, survive and pay for the upkeep of their families and their homes, and they do so at a time when, as we all know, the cost of living crisis is upon us. Food prices are rising faster than they have for 45 years, inflation has reached 16.2%, and the pressures on everyone’s home budget is increasing. Apparently the average disposable income of a police officer in Northern Ireland who is in rented accommodation and paying for a car—officers have to live in certain areas and police other areas—is about £108 a month. We could not live on that, Mr Deputy Speaker, and we should not be asking our police officers to live and raise their families on that.

The Police Federation also kindly produced for the benefit of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee a series of alternative jobs—equivalent in terms of training and skill level—with which Northern Ireland police officers are competing. After year 3, a software engineer is making £43,500, a software developer about £33,500, a deputy principal—a middle manager in the Northern Ireland civil service—about £39,500, and a security guard about £28,500, and we are asking people who are genuine security experts to do their job for about £6,000 less. From day one, police officers in Northern Ireland face a terrorist threat and are under immense pressure. For the past five or six years, pay awards that should have been effective from 1 September have been delayed for months.; often, when discussions on the following year’s pay award have begun, officers have not yet received the previous year’s award.

I appeal to the Minister not to stick to a brief that says, “If we had devolution, all this would be sorted out.” That will wash with no one, because this problem has been building up for six years, and we had devolution for half that period. This is a problem of how we manage policing resources and whether or not we have devolution, and we need it to be addressed with a much sharper answer than “Well, if you had an Executive in Northern Ireland, all these things could be sorted out.” I wish that the answer were as easy as that, but I fear that it is not, and I fear that giving such an excuse for an answer will only fail to answer the pertinent question of how, in this day and age, we can properly reward our police officers and find the resources that will enable us to do so, and what we can cut in other sections of governance to ensure that they are properly paid.

These are national, not local awards for police pay. As my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) identified, we must make sure that the policing budget is strengthened in Northern Ireland, so that the issues that I have put on the agenda tonight can be properly addressed once and for all.

Let me start by thanking the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) for securing this evening’s debate and for setting out the issues with such care, thoughtfulness and compassion, clearly based on personal experience of talking to police officers in his constituency and in Northern Ireland more generally.

As a Home Office Minister I have responsibility, primarily, for policing in England and Wales. I will make some remarks about policing more generally and about police officers’ salaries, which broadly speaking are the same in Northern Ireland as in England and Wales. I will then touch on some issues more specific to Northern Ireland although, being a devolved matter, they fall more properly within the responsibilities of my colleagues in the Northern Ireland Office, one of whom, my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), is with us in the Chamber.

Starting with policing more widely, in England and Wales we are well on track to recruit an extra 20,000 police officers by the end of March 2023. Once we have done that, we will have a record number of police officers. Never in the history of England and Wales will we have had more police officers than we will have by the end of March. That goes to show that the package offered has some attractions and merits.

In the most recent pay awards, police in England and Wales received a flat, consolidated increase for this financial year effective from 1 September of £1,900, as the hon. Member for North Antrim said. I believe that in the last day or two it has been confirmed that that will apply to police in Northern Ireland as well, and will be backdated, so officers such as the one he described should get all that money in their March pay packets. For officers with children to look after such as the one he mentioned, that will be a welcome payment.

That £1,900 equates to an average of 5%, but for officers on lower salaries it represents a lot more. For entry-level officers such as those the hon. Gentleman described, it equates to 8.8%, because it is a fixed proportion of a smaller number. The view was taken that it was important to try to direct the increase disproportionately towards officers on entry point wages, for all the reasons that he set out with great eloquence. That means that since 1 September last year, officers have had a basic starting salary of between roughly £23,500 and £26,500. That is typically an 8.8% increase.

A median police constable will receive £41,000. The hon. Gentleman mentioned comparisons with other occupations; the police salary review body stated that median full-time gross annual earnings—not officers starting out at the beginning of their career—are 33% higher than the whole economy, 26% higher than so-called associate professional and technical occupations, and about the same as professional occupations. I am speaking about median earnings across the whole police force, not entry-level salaries, which are lower.

In addition to the 8.8% annual pay increase for people on starting salaries, there is incremental annual pay progression as officers get more experience. Those increases are at least 2%, and can be between 4% and 6%, on top of the regular annual increase. As an officer—like the young officer he mentioned—stays in the force, they will get not just the regular increase but the progression as well, so they will not have to stick with it for too long before they start seeing some meaningful increases coming through. I hope that the hon. Gentleman can pass on that message to officers in their first couple of years.

I thank the Minister for setting that out. That is helpful, and the timing could not be better because of the award that was made at the weekend. I also thank the Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office, the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) for being here. The fact that he is here says a lot, and officers will be grateful that he has turned up for this debate. He did not have to, and I know that he is very busy with other responsibilities.

On the point that the Minister has made, keeping pay parity with the rest of the UK should be a principle, and making the award to PSNI officers on 1 September each year is also critical. We are now at the beginning of February and the award has just been made in Northern Ireland. That has not really helped, and I hope that that lesson can be learned by the civil servants who help the Minister with this.

The hon. Gentleman makes a reasonable point. Salaries are not exactly the same but they are pretty much the same in Northern Ireland as they are in England and Wales, and the settlement that has just been announced is exactly the same. That is an important principle in relation to Northern Ireland in particular.

I emphasise again that this is a matter for my colleagues in the Northern Ireland Office. As the hon. Gentleman has said, policing is a devolved matter in Northern Ireland, and it is not in my area of ministerial responsibility as the Policing Minister for England and Wales. A functioning Executive would give more flexibility and freedom to Northern Ireland to determine its own path and how it chooses to allocate money between different budgets. I understand that the Secretary of State, in setting the budget for Northern Ireland’s Department of Justice this year, has given a 3.1% increase—a total allocation of about £1.2 billion—but as the hon. Member knows, the freedoms available to Northern Irish civil servants are limited in the absence of an Executive, so the sooner we can get an Executive up and running, the more flexibility and autonomy the people in Northern Ireland and the elected representatives of the people in Northern Ireland will have.

The hon. Member made some comments regarding security, and he is quite right to draw attention to that. The UK Government provide the PSNI with additional security funding to tackle the obvious threat from terrorism in Northern Ireland, and the amount of money being paid over for that purpose in the current financial year, 2022-23, is £32 million, which is the same as it was in the previous year. In addition to that, there is a security funding payment of £8 million a year towards the tackling paramilitaries programme, which is designed to match the funding that comes from the Northern Ireland Executive. That money designed specifically to tackle terrorism, which has a unique Northern Ireland element, is continuing.

I hope that the Minister will able to go back after this debate and ensure that tat frequency of funding for the tackling paramilitarism and crime taskforce will remain, because as I understand it, the Northern Ireland Office is tapering that money off, which would have an impact on the delivery of service.

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. I am assured by my colleague, the Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe, that he and his NIO colleagues will write to confirm the position on that in the very near future.

I think we are coming to the end of our allotted time, so I want to thank the hon. Member for North Antrim once again for raising this important issue. All of us obviously back our police forces and want to ensure that they have the funding, the salary and the resources to do their job. It is probably appropriate to close by extending, I hope on behalf of the whole House, our thanks to officers the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, but in this evening’s context, particularly in Northern Ireland, for the work they do in keeping us, our constituencies, our constituents and their families safe.

Question put and agreed to.