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Press Release

Chief officers pose riddle over 'inflexible' flexibility

26 July 2010

I read with amazement a story on the front page of Saturday's Daily Telegraph (writes Met Fed chairman Peter Smyth) from which I learned that our colleagues in ACPO apparently think that current Police Regulations have created an inflexible workforce unable to fulfil chief officers' dream of policing.

They want the rules changed to allow them to manage us with greater flexibility.

Well let's look at this alleged inflexibility.

-Police officers provide 24/7 cover, 365 days of the year.
-They can be ordered to stay on duty after their shift has finished.
-They can be ordered to change their shift times with little notice at no extra cost.
-They can be ordered to return to work at any time.
-They can have days off cancelled, normally with no financial compensation.
-They can have Annual Leave cancelled, again with normally no financial compensation.

In The Met, officers are currently owed some 850,000 days off. This is because they have been ordered to work on their rest days for no pay, receiving, instead, the promise of time off in lieu. How exactly does this constitute inflexibility?

How flexible, in fact, do ACPO want us to be? Flexible enough, I presume, to paper over the cracks in their management abilities and disguise their inability to conduct forward planning.

According to the Telegraph, officers who receive a simple phone call when off duty can claim four hours' overtime. I have been a police officer for 33 years and I know hundreds, if not thousands, of officers who have been phoned while off duty. But I don't know a single one who has claimed overtime.

In the past couple of months, there has been a sustained attack on policing; a softening up of public opinion, if you will. Nearly all the points that have been raised concern cost and have nothing to do with improving service. It's time the government was honest and admitted that it is concerned solely with slashing budgets.

Whatever faults policing has today, they have arisen from policies pursued by the Home Office and ACPO.

Introducing new rules which do nothing to address the problem of poor management is hardly a recipe for success.



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Metropolitan Police Federation

Metropolitan Police Federation

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