Consider Early Vaccine For Officers

10 December 2020

Kent Police Federation has asked the Government to ensure police officers are given a level of priority when the Covid-19 vaccine is more widely rolled out.

Kent Police has had very few officers fall ill with coronavirus, and has kept one of the lowest absence rates in the country, Neil Mennie, Chair of Kent Police Federation told BBC Radio Kent this morning.

The next step to protect officers and the public is to get them vaccinated.

Neil said: “The Federation have asked that we have some level of priority with the vaccine. Obviously we accept that there are people of a higher priority than us, but we’d like to think we are in the Government’s mind as being fairly high up the list, along with our emergency service colleagues, to be vaccinated.”

Neil was speaking to BBC Radio Kent this morning about how the force was planning for Brexit against the backdrop of the pandemic.

He said:  “We are now very well established with our PPE, our systems and processes. Here in Kent we are very lucky as we have had so few officers ill with Covid. We are doing very well but as you can imagine we need to retain that kind of vigilance. When we have visiting officers we are going to make sure that they are well and that we are looking after them.”

Mutual aid agreements are in place to support Kent Police ahead of Brexit on 31 January. The force has a number of plans in place which are “long and complex” but have left the force “very well-prepared”, he said. 

Neil added: “There hasn’t been a requirement to cancel leave because planning has been so good. Thus far all we are doing is making sure we don’t have too many people off at once. We are very welcoming of this as it does allow people to get some rest. As it has been a difficult year and people do get tired and fatigued and we need to keep them as refreshed as possible.

“There are still a lot of variables. We still don’t know what’s going to happen - whether we get a deal or not, but we certainly anticipate disruption and queues into the key routes into Kent, to the ports and to Eurotunnel.

“There is a phased response in terms of parking and stacking. It is not just about Kent Police, we will also need help from the Highways Agency and other government departments. Because of the scale and size of the operation, we anticipate having quite a lot of officers from other forces assisting. This is going to require something of a balancing act as policing often does because we will need to police the disruption and Brexit on top of our normal policing business, which is quite lively and fairly busy.

“So it’s quite a difficult act but we think we are as ready as we can be.”