Chair on Pay and Morale: The survey makes for quite grim reading... no wonder officer morale is on the floor

21 February 2022

“The pay and morale survey makes for quite grim reading, police officers have had a difficult period… so for the Government to throw in a 0% pay rise in 2021… no wonder morale among officers is on the floor.”

The thoughts of Kent Police Federation Chair Neil Mennie as he spoke to BBC Radio Kent this afternoon about the results of the most recent Police Officer pay and morale survey.

Neil said: “When you look at our survey it makes for quite grim reading, I think we have had a very difficult period of time recently. I appreciate we are now in the throws of having some more officers in terms of an uplift but that has not kept pace with the amount of work that we have got, so workload still outstrips our resources and it’s very worrying when you see officers worrying about their finances, some almost on a daily basis.

“All this follows on from a year where the Government decided to give us a 0% pay rise, which didn’t go down very well, particularly after Covid and has only made a bad situation worse. You can sort of understand why morale among his officers is on the floor at the moment.

“Unfortunately, morale has been like this for some time, and I can take this back to when we sustained a very, very large cut in policing, a big 20% chunk, I don’t think we ever truly recovered from that.”

Neil also said that figures for Kent policing were ‘marginally less bad than that of other forces’ but the figures were still very concerning.

He added: “Starting pay for policing is not particularly good. Policing is a vocation, police officers don’t join for the money. But on the other hand, all we are asking for is a mechanism to pay us fairly.

“We see officers who cannot afford to live in this part of the country. We see it in various ways. The Kent Police Federation has a benevolent fund that helps officers in financial difficulty, and it can be very hard reading the positions that officers are in.

“In Kent, the Chief Constable has discretion to pay us an additional allowance to live in this part of the country – the South East Allowance - which he does and that is designed to try and help us with this being an expensive part of the country to live in. There is a little bit there that the Chief does for us, which is very welcomed,

“However, it’s affecting younger officers particularly, those that are trying to get on the property ladder, or to manage debt, it’s a problem. We do see officers struggling.

“We very much rely on the support of the public in Kent. I personally have found that in conversations with people, the majority of people in Kent are supportive of the police, but unfortunately it’s the minority we deal with most of the time.

“We know the support is there but sometimes it’s hard to find it, particularly in recent times when policing has had a real kick in the media. And that does affect our members, they get frustrated and upset reading these horrifying stories that have come out, because the vast majority of the cops in Kent are working hard and trying to do a good job and that has a real impact. It’s upsetting to see and we don’t like that damage to the profession more than anyone else does.”