Officers “aggrieved” to have received lower pay offers than public sector colleagues

9 September 2024

The Chair of Norfolk Police Federation warned it was hard to demand top performance from officers when lowball pay deals have left them “demoralised”.

Andy Symonds said officers felt “aggrieved” to have received lower pay offers than many of their public sector colleagues.

The latest announcement from the government in July finalised a rise of 4.75% for the police, despite chief constables recommending a 6.5% hike.

“It’s one of the lowest amongst all of the public sector workers and that feeds into low morale,” Andy told BBC Radio Norfolk.

“When officers look around at other sectors – nurses, doctors and various other places – they see they’re getting more. Then the question comes, ‘Why is that?’.”

Under UK law, police officers are unable to take industrial action and it would be a criminal offence to do so.

Andy said that having “nothing we can do about” the discontent surrounding pay “feeds into not having a high morale”.

He continued: “It’s over a number of years this has happened, where we haven’t got the fair pay across the sector.

“That leads into 97% of cops don’t feel respected by the Government. At the moment, cops feel ‘done to’ rather than being brought together for an aim.

“If you have a workforce which is demoralised like that, it’s always difficult to squeeze even more performance out.”

Norfolk Constabulary made the headlines in late July and again in August for its impressive action against shoplifting.

Figures showed the force had the highest charging rate for the offence of any of the 43 forces in England and Wales in each of the past five years.

Norfolk had a charge rate for shoplifting offences of 31.7%, compared with the Met Police’s 4.9%, Home Office data revealed.

Andy said positive work such as this could begin to deteriorate if officers were continually pushed to their limits without sufficient remuneration.

“We’re really good at charging people with theft, the highest in the country,” he added.

“But that comes at a cost, and the cost is that officers are revving on red and you can’t continue that before things start breaking and not going very well.”