Mental health absences underline urgent need to tackle pay and recruitment, says chair

29 July 2026

During 2025/26, 181 Suffolk Police officers were off sick with depression, anxiety, stress or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

That is the same number as 2024/25, according to Police Oracle, which obtained the figures in a Freedom of Information request.

Branch chair Darren Harris said: “The link between these figures and police pay can’t be ignored. The salary of police officers has fallen by 20 per cent in real terms in the past decade - which, of course, will be having a negative impact on our hardworking members.

Recruitment crisis

“Most recently, we heard that the latest pay award was 3.5 per cent, less than the Police Remuneration Review Body's (PRRB) recommendation of 3.9 per cent, which does almost nothing for restoring pay."

Highlighting how the retention and recruitment crisis places increasing pressure on officers who remain, Darren added: “If police pay isn’t restored, we will not continue to keep officers in the job - whether that’s with officers off sick, leaving for better pay opportunities or taking early retirement.”

Darren noted that the biggest group of officers leaving policing are those with between nought and five years' service: “In this day and age, we can’t rely on passion and commitment alone. Officers deserve pay that reflects their jobs."

He continued: “Capacity is at its maximum and resources are low, which means officers who are staying at work are then burning out and going off with stress and anxiety because they're working themselves to the bone.

Branch chair Darren Harris

"It's a double-edged sword. You're losing officers from both directions, which just exacerbates the problem. I think it is all interlinked, and the Government just isn't listening.”

Darren said the recruitment challenges had forced changes to the routes into policing in an effort to get new officers operational more quickly, but he said this would not solve the problem on its own.

"They need to look at the whole picture,” he said, adding: “Why are people off with stress and anxiety? Why aren't people staying?

“Until those questions are properly addressed, the pressures on those who remain will only continue."

Nationally, a record 19,443 officers were signed off with stress, depression, anxiety, or PTSD in 2025/26, a rise of 9.5 per cent on the previous year.

Workloads

Police Oracle said it was the fifth year in a row the number has gone up, and was 209 per cent higher than when it first ran the survey 13 years ago.

Andy Rhodes, director of Oscar Kilo, the National Police Wellbeing Service, told Police Oracle: “We need to look at workloads and work design. People don’t mind being busy if it’s purposeful work that they think has value, but there’s a lot of bureaucracy involved in policing, and that can be very stressful to deal with.”

He added: “You look at the number of officers who are now deployed in public order and mutual aid; the issues the police are dealing with are putting a massive strain on them. Rest days are there for a reason. You can’t look at a 45% burnout rate and just say, ‘Well that’s policing’. We’ve got to call it out.”