Federation secretary meets Labour MPs

6 October 2022

West Midlands Police Federation secretary Tim Rogers has taken part in talks with politicians at last week’s Labour Party Conference.

Tim was part of a Police Federation delegation which travelled to Liverpool for an engagement meeting which took place away from the conference itself.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, shadow policing minister Sarah Jones, West Midlands Assistant Police and Crime Commissioner Tom NcNeil, Commons Home Affairs Select Committee chair Diana Johnson and shadow minister for employment rights Justin Madden were all present.

Tim said the meeting gave both sides the opportunity to raise issues facing policing and how they could work together to address them.

He said Ms Cooper was particularly interested in the recruitment and retention of officers and the Police Uplift Programme, the challenge of meeting its targets and fears that the quality of new recruits could be compromised.

Policing infrastructure in relation to recruitment was also discussed during the conversation with the Federation delegates suggesting important support structures lost alongside 25,000 officers needed to be properly replaced to cope with the uplift influx.

Tim said: “What we are doing now is simply trying to quickly restore the balance but are only looking at officer numbers. The infrastructure was already creaking but now it has imploded.

Issues surrounding learning and development were also discussed and it was pointed out that some experienced officers are reluctant to get involved with tutoring because of the numbers expected, the quality of the recruits and the risks they feel are being imposed upon them for little or no extra remuneration.

Tim said shadow policing minister Ms Jones was keen to see entry routes being reviewed and was interested in the scenario at West Midlands Police in which seven police officers who are operationally competent are being progressed through regulation 13 and leaving the Force because they have failed to pass their degrees.

He said: “These officers are competent but unable to pass the academic side of things. But, of course, we are massively invested in the degree program with the only clear winners being the university.”

The meeting came after Ms Cooper promised Labour would take on an extra 13,000 police officers if it won the next election.

She outlined how a Labour Government would recruit more police officers, PCSOs and Special Constables in an effort to cut crime and restore confidence in the police while also bringing back the last Labour administration’s focus on neighbourhood policing.

Ms Cooper said: “We are announcing this week that we have got to return to neighbourhood policing. We have seen the clock hugely turned back on the policing in our communities that Labour brought in.”

She added that focusing on neighbourhood policing was “about both expanding policing in our communities, but it is also a reform because it’s about the way in which we police, if you’ve got police embedded in those communities, providing intelligence and working together”.

Bringing police officers into communities, she argued, was “incredibly important in terms of prevention, in terms of preventing people being drawn into crime, in terms of keeping people safe and in terms of following-up”.

Ms Jones told the same event that a Labour government would overhaul police standards, including officers’ social media use.

She said: “It’s for us to make sure that those brilliant police officers, which is the majority of our police officers, are not being dragged down by those few who are not expressing the cultures and the behaviours that we would expect of them.”

Ms Jones explained Labour would speed up police misconduct proceedings and introduce compulsory training on subjects such as violence against women and girls and racism.