Revolt in the ranks at PSNI’s bid to cut overtime
Exclusive Angry officers insist plan to make them work rest days is ‘madness’ but force claims it’s about applying rules consistently
THE new PSNI Chief Constable is facing a rank-and-file rebellion over plans to make officers work on their days off as part of a cost-cutting drive.
Simon Byrne (left) is cracking down on overtime from the start of next month. One serving officer said: “It’s absolute madness and it’s all anyone is talking about.”
CHIEF Constable Simon Byrne is facing a rebellion over plans to make officers work on their days off as part of a cost-cutting drive.
Mr Byrne is clamping down on overtime across the force from the beginning of next month.
Under the plans officers will be required to work on their rest days with the promise of a day off in lieu some weeks later.
The PSNI said it was part of moves to apply overtime regulations equally across the organisation.
However, with the PSNI short of almost 800 officers to provide an effective service, there are concerns over how the new system will operate.
It comes just weeks before Brexit, as more officers are being tasked to work in border areas amid concerns over a surge in dissident republican activity.
Mr Byrne’s predecessor George Hamilton repeatedly warned that he did not have the necessary resources to deal with potential disorder in a no-deal scenario. It has also been claimed there are not enough officers to enforce even a soft border after the UK leaves the EU at the end of October.
The implementation of the overtime clampdown has angered officers.
It comes after Mr Byrne said the PSNI will appeal a ruling by the Court of Appeal, which upheld a judgment that staff are owed money for a shortfall in holiday pay dating back 20 years.
PSNI employees in Northern Ireland have also not yet received a pay rise dating back to 2017/18 that has already been handed to their counterparts in the rest of the UK.
The most recently available figures, covering the 12 months to 2017, show £45.5m was spent on overtime — equivalent to £124,730 a day.
Earlier this year a meeting of the Policing Board was told some officers were claiming up to £55,000 for working additional hours.
Responding to the bid to radically cut the PSNI’s overtime bill, one officer said: “It’s absolute madness and it’s all anyone is talking about.
“A lot of people rely on their overtime to pay their bills and they’re genuinely worried about how this is going to impact on them. I know the bosses would say staff shouldn’t rely on overtime, but the fact is they do and there are a lot of very worried people out there.
“It has really got backs up; Northern Ireland isn’t like England, we have serious security issues here and policing here is very different to policing in the rest of the UK.”
The officer pointed to trouble which flared at the site of an anti-internment bonfire in North Belfast last week, when officers came under attack.
They added: “Just look at what happened in New Lodge last week, look at the marching season, all it takes is for someone to say the wrong thing and the whole place implodes.
“I’ve no idea how the
bosses think we can provide an adequate service over things like the Twelfth without overtime.
“If they bring me in on my day off to work a shift because they don’t have enough staff, how are they magically going to have enough staff to let me have my day in lieu a few weeks later? “There are some units where officers are having their leave cancelled at the last minute, they’re actually having to cancel holidays abroad, because the police are so shortstaffed, so it’s hard to see how this is going to work.”
He continued: “There are also welfare issues with these new rules.
“It’s hard
enough for officers to work shifts around their families.
“There’s a lot of planning goes into childcare and now they’re changing around our days off with a few weeks’ notice.
“I understand the Chief Constable wants to save money, but this is leaving a really bad taste in people’s mouths.”
Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton said: “Overtime is inevitable in an organisation that faces unpredictable and critical demand. The use of overtime is governed by regulations.
“As part of ensuring we apply the regulations consistently, information was issued to management teams recently asking that they ensure that regulations are applied equally across the organisation.
“Police regulations state where an officer receives 15 or more days’ notice of the requirement to work a rostered rest day, that officer will be allocated another rest day within four days of the notification of the requirement to work.
“Overtime is paid to all officers who have a rostered rest day cancelled with less than 15 days’ notice. It is also paid to officers who work additional hours to their rostered shift.
“Overtime will never be a default option to meet a resourcing demand and we recognise the additional burden it puts on our workforce.
“The public have a right to expect that the Police Service of Northern Ireland pays overtime according to the regulations and managers have been asked to ensure this happens.
“We are conscious of the impact working additional hours has on our staff and take actions to mitigate this.” NORTHERN Ireland’s political deadlock is hindering societal efforts to tackle the threat posed by dissident republicans, the Chief Constable has warned.
Simon Byrne expressed concern about a lack of political direction to improve conditions in deprived areas where dissidents are recruiting vulnerable young people.
Mr Byrne said educational underachievement and limited employment opportunities were shown to be contributory factors in fuelling extremism.
His warning came as he pinned the blame for this week’s murder bid against police and Army in Co Fermanagh on the Continuity IRA.
Police officers and Army bomb disposal experts escaped injury when a device detonated as they attended a security alert at Wattle Bridge near the border on Monday morning.
In the wake of the explosion PSNI Deputy Chief Constable Stephen Martin pointed to the power-sharing crisis at Stormont as he stressed the need for societal improvements in the region.
Mr Byrne echoed those remarks yesterday as he visited a PSNI call centre in east Belfast.
He said: “We need the Executive back in place so that policy can be implemented to improve the opportunity and living conditions of particularly young people who may become disaffected and be recruited in a vulnerable state by dissident republicans.” Stormont has been without a devolved Government since January 2017. Mr Byrne
❝ My job is to lead the operational response of PSNI, but at end of the day we need political support
said: “I have nowhere to go, frankly, in terms of where do I get support to deal with some of the more medium-term policing issues, how do I draw commitment support from health, from some of the district councils, for example?
“Because there is a whole wealth of evidence that actually turning around deprived and isolated communities to make their life opportunities better, their prosperity improved, the whole environment more vibrant, is actually not a policing issue. We can sometimes be a catalyst, we can create the space for other agencies and organisations to do their job, but we need that support unequivocally.” Mr Byrne backed the stance taken by his deputy.
“At the end of the day Steve has the benefit of being here man and boy, years of experience of differing policing contexts right across the country,” he said. “I am fresh eyes, two months into the job, but where we join up is that same conclusion that the political vacuum is not helping us.
“We are not here to be political, my job is to lead the operational response of the PSNI, but at the end of the day we need political support to do our job as well as we can.”
Mr Byrne said the re-emergence of the Continuity IRA after a period of relative inactivity was a “worry”. Mr Byrne said he
Political vacuum is being filled by dissidents, Chief Constable warns in plea to parties
would describe th e recent spate of murder bids by dissidents as a“spike ”.
Th e senior officer said it was too simplistic to blame th e increase in activity on Brexit.
“There’ s no clear evidence yet th at Brexit is motivating people to increase their confidence to change the tempo of attacks against the police ,” he said.
Mr Byrne said a no-deal Brexit could see th e PSNI calling in support from other forces in the UK to help manage the border.
He revealed th at a mutual aid request is one option in th e force’s Brexit scenario planning as he warned that policing 300 border crossings is “just not practical”.
Mr Byrne stressed he had not “pressed th at button yet” in requesting outside support, and said th e PSNI’s primary aim would be to police th e fallout from a no-deal exit, with its own officers working in co-operation with the Garda south of th e border.
He outlined details of th e PSNI’s Brexit preparations as he urged the Government to bolster his resources by recruiting a wave of new officers. The PSNI h as around 6,750 officers.
The Government has committed to funding an extra 300 to deal with Brexit, but Mr Byrne wants more th an double th at number, to bring th e total to 7,500— an operating level envisaged for the PSNI when it replaced th e RUC in 2001.
He was speaking on the same day th at Garda Commissioner Drew Harris announced major reforms to th e Republic’s police force, which will see around 1,800 extra gardai deployed to front line services over th e next two years. Around 800 additional officers and staff would be recruited, while some 1,000 current gardai would be redeployed by 2021.
Mr Byrne questioned why Boris Joh nson’s commitment to recruit 20,000 extra officers in England and Wales h ad not been extended to Northern Ireland.
“If we go back to th e past we talk ed about a number of 7,500 officers being what Patten (Lord Patten, who oversaw policing reforms) saw as the number of officers th at I need to police th e streets of Northern Ireland and that’ s my plea to politicians ,” he said.
“At the end of the day the Prime Minister made a commitment in England and Wales to increase the head count of police officers by 20,000— when will we see our share here?
“Brexit feeds into th is. We have had a support, which we are grateful for, to increase nearly 300 more officers to deal with some of the most immediate problems with Brexit but, at the end of the day, we can only speculate h ow th is is going to play out.
“In th e medium term, if I am going to provide a policing service which the public in Northern Ireland have quite clearly said needs to be about more visibility and more people on the ground, I frankly need more officers to do th at and my plea is to have our share of what is happening in England and Wales.”
SimonByrnedidn’t exactly take up his newjobasPSNI Chief Constable atthestartof last month in the most auspicious of circumstances. There was no government at Stormont. Brexit was looming on the horizon. Dissident republicans were once again flexing their muscles. The Twelfth was just days away.
It’ s far too early top ass a definitive judgment on how George Hamilton’s successor is handling these challenges, but Simon Byrne certainly faces a perfect storm in the coming months, with a no-deal Brexit now looking all-but-unavoidable on October 31, with all the implications that has for the border — not forgetting a possible return to direct rule, or even another Assembly, or general election. Perhaps both, God help us.
The last thing he needed was the threat of strike action by officers, but that appears to be exactly what the 56-year-old Englishman may be facing in the coming weeks, with PSNI officers understandably upset at plans — revealed in this newspaper today — for an overtime ban that would even require them to work on their rest days; a necessary sacrifice, bosses clearly believe, since the force is 800 officers short and in no position to take on additional duties.
They’ll now be doing so at normal, rather than overtime, rates, which many PSNI officers need to pay the bills. It looks very much like robbing Peter to pay Paul, following a recent ruling that thousands of officers and civilian staff are owed money going back 20 years. What the PSNI giveth with one hand, it seems set to taketh away with the other.
The effect on police morale could hardly be more detrimental. They can’t be on constant call. They have families and need downtime to recharge from stressful situations.
Thinning out their pay packets at the same time as dragging them away from home would be a cruel double-whammy.
Having a Chief Constable who seems deaf to some of the connotations of his language can’t help either.
Yesterday morning, Simon Byrne appeared, once again, on radio, this time on Irish station RTE, to wax lyrical about his fears if no-deal goes ahead. He has every right to be concerned. The Chief Constable’s job is to anticipate problems and then ensure that the men and women under his command are ready and fully resourced to deal with them.
But Byrne went much further, telling RTE that he doesn’t want to see “a return to a paramilitary style of policing”, post-Brexit.
The words were even stronger than those he had used on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme earlier, when he lamented the problems that a hard border might bring with the words: “If we get this wrong, we could drift back to almost a paramilitary style of policing.” In the space of a few hours, that “almost” had gone.
Is Simon Byrne suggesting that the old RUC was a paramilitary organisation? Words matter. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the primary meaning of “paramilitary” is for a group “organised like an army” but which is “not official and often not legal”. That’s certainly how it’s been generally used in Northern Ireland.
There were undoubtedly problems with the RUC, some of which were addressed by Lord Patten’s commission.
The force was not accepted by many in the nationalist community. It had been responsible for a number of controversial killings. There were question marks around collusion with loyalist terrorists.
Nonetheless, most fair-minded people in Northern Ireland, of whatever political persuasion, always acknowledged that there was a huge difference between the legal RUC and illegal groups such as the IRA and UVF. The RUC had rogue sectarian elements. Those other groups were the rogue sectarian elements.
It’s true that the RUC were armed and could only patrol certain areas with Army support, but everyone knew who was to blame for that.
The PSNI are still armed, for the equally obvious reason that it would be irresponsible to send them out defenceless while there are groups actively intent on murdering them.
All the same, no one but the most extreme dissident would suggest that this made the RUC a paramilitary force.
Why Simon Byrne has chosen to go down this road, only he can answer. But he has made a number of political statements relating to Brexit and the border since becoming Chief Constable which raise similar concerns.
When the Northern Ireland Policing Board set out earlier this year what was needed in a new boss, it mentioned looking for an “exceptional leader with an ability to drive and deliver organisational change”.
A candidate was sought who could “bring a strong vision of service delivery to the community”, who had “an ability to build strong relationships” and possessed “sound business skills and acumen” to run a organisation with a budget of £800m. What it didn’t ask for was someone who would bang on about Brexit every five minutes to journalists.
The requirements did state that the new Chief Constable should be “able to operate with high levels of political astuteness”, but it was made clear that the successful candidate should do so only in order to make policing more efficient and effective, not to influence the political conversation. The police must be seen to act and speak in a non-political way.
Simon Byrne was actually asked on RTE whether he
had specific information, or knowledge, that no-deal would increase dissident activity. He admitted that his warnings were founded on “speculation and some assumptions”, rather than hard intelligence.
It’s surely not asking too much to expect a Chief Constable to resist the urge to publicly speculate and make assumptions based only on the “emotional anger” he thinks dissidents might feel at leaving the EU come Halloween?
Police chiefs must be operationally independent of politicians, but that means they should also back off on matters that are the proper business of elected politicians.
Anything else risks dragging the PSNI into an increasingly fractious political landscape, in which Brexit and the border have become dangerous battlegrounds — and ones that are split largely on unionist/nationalist lines.
Rather than giving his tuppence-worth of thoughts on ongoing political developments, the Chief Constable would be better advised to concentrate efforts on building support, both in the community and, crucially, in the force itself.
Police officers cannot be expected to be at their best when they’re worried about having enough money at the end of each month to look after their families. The threat of strike action in the coming months if an overtime ban is imposed suggests that Simon Byrne has his work cut out.
Was the new Chief Constable suggesting that the old RUC was a paramilitary organisation?
Police chiefs should back off on matters that are the proper business of elected politicians