How the SNP stretched the thin blue line to breaking point
IT was back in 2013 that former justice secretary Kenny MacAskill promised a ‘smooth and seamless’ transition to a ‘new era of policing’. He said the public were ‘unlikely to see a significant shift, but in the background officers are primed and ready’ – and the single force was born.
An ambitious merger of the eight existing territorial forces, it was the highest-profile reform of public services undertaken since devolution in 1999.
Fast forward to 2022, nearly a decade after the launch of Police Scotland, and the reality is a little different – for the first time ever, rank-and-file officers are embarking on a workto-rule in the midst of a bitter pay dispute.
Their leaders in the Scottish Police Federation (SPF) warn that morale is in freefall, while more than 900 officers left the force in 2021-22, up by 56 per cent in a year – heaping more pressure on the burnt-out workforce.
The same Nationalist government that pledged a ‘new era’ has become the first to preside over what the SPF has called the ‘worst industrial relations crisis’ in the history of policing – light years away from the ‘truly world-class’ crime-fighting force heralded by the first Chief Constable, Sir Stephen House.
He acrimoniously quit in 2015 following the M9 tragedy, when young mother Lamara Bell was left dying by the roadside for three days thanks to call-handling blunders – leading to a fine of £100,000 for the force for health and safety failings.
Years of hierarchical turmoil followed, with Sir Stephen’s successor, Phil Gormley, quitting in 2018 amid bullying allegations – two of his alleged victims later won out-of-court settlements of more than £1million.
Now the current chief, newly knighted Sir Iain Livingstone – formerly Mr Gormley’s deputy – is in charge, providing much-needed stability after a long spell of chaotic leadership.
He insists that policing has done a good job given the scale of cost-cutting that has been imposed over the past decade – with £200million taken out of the core annual policing budget, and total cumulative savings of more than £2billion predicted by 2026.
For all of his high-flown rhetoric, Mr MacAskill once admitted that the SNP had ‘taken the view we should make a virtue out of a necessity’ by creating the single force in response to Westminster funding cuts – but ultimately the cuts were inflicted not by the UK Government but by its Nationalist counterpart in Edinburgh.
The service is among the worst-funded in the UK for hardware and technology, while Scottish Police Authority (SPA) chairman Martyn Evans has said that Police Scotland ‘has less access to technology on average than every other police service in the UK’. Sir Iain believes Police Scotland is ‘behind the UK’, for example in the limited rollout of body-worn cameras – which is now in doubt after the SNP Government’s recent spending review.
More pain lies ahead – real-term spending reductions of up to 8 per cent are coming for Police Scotland, as well as prosecutors and courts, according to an analysis of the Scottish Government’s financial plans by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The Chief Constable told an SPA public board meeting this week that the cost-of-living crisis ‘has the potential to increase the vulnerability of people’, sparking the threat of ‘protests’ and ‘disharmony’, and he warned of officer cuts and scaling back operations.
Scottish Tory justice spokesman Jamie Greene warns that the SNP’s real-terms budget cuts could run to more than £100million, which ‘clearly will hamper their efforts to invest in infrastructure’.
Against this bleak backdrop, officers are grappling not only with poor technology but also with deteriorating conditions – as a job that many saw as a vocation becomes a nightmarish ordeal.
Being called to court or other duties on ‘rest days’ is common – and with courts facing a Covid-induced logjam that could take a decade to clear, they might well find the cases where they were due to give evidence postponed or cancelled at the last minute.
The starting salary for a constable is £26,737, a wage that critics say does not begin to reflect the myriad responsibilities and the complexity of the role.
Calum Steele, general secretary of the SPF, told the Mail: ‘There is a huge debt of time owed to officers – the service owes 50,000 rest days which have yet to be allocated.
‘This isn’t an easy job – the average response officer will come into work and face situations that can put huge strain on their mental health, and a lot of the time they’re not actually fighting crime – there’s a legal duty to protect life, so many hours could be spent with someone who’s threatening suicide, for example, waiting at their homes or in hospitals.
‘Numbers have gone down so there are fewer people on shift, which also creates problems.
‘It’s fairly typical to be called in on a rest day, maybe to give evidence in court, and often the case won’t call, but the officer will have had to rearrange childcare at the last minute.
‘In situations where an officer is in a relationship with another officer, because of the way shifts work it’s entirely possible that they won’t see much of each other, or get to spend time with their kids.
‘It’s no wonder that so many are leaving because, frankly, they are absolutely sick of the job.’
Official statistics show that officers and staff within the force missed 76,848 days during 2021-22 as a result of ‘psychological disorders’, up from the 62,783 days recorded in the previous year.
The current move to work-to-rule is the result of a clash with ministers over pay – a plea for an annual rise of 8.4 per cent was countered in May with a flat increase of £565, a rise of about 2 per cent, that was rejected by police staff.
One police insider close to the talks said Justice Secretary Keith Brown had been ‘extraordinarily low-profile’ during the tortured negotiations, adding: ‘He is missing in action while the service is in crisis – it’s like they don’t care.’
A 5 per cent pay rise for train drivers earning more than £50,000 in the recently nationalised ScotRail has added to the rancour, culminating in a decision earlier this week by the SPF leadership to authorise work-torule – previously unthinkable for an organisation that is legally forbidden from taking industrial action.
The SPF calls it the ‘wholesale removal of goodwill’ – the commodity which they argue allows the service to function – and the repercussions could be severe.
The policing insider said: ‘There are many things that we can do, and some things that of course we can’t, or wouldn’t – if we’re called to go to a court case, then of course we’ll go, for example.
‘We have to come in to work on a rest day if ordered to do so, but that can’t happen if line managers can’t get through to us – so there will be a lot of people just not picking up their phones, when previously they would have.
‘They won’t report early for a shift, or stay beyond the end of it, and if they have to do so, it will be billed as overtime, which will be very costly for the force as overtime is much more expensive than standard pay.’
By any reckoning, this is a dire reflection on the political stewardship of policing by a government that has overseen a rapid diminution of manpower, after years of hubristic boasts about safeguarding police numbers.
In 2007, the then SNP leader Alex Salmond set out plans for 1,000 extra officers and promised to maintain the extra police numbers in the 2011 election.
That commitment – now ditched – meant that when Police Scotland was formed in 2013 there could never be
‘No wonder so many leave, frankly they are sick of the job’
less than 17,234 police officers. Yet officer numbers fell to 16,805 at the end of March – the last time numbers were below 17,000 was in the last quarter of 2008, when there were 16,675 officers.
Meanwhile, the number of alleged rapes in Scotland has risen by more than 8 per cent in a year, while non-sexual crimes of violence shot up by more than 12 per cent.
Mr Steele’s assessment of the cuts-ridden police service under the SNP is characteristically forthright, and damning – he says policing is ‘becoming a reactive response service rather than one that is able to provide community reassurance through physical presence’.
For many of those who got into policing largely because they wanted to arrest criminals and keep the public safe, the reality on the ground is starkly different.
New changes to bail rules will result in increasing numbers of suspected offenders out on the street to ease pressure on overcrowded prisons.
Earlier this week, Scottish Government figures showed a rising proportion of sex offenders being spared jail – nearly eight out of ten dodged prison last year.
Mr Brown, unveiling a vision for the justice system back in February, said it would be ‘puerile’ to keep locking up criminals, and was mocked after appealing to the public for ideas about how to combat court backlogs.
The merry-go-round of accused or convicted criminals getting out on bail or being freed early from prison is a huge frustration for the officers who have to contend with the fall-out from the SNP’s softtouch justice agenda on a daily basis.
And far worse is to come, amid warnings of a mass exodus of experienced officers as a result of changes to the rules on pensions.
Retirements accounted for 74 per cent of the 928 officers who left last year.
A pensions shake-up means officers are able to retire after 25 years’ service without a financial penalty, prompting a scramble for the exit.
Up to 1,800 officers could go in the next few months, raising the prospect of a talent drain and an influx of probationers – with possible cost savings of £10,000 a year for every officer who leaves.
Commenting on the projected fall in police numbers, former Glasgow Chief Superintendent Tom Buchan, who claims Police Scotland is ‘on its knees’, said: ‘This is unfathomable – policing will pay the price for years to come.
‘The probable impact is of a scale never before experienced in the history of policing – it is a cataclys
As beleaguered rank-and-file officers prepare for unprecedented industrial action and the force’s chief warns of the dangers created by more Nationalist funding cuts... ‘The service is just not going to be able to fill the void’
mic change, a real crisis, and the service is just not going to be able to fill the void.’
The SPF claims that many are leaving not necessarily because of the pension changes but because they simply don’t want to do the job any more. For its part, Police Scotland says recruitment plans have been ramped up, creating a ‘significant demand’ on Tulliallan Police College.
Senior insiders argue that given the cutbacks of recent years it has performed well, pulling off the difficult task of policing the Cop26 climate change summit in Glasgow last November.
And they point out that few, if any, other public services have had to go through the pain and reorganisation Police Scotland has endured – making it all the more unjust that more financial misery is looming.
Yet the Mail has been told there is ‘considerable anxiety and nervousness’ among force bosses about the months ahead, as work-to-rule gets under way.
The policing source said: ‘At the top of the force, they know the effect this action could have – and it could get very bad indeed.’
Just at the moment the Nationalists are attempting once again to persuade the electorate of their ability to forge a bold new state, one of their flagship reform projects is on the verge of implosion.
And as the thin blue line becomes ever thinner, the chasm between the early rhetoric of the SNP architects of the single force – and the second-class service the public are having to get used to – will continue to grow.