Police take 200,000 days off due to stress
Officers suffer ‘anxiety and depression’ as budget cuts take their toll on single force
SCOTLAND’S police have taken almost 200,000 days off with stress and other mental health problems in just three years since the creation of the new single force.
Figures dating back to the launch of Police Scotland show growing levels of absence among officers and civilian staff because of anxiety, bereavement, depression and other psychological disorders.
It paints a picture of a force pushed to breaking point following dramatic reform, swingeing budget cuts and a series of scandals.
In a blog last week Calum Steele, general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, accused senior officers with ‘taxpayer-funded private health insurance’ of cutting support for junior officers.
The figures, obtained by Liberal Democrats through Freedom of Information, show police officers struggling with mental ill-health took 141,230 sick days between 2013 and 2016, with civilian staff taking 54,019 days over the same period.
And in 2015/16 the figures were slightly higher than the previous two years, suggesting the problem is getting worse. Police Scotland was launched in April 2013, following the merger of eight regional forces. It has been ordered to make cuts of around £60 million a year by the Scottish Government, and an estimated 2,000 civilian jobs have gone, putting more pressure on police officers.
Scottish Lib Dem justice spokesman Liam McArthur said: ‘The savings promised by the SNP before the creation of Police Scotland have not materialised. As a result, officers and civilian staff are being asked to do more and more with less.
‘With the chief constable warning that further cuts are coming, the pressure on staff is only likely to get worse. The changes that the SNP forced through are stretching the mental health of officers and civilian staff to breaking point.’
The new figures follow reports of plummeting morale among Scottish police. A recent Scottish Police Authority survey found workload pressures had left some inspectors ill through sleep deprivation.
And last year a damning Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland report exposed a crisis in police morale over a spiralling targets culture and ‘disproportionate’ use of stop and search.
Sir Stephen House, Police Scotland’s inaugural chief constable, stood down last year amid a series of scandals over stop and search and armed policing, and the highprofile deaths of Sheku Bayoh in police custody and Lamara Bell in a crash by the A9 which officers failed to attend for three days.
In a recent blog for National Police Memorial Day, Mr Steele called for more support for rank and file officers from the public and from chief constables. He wrote: ‘Sadly the once unparalleled assistance our forces gave injured officers is a thing of the past. Many are now tolerated rather than supported and organisational sympathy is often a secondary consideration.’
But Police Scotland spokesman John Gillies said the force took the ‘safety, physical and mental wellbeing of our officers and staff extremely seriously’ with an employee assistance programme providing ‘proactive health and wellbeing-related advice as well as reactive counselling services and post-incident trauma support’.
THE creation of a single national police force was sold by the SNP as an essential step to ensure the most effective maintenance of law and order. Police Scotland, insisted ministers, was the answer to public concern about crime rates and the shortage of officers on the frontline.
The truth was somewhat different. Police Scotland was conceived, first and foremost, as a money-saving exercise.
And since the merger, in 2013, of Scotland’s eight forces into one, the flaws in the project have been all too apparent.
Police Scotland has been rocked by scandal after scandal, from the routine arming of officers to systemic failings such as that which saw the victims of a car crash left lying unaided for days.
New figures obtained by The Mail on Sunday show that officers have taken almost 200,000 days off to deal with stress and other mental health problems since the establishment of the force.
It’s clear that the problems undermining the force run deep. Budget cuts have piled pressure on officers already struggling to cope with the scale of reform pushed through by the Scottish Government.
We are gravely concerned by the sickness levels among staff. If working for Police Scotland has this impact on officers on whom we all depend, what confidence can any of us have in it?