Police ‘should be able to work from home’
Head of Superintendents’ Association also claims that flexible working would boost diversity
POLICE officers of the future should be allowed to choose their own hours and spend more time working from home, the newly elected President of the Police Superintendents’ Association (PSA) has suggested.
Paul Fotheringham, who took up his new post last month, said the pandemic had demonstrated how police forces could afford to be much more flexible with their staff, while still protecting the public.
He said allowing officers to fix their own work patterns would help improve diversity in policing and would increase the number of women able to reach senior ranks.
Earlier this year Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, hit out at the work from home culture and urged people to return to the office, claiming that staff were missing out on vital interaction with colleagues.
But Mr Fotheringham, who spent 28 years with the Kent Force, rising to detective chief superintendent, said if policing wanted to remain attractive as a career option, it needed to modernise and be open to flexible working.
He acknowledged there would always be a need for frontline officers working around the clock to respond to emergencies, but he said the changing nature of crime and the increased use of technology, meant there was now much more scope for remote police work.
Just over half of all police are nonemergency response officers so could be eligible for some form of flexible working arrangements.
Mr Fotheringham said: “There’s no escaping the fact that we can’t compete in many ways with the private sector when it comes to employee packages and benefits, but we have so much else to offer that’s [unique] to policing.
“The only way we will continue to be attractive as a career choice, whilst also bringing in people representing every part of our communities, is to become more flexible and forward thinking when it comes to working patterns.
“We’re seeing this happen and it’s really important that we drive this forward.”
He said the pandemic had forced the police to embrace new technology which had opened the door to more remote working.
And while his comments might alarm some people, he insisted the public would not get a reduced service if officers were at home rather than based in police stations.
He explained: “I’ve no doubt that when we started having to work from home, there would have been some senior leaders asking the questions: ‘People working from home? We need to check they are working’, instead of actually trusting the staff.
“But we as an organisation must learn to adapt. Covid has helped with that in a way, because I think it has opened the eyes of many senior leaders within policing and demonstrated that if you offer more flexibility with your workforce you are going to get so much more back.”
He went on: “Obviously in terms of uniformed officers you are always going to need people available to deal with emergencies but policing is about many different roles so the challenge for us in the future is to be much more flexible.”
Mr Fotheringham also stressed the need to improve diversity in policing so that it better reflected the communities it serves.
He said that a particular issue in the past had been officers forced to leave the service because they struggled to fit punishing shift patterns around family life.
But he said that by offering more flexibility and allowing officers to choose which hours they worked, women with young children would be able to stay in service and gain promotions that had previously been out of reach.
Meanwhile, it has been announced that Dame Cressida Dick’s last day as Metropolitan Police Commissioner will be Sunday April 10.