Is Scotland staring down the barrel of a paramilitary police force?
That was the dystopian warning voiced by one of our most senior officers. And, as is so often the case, rank SNP incompetence is to blame
NEARLY a decade ago, former justice secretary Kenny MacAskill pledged that the new single police force would deliver ‘policing in a way that has never before been seen in this country’. And on that point he was unusually prescient – fast forward to the present day and Police Scotland top brass are warning of a financial implosion that represents nothing less than an existential crisis.
The police service as we know it is facing such a drastic reduction in funding as a result of proposed Scottish Government cuts that 4,500 officer and civilian jobs are on the line.
This week, the force leadership joined rank-and-file officers to spell out in chilling terms the potential repercussions of these savage cuts – including a likely surge in crime.
David Page, Deputy Chief Officer of Police Scotland, said one horrifying scenario was that the police would become ‘quasi-paramilitary’, capable only of responding to terrorist incidents, rioting or murder.
It’s a dystopian vision and one that is light years away from Mr MacAskill’s prediction of a ‘smooth and seamless’ transition to a ‘new era of policing’ when the eight police forces were merged back in 2013.
The troubled evolution of Police Scotland illustrates the gulf between those hubristic political promises and the much bleaker reality of a chronically cash-strapped force.
Even before these brutal cutbacks are imposed, there is little doubt that policing has been in survival mode for years.
Officers staged a work-to-rule earlier this year in a bitter dispute over pay. There were even warnings of ‘blue flu’ – mass co-ordinated bogus absences through ‘sickness’ – as police cannot legally strike.
So how did policing get to the brink of what the Scottish Police Federation (SPF) has called a ‘calamity’? And what happens next to the second-largest police force in the UK after the Metropolitan Police?
Police Scotland has been firefighting since it was created in April 2013, having to make the case for more cash year after year.
The SNP Government was candid at the time of its launch that force mergers were a way of saving cash.
Mr MacAskill said the intention had been to ‘make a virtue out of a necessity’ in response to Westminster funding cuts.
But the decision to merge the territorial police forces, leading to budgetary chaos, was taken not in London but in Edinburgh.
SIR Iain Livingstone, Chief Constable of Police Scotland, 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.
And for that reason he and his colleagues insist that policing shouldn’t be in the firing line once again – not least because any further cuts, on the scale now proposed, would effectively bring the force to its knees.
A ‘flat-cash settlement’ is planned, which means the police budget is no longer protected in ‘real terms’, a euphemism for massive cuts.
If a 5 per cent pay award agreed earlier this year were to be repeated up to 2026-27, police chiefs warn that an extra £222million would need to be found – the equivalent of an average reduction in headcount of 4,500, based on current salaries.
Police Scotland already has its lowest number of full-time officers – 16,610 at the end of June – since the creation of the single force.
In 2007, the SNP came to power promising an extra 1,000 police officers, a commitment that was later ditched. Indeed, Mr MacAskill recently admitted the pledge was ‘plucked from thin air’.
SPF general secretary Calum Steele told the Mail: ‘This isn’t scaremongering. The idea that we could be about to become a quasi-paramilitary force is plausible, with the exception that frankly we wouldn’t have the same level or standard of equipment as the military.
‘We’ve already got a situation where police aren’t able to respond to a lot of crime, and that will get worse. We are at the start of a serious decline, but rather than managing that decline over a period of years, we are being pushed off a precipice.’
Writing in the Mail earlier this week, Mr Steele said the ‘police service is already not physically attending reports of domestic abuse, housebreakings or car thefts’.
And he said ‘even victims of historic sexual crime are increasingly being dealt with over the phone – these practices will become the norm and not the exception’.
Mr Page told MSPs on Wednesday Police Scotland will become ‘more reliant’ on England and Wales for mutual aid – the arrangement allowing forces across the UK to share officers at times of acute demand.
For the SNP, this would be a humiliating blow given that for years it has argued that public services in Scotland, including policing, are comparable or even superior to those south of the Border.
Mr Steele said over the past decade police budgets were cut south of the Border, while in Scotland ministers opted for mergers. But now Scotland is facing cuts similar to those seen in England and Wales.
Notwithstanding police cuts in England, senior Scottish policing figures have pointed out that the Scottish force remains massively underfunded on basic technology.
Last month, Will Kerr, Sir Iain’s deputy, admitted that Police Scotland is ‘professionally embarrassed’ by its lack of body-worn video cameras, which have been issued to the personnel of ‘even the smallest English police service’.
Amid growing financial constraints, police chiefs in Scotland are now reviewing all options, including scrapping the 101 non-emergency number, a move that would divert all calls to 999, while the SPF also fears the force helicopter may no longer be ‘viable’.
The average waiting time for a 101 call to be answered rose by 30 per cent, from two minutes, 37 seconds to three minutes, 17 seconds, between 2020-21 and 2021-22. The target answering time is 40 seconds.
In 2018, a new call-handling system was introduced called the Contact Assessment Model, which aims to prioritise urgent calls. But Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS), the police watchdog, believes this has ‘not delivered the intended benefits’.
A recent report said: ‘Demand relating to mental health, distress and vulnerability is increasing.’
Yet at the same time as fighting cuts, police are having to fight a rise in violence. Earlier this month, Police Scotland statistics showed a 5.8 per cent rise in violent crime between April and September this year compared with the same period last year, from 2,394 crimes to 2,533.
But the proportion solved dipped from 68.8 per cent to 64.5 per cent.
Housebreaking saw an increase of
12.7 per cent over the same period – from 1,926 to 2,170, but the clearup rate has fallen from 28.5 per cent to 26.8 per cent.
Police are also having to bail out paramedics by taking injured people to hospital because of massive strain on the ambulance service, leaving the force at risk of being ‘paralysed’, according to HMICS.
The watchdog said officers were having to deal with mental health crises and other problems unrelated to investigating crime.
Chief Inspector of Constabulary Craig Naylor has warned there is a risk of the police service ‘becoming paralysed and unable to cope with unfettered demand’.
HE said: ‘We heard local officers voice frustration at spending lengthy periods with people who are physically or mentally unwell, and experiences of SAS [the Scottish Ambulance Service] passing responsibility for calls to the police as a result of their own resourcing issues.’
Insiders say police morale is in freefall, with 65 per cent of officers reporting high levels of stress and 17 per cent warning of ‘burnout’, according to the SPF. Former Glasgow Chief Superintendent Tom Buchan said the force was in dire straits because the Government had ‘plundered police coffers’.
He said: ‘Police have run out of room for manoeuvre, given that so much of their spending is on people. Once you’ve cut that to the bone, you have to look further afield to things like the helicopter and 101. Stations are falling apart – the ones that haven’t been closed – and you’ve got some police vehicles with more than 100,000 miles on the clock and held together with duct tape.
‘In the 1980s, in Glasgow city centre, you would have had 20 cops on patrol between Central Station and what is now the Buchanan Galleries area, on a 24/7 basis. Now you would be lucky to see any, certainly on weekdays.’
He now backs a Royal Commission or judge-led inquiry into what is expected of policing.
Graeme Pearson, former director of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, has said the ‘growing budget gap reflects the absence of a fully fleshed business case for reform’, which he said was never provided prior to the inception of Police Scotland.
And in 2020, former Lord Advocate Dame Elish Angiolini said laws setting up Police Scotland were rushed due to the SNP’s ‘incompetence’, leading to major flaws in how the service was run.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost and the decline of policing is about to accelerate rapidly. Meanwhile, much of the superb work done by dedicated officers is undermined by failures elsewhere in the justice system – for example, nearly 450 suspected drug drivers have evaded justice because of forensics delays.
AS for the Scottish Government’s response to the apocalyptic warnings, it’s a well-worn and all too familiar argument. Justice Secretary Keith Brown has said ‘our largely fixed budgets and limited fiscal powers mean the UK Government needs to provide the Scottish Government with sufficient funding to support public services and the economy in these difficult times’.
But the ‘difficult times’ aren’t new. Police Scotland has been in a downward spiral for much of the past decade. SNP ministers are holding the purse-strings and making decisions about where public cash should be spent, not their London counterparts.
One of the SNP’s flagship projects is in danger of unravelling – yet another botched reform, with taxpayers again picking up the bill while one of our key public services is left to languish on life-support.