Police Pay Mechanism Needs Reform

“We should have a pay mechanism that we can trust, that we know is going to treat police officers fairly.”
Hampshire Police Federation Chair Zoë Wakefield was responding to comments made by national PFEW Acting Chair Tiffany Lynch in Police Oracle, where she called on politicians to reform the police officer pay body.

Tiffany wrote: “The Police Pay Review Body (PRRB) is a rigged process in which the Government hand-picks the members, constrains their remit and decides the outcome. It’s like a football match where one side selects the opponent’s players, referees the game and has a veto over the result.”

Tiffany continued to say that there needed to be a new system where all parties – Government, police chiefs, Police & Crime Commissioners and staff associations – could present their evidence and negotiate, before decisions were made by the PRRB. If agreement couldn’t be reached, she said, there should be a system of arbitration to bring matters to a conclusion.

She added: “This is not asking for a blank cheque or the making of unreasonable demands, but rather an allowance to cater for the fact that there is no option of industrial action or the threat of it for police officers.”

Zoë said she mostly agreed with Tiffany’s comments and added that the London Allowance was unfair to southeast forces.

She said: “I think we need a pay review body where the Government has a minimal influence on the whole process. I am aware that they have made some good decisions over the past couple of years. We’ve had two decent pay rises recently, which I know officers are really pleased about. But in real terms, we are still way behind where we should be on our pay. And those pay rises were influenced by the rate of inflation at the time, so it sounds like they were massive pay rises but, in reality, they weren’t that big.

“What I find difficult with the pay review body is how the Met is treated differently to everybody else; for example with the London weighting. The London Allowance gets increased year on year, but the Southeast Allowance doesn’t. I think there’s a huge swathe of unfairness around that. Bearing in mind the majority of Met officers live within the southeast forces and not actually within the metropolitan area.

“But the whole thing needs an independent review to work out what it should look like. I think the way we had it before PRRB worked better. We should have a pay mechanism that we can trust, that we know is going to treat police officers fairly and not be influenced by the Government.”