More Police Officers Resigning Before Pension Age

More police officers are leaving the service due to overwork, burnout and pension changes, Hampshire Police Federation has said.

Chair Zoë Wakefield was speaking after the Police Federation of England and Wales’ 2024 Police Leavers’ Survey found that, between 2017 and 2024, 27% of police officers resigned before reaching pension age.

Officers who resigned cited low morale and poor job satisfaction as the main reasons, with 63% saying the job’s negative effect on their family and personal life was a critical factor.

Zoë said: “This is concerning, but I can’t blame people for wanting a better work-life balance for them and their families.

“I was chatting to one officer who’d made the decision to leave and his son said to him, ‘Does that mean you’ll be here on my birthday, Daddy?’. For him, that was enough for him to know that he’d made the right decision to leave, because it was going to have a big impact on his kids.”

Zoë said that austerity cuts had had a big impact on officers’ working lives: “Officers are having to work harder because there’s fewer of them. They’re having to work more hours, they’re having more rest days cancelled, they’re having to stay at work later because of the lack of police officers.”

In addition, the changes to the police pension meant there was less of an incentive to stay to retirement age, Zoë said: “Before, officers knew they could leave after 30 years’ service with a really good pension. That pension draw isn’t there anymore to keep people and I don’t think the Government considered that when they made the changes.

“All those things combined have caused people to think, ‘Do you know what? I’m going to look elsewhere’. To turn this around, there needs to be a huge, sustained recruitment campaign to get police officer numbers up to where they should be. There needs to be a review of our pay and conditions, because a lot of people still want to be police officers but they have to make tough decisions when it’s massively impacting on their families.”