Hansard

It is a week since we debated the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Bill and it completed stage 1 of its passage through Parliament. We in the Labour Party supported the general principles of the bill, but the debate was disappointing in some respects. Labour members and others expressed concerns about the on-going process of reducing police staff numbers that would result from the bill, and it was disappointing that those concerns were not shared by members of the Government back benches. Humza Yousaf claimed that:

“the myth that ... police officers will be taken away from patrolling the streets to fill out paperwork all day in a back office was firmly knocked on its head.”—[Official Report, 10 May 2012; c 8799.]

Roderick Campbell noted that Strathclyde Police has a lower proportion of civilian staff and appeared to imply that the problem is that other forces have too many civilian staff in the first place.

Even more concerning, however, was the ministers’ approach, which is reflected in their amendment to my motion. Last week, the Cabinet Secretary for Justice applauded a decision by Lothian and Borders Police to get rid of civilian custody support officers by putting police constables back into stations to look after custody suites, on the basis that a junior police officer costs less and offers flexibility. In responding to the debate, the minister did not address the concerns that had been raised about the impact of reducing civilian posts in the police service. It might be that Ms Cunningham meant to respond to that, but ran out of time do so; I acknowledge that it is not always possible to respond to every point that is made during a debate.

However, we in the Labour Party made it very clear that our concern about civilian posts and about police officers being diverted to do civilian jobs was critical to our view of the bill as a whole. Labour entered the last election with a manifesto commitment to support a single force, but we also had a manifesto commitment to oppose diversion of police officers to civilian jobs. It is not, for us, just one more non-bill issue that was raised while debating the bill; it is fundamental to how we get the most effective police service, just as much with a single service in the future as with the existing forces and agencies of the recent past.

I want to say why I think that it is wrong to suggest that the problem is that there are too many civilian staff in some forces. The process of civilianisation of police roles was carried out over a period of years with broad political support. The ratio of staff to officers varies from force to force, as was pointed out during last week’s debate, but for most of its first term in office, the Scottish National Party seemed to share the general view that there being more, rather than fewer, civilian posts tends to provide a better service to communities and better value for money for the taxpayer. Civilianisation was seen as being better for policing, better for communities and better for the police service itself. For example, the policy was lauded for increasing diversity by improving recruitment and retention from among groups that have traditionally been underrepresented in the police service, including women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds.

The process was piloted by forces in England and Wales, and in Scotland, with reports of savings in money and in police time for forces ranging from the Metropolitan Police in London to Dyfed-Powys Police in rural Wales. As recently as April 2008, Kenny MacAskill was providing Central Scotland Police with extra funding to deploy civilian staff to help with routine enquiries in Falkirk in the expectation that doing so would free up 10 per cent of front-line police officers to go and do things that only a police officer could do.

Of course, not every initiative to civilianise police posts was an unqualified success. Besides tasks that require the power of arrest, other police tasks are so closely related to the work of an officer that it makes most sense for them to be done by police officers. However, until relatively recently, the direction of travel was to see what more and what else could be done by civilian staff; it was not to find plausible explanations for taking police officers away from policing duties to get them to look after suspects who are already in custody.

Last week, the cabinet secretary conceded that, ultimately, his support for a single police force is down to financial pressures and the need to mitigate the impact of budget cuts, so that must be what lies behind his U-turn on civilian staff in the police service, who were once a desirable commodity but are now an expendable luxury.

The savings that have undoubtedly been made from extending the roles of civilian staff have been trumped by the £100 million of costs that ministers have promised will be cut as a result of the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Bill. The desirable objective of modernised mixed teams of officers and staff has disappeared in the face of the political imperative of delivering very large savings in a very short time without cutting police officer numbers, and without any effective steps being taken to avoid handing over an additional £22 million in the form of unrecoverable VAT.

We know that job cuts are already under way. Full-time equivalent police staff numbers passed the 7,000 mark on the way up in 2005, peaked at 7,862 in 2010 and passed the 7,000 mark again on the way down in the final quarter of last year. The Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland currently estimates that a total of 1,000 posts have been lost since the change in direction of Government policy, which agrees with the results of Unison’s survey of its members who are employed by Scottish police forces in February of this year.

The risk is that things will only get worse under the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Bill. ACPOS reckons that the only way to meet the savings in the outline business case for a single Scottish police force is to shed civilian jobs. At least 2,054 will have to go by the time of the next Scottish Parliament election, and most of the rest of the civilian staff will have reduced terms and conditions. If they were to resist reductions in terms and conditions, ACPOS believes that some 2,400 posts would be lost and, if ministers make no progress on the VAT issue, it estimates that some 3,200 jobs would have to go.

Those are not small numbers and they will not be accounted for by the reduction in the number of posts that directly support the eight chief constables, as Mr MacAskill appeared to imply would be the case last week. This is not simply about ending unnecessary duplication or trimming at the edges; it represents a fundamental recasting of how the police service is delivered. As Unison has said, it takes us back to the policing model that existed before civilianisation began. Other staff unions are also concerned.