Alan Chambers: Buck stops firmly with justice minister over state of the police service
When Chris Patten brought forward his report into the creation of the PSNI, some twenty five years ago, he recommended that the complement of officers in the new service should number 7,500, supported by locally recruited 2,500 part time reserve officers to serve in their own areas.
The assumption was that this group of officers would be policing in an environment largely influenced by the peace that was anticipated would emerge from the Good Friday Agreement. Fast forward to today. Policing is still operating in a post conflict arena. Huge challenges still exist to the safety of officers from dissident republican terror organisations as well as the criminal activities of remnants of loyalist paramilitaries, who are a product of our historic conflict, but whose activities affect the quality of life of the very communities they would claim to represent.
Police numbers currently sit at 6,173 officers, supported by just 150 part time reservists. Patten’s figure of 2,500 part time reservists is never mentioned and we still haven’t managed to get near his recommendation of full time 7,500 officers.
The chairman of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland, Liam Kelly, delivered a hard hitting, and fully warranted, keynote speech to his members at their annual conference recently. He referenced the impact that the current depleted level of workforce was having on officers. Stress and other health issues are forcing many officers to take sick leave, a situation not helped by the unacceptable number of injuries on duty that side-line those who have been attacked.
In fact I recently heard the chief constable Jon Boutcher highlighting that due to a number of factors he could only call on around 4,500 officers on some days.
Mr Kelly suggested that politicians are not listening, and indeed used the strong words that nobody in government gives a damn about policing. He later narrowed that narrative to state that the Minister for Justice and her executive colleagues need to re-establish policing as a meaningful priority. He indicated that at a Bravery Awards event in March, the minister had said that she felt policing was ‘turning a corner’ but that since then he had seen no tangible evidence of that. He went on to say that the only corner we see is one that will force us down the road of demoralisation and deterioration of service delivery.
I served as a part time RUC reservist for 15 years in the 70s and 80s and currently am a member of the Northern Ireland Policing Board. Reading between the lines of Mr Kelly’s speech I detected an increasing loss of confidence amongst his members in the political leadership of the justice minister, Naomi Long. Indeed in conversations with servicing officers I hear this echoed more and more frequently. The reality is that the buck stops firmly with the justice minister and her words of ongoing talks and discussions offer little encouragement to serving officers that anything is going to change soon.
There is plenty of evidence to go to the Westminster government and make a case for the £200m the chief constable needs in each of the next three years. It is a disgrace that the PSNI is having to pick up the tab for settling historic legacy cases along with the failure to deliver what policing was promised in the Good Friday Agreement, an agreement that Westminster is always willing to portray as a huge success story, whilst putting on the blinkers when the topic of policing is mentioned.
Extra funding was recently found for policing in the UK while the get out for failing policing in Northern Ireland is that it is a devolved matter. The minister must continually and robustly challenge the Secretary of State Hilary Benn to start representing the best interests of the citizens of Northern Ireland in regard to policing. She must start to be his worse nightmare. The men and women of the PSNI deserve no less, and nor do the public they strive to serve.
I am pleased to see the chief constable, who I regard as a breath of fresh air, talking off the same page as the federation. His blunt assessments of how his ability to offer the public the policing service they deserve is being seriously hampered by the current shortfall of budget is much more than a wake up call but rather should be heard as a clamour of alarm bell ringing. Deaf ears need to be unplugged.
• Alan Chambers is UUP MLA for North Down