Chief gets approval to use forced retirement

Between 150 and 200 officers will leave and some 300 staff will be made redundant in the most radical shake-up in North Yorkshire Police’s history.

Chief Constable Grahame Maxwell has moved quickly in a bid to solve the budget crisis, becoming only the second top policeman in the country to gain police authority approval for A19, the pension regulation allowing him forcibly to retire his most experienced officers.

A voluntary severance scheme for staff was introduced last year, and this month senior officers and unions began a 90-day consultation with employees over compulsory redundancies.

Mr Maxwell said swift action was needed as the force had to save between £9m and £11m next year, with the black hole expected to widen to more than £19m by 2014-15.

“We can make the cuts year on year on year on year, or we can restructure in one fell swoop next year,” he said. “We need to get the organisation as stable as we can. If police officers don’t leave at the rate that we need them to, we will have to use A19.”

Mr Maxwell said he wanted to protect safer neighbourhood teams, 999 response teams, local CID offices and roads policing units from the worst of the cuts, aiming instead to reduce the cost of buildings, vehicles, human resources and IT systems.

As well as A19 and the redundancy schemes, a raft of other money-saving measures are either planned or already in place, such as ending the hire of temporary staff and changing shift patterns. A high-profile officer recruitment campaign launched last February was scrapped for cost reasons nine months later with more than 520 job applications pending.

The budget crisis has spread to the force’s soon-to-be-abolished governing authority, which yesterday discussed plans to slash its spending by 10 per cent next year.

Mr Maxwell said the picture would be even gloomier were it not for large increases in the council tax precept agreed in North Yorkshire during the past decade.