Politicians take on the police

For surely the party that is most associated with law and order can be trusted to reform the police service sensitively and prudently, ensuring that costs are brought under control without limiting the ability of the police to protect the public. Or can it? We are about to find out.

Teresa May is ready to go where few before her have dared to tread. The last wholesale reform of police pay and conditions, attempted by John Major’s government in 1993, quickly floundered in the face of concerted opposition by the Police Federation. And the officers’ trade union also put paid to Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s comparatively modest attempt to reject a pay increase in 2008.

For the new Home Secretary, however, the stakes are much higher because the Government is so short of money. Hence Ms May has delivered a grim ultimatum: the police must either accept pay cuts or lose thousands of frontline jobs.

To be fair to Ms May, few doubt that there is considerable scope for savings in a service riddled with high overtime payments, early retirements and a generous system of allowances. But the Home Secretary is playing a risky game.

In straitened times, with a worried public increasingly unsure how they will be affected by the Government’s vast programme of public-service cuts, the last thing that the Government can afford is a loss of faith in the police’s ability to hold the line against crime.

Yet, with forces already making plans for frontline redundancies, the fear is that the pay freeze envisaged by Ms May will hit morale, and thereby effectiveness, still further.