Probationary Police Officers: Cost of Living

Debate between Ian Paisley and Paul Girvan

Monday 6th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ian Paisley]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point; he makes it well. The fact of the matter is that policing in Northern Ireland cannot be done on the cheap, and that is essentially what has been asked for. Not only do we have to tackle the crimes that are prevalent across this part of the United Kingdom, but we have an added layer of serious and organised crime that derives from paramilitary activity. That puts even more pressure on the policing budget. My hon. Friend is quite right to outline that this additional pressure makes the PSNI like no other police service in the United Kingdom. With 42 other comparisons to look at, the issues that our officers have to tackle are completely unique. They operate in a unique environment and under unique circumstances. With a hangover of policing the past, as well as trying to cope with the present and laying sound foundations for the future, it is almost impossible for them to do it on a shoestring budget that needs to be agreed year on year.

[Paul Girvan (South Antrim) (DUP)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. I want to highlight the number of young officers who come into the force and are left having to do additional duties, which is driving down morale. They do not have a proper work-life balance; never mind just the pay issue, the work-life balance is a serious issue for young officers.

[Ian Paisley]

Of course, if there was not the opportunity for overtime, police officers in Northern Ireland would absolutely be on the breadline.

Again, in setting the scene, let me add a layer that is unheard of and rarely reported in this part of the United Kingdom. Last year there were 2,500 assaults on police officers in Northern Ireland. Of a force of 6,800 officers, 2,500 of them were seriously assaulted, with broken bones or having to be off duty. In fact, 900 of them are unable to serve at present because of injuries. That is a serious pressure on our police. There have been four attempted murders of police officers in the past 12 months. One of them from earlier this year we cannot talk about—it is subject to a court case—and there were other very serious ones, including a stabbing, a bomb under an officer’s car and an attempt to fire a projectile at a station where an officer worked.

Our officers in Northern Ireland work under a unique set of circumstances where the threat against their lives and the targeting of them continues when they leave work and go home to be with their partner and family. That is a very different stress level from that of other officers. Not only do we have that aggressive targeting and attacks on police officers; we also have what I can only describe as a woke culture developing in Northern Ireland that says the police should not be allowed to use certain weapons to defend themselves from attacks. We all know of the benefits that Tasers give to police officers in the United Kingdom. If a police officer feels they are under attack, they can use a Taser to keep the assailant at a distant and under control. We have only 100 officers in Northern Ireland who are allowed to use a Taser, and the Taser has been deployed on only 21 occasions in the past year. Why has it been deployed so rarely, when we have so many attacks on police officers? Because there is an agenda to stop a Taser being rolled out to every single officer so that they can use it in a proportionate and balanced way when they face a threat.

Water cannon, which are not regularly used on the British mainland, are used for large crowd dispersals in Northern Ireland. CS spray is offered to our police officers; they also have baton rounds and are routinely armed with sidearms, but they do not like to use or deploy them because that would mean a fatality. In the past year, there were 400 withdrawals of a sidearm from a holster to point at a person, so severe was the threat to our police officers. Let me just put that into context: there have been 400 withdrawals of a gun from a holster, to point at a citizen of the United Kingdom, because there was a threat so serious that an officer felt his life was in danger. Thankfully, because of good, proportionate policing, there was only one discharge of a weapon.

We need something in between. Tasers may be one of those things; I certainly encourage the Chief Constable to apply for Tasers to be used and to make sure that they are widely issued. The Home Secretary offered £6.7 million to the other 42 United Kingdom police services to look into using Tasers as a proper mechanism for defending police officers. That offer was made to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, but it has not yet been taken up. I encourage the PSNI to take it up, so that we can create an atmosphere in which young police officers feel confident, in which their morale is not under threat and in which they feel able to use everything in their quiver to properly defend themselves and their actions.

I turn to the key issue, which is how young probationary officers are being treated in such a way that the cost of living crisis is putting real pressure and a real squeeze on them. It is important to put that into context. There is a benevolent fund in the police service that is run by the Police Federation. It was essentially set up to assist retired police officers and their families after they leave the service, but in the past year, more claims on and payments from the fund have been made for serving officers than for retired officers. That includes payments for home heating, for food for children and to assist with getting through the month. More currently serving officers than retired officers are having to rely on the police benevolent fund—that is an appalling picture for police officers.

I was chatting to an exceptional probationary police officer who lives in my constituency. He serves in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell), but he was seconded to do some work in a market town in my constituency while he was operational out of another part of the country. He was, quite frankly, brilliant. His conduct was brilliant, and so was his ability to deal with the public, help to resolve crimes and get on with doing the ordinary job in which every police officer takes regular pride.

That police officer came to see me in my office one day and said, “I want to show you my bank account.” He had 17p left in it. He is not a drinker, he is not a smoker, he is not a gambler; he has two young kids, and he was trying to organise his kid’s birthday party the next week. He had to drive a 45-mile round trip every day to do duty. He said, “I’ve maxed out my credit cards. How am I to get to work, let alone care for my kids and do this job? As a probationary officer, I’m on less than £26,000. My buddy who lives a few houses away works in a supermarket and is paid £7,000 or £8,000 more a year. He doesn’t face the same problems and stresses that I face”—the picture that I have outlined of the conditions under which police officers are operating. That story, unfortunately, could be repeated over and over again.

My hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned officers taking second jobs. This month, in the news magazine of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland, there was an account of a police officer who had to get a second job as a delivery van driver. That might be okay here in Great Britain, but the one thing that I am told, our colleagues are told and police officers are told in Northern Ireland about our security is “Do not engage in any regular activity. Do not allow anyone to say, ‘On such-and-such a day, that person does such-and-such.’ Change your system: change the way you operate.” A regular van driver cannot change the way he operates, and is therefore an easy target for those who wish to target him; but this is what that officer had to do in order to make ends meet. What is more, according to the article, he referred eight colleagues to the same job, encouraging them to earn extra income in order to live. It is not appropriate, in this day and age, for police officers to need to do that. It sends a clear signal that they are not being properly rewarded.

Last month the chairman of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland, Liam Kelly, wrote to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee outlining what an ordinary constable would receive. I am pleased to report that at the weekend there was an uplift in policing budgets, although they are still behind where they need to be. A probationer who would normally be on about £25,000 a year is now on about £26,500, a trainee officer who was on £21,500 is now on about £24,000, and an officer must reach year 5 after being a probationer to earn about £30,000.

It is a huge struggle for those people to remain in the job, survive and pay for the upkeep of their families and their homes, and they do so at a time when, as we all know, the cost of living crisis is upon us. Food prices are rising faster than they have for 45 years, inflation has reached 16.2%, and the pressures on everyone’s home budget is increasing. Apparently the average disposable income of a police officer in Northern Ireland who is in rented accommodation and paying for a car—officers have to live in certain areas and police other areas—is about £108 a month. We could not live on that, Mr Deputy Speaker, and we should not be asking our police officers to live and raise their families on that.

The Police Federation also kindly produced for the benefit of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee a series of alternative jobs—equivalent in terms of training and skill level—with which Northern Ireland police officers are competing. After year 3, a software engineer is making £43,500, a software developer about £33,500, a deputy principal—a middle manager in the Northern Ireland civil service—about £39,500, and a security guard about £28,500, and we are asking people who are genuine security experts to do their job for about £6,000 less. From day one, police officers in Northern Ireland face a terrorist threat and are under immense pressure. For the past five or six years, pay awards that should have been effective from 1 September have been delayed for months.; often, when discussions on the following year’s pay award have begun, officers have not yet received the previous year’s award.

I appeal to the Minister not to stick to a brief that says, “If we had devolution, all this would be sorted out.” That will wash with no one, because this problem has been building up for six years, and we had devolution for half that period. This is a problem of how we manage policing resources and whether or not we have devolution, and we need it to be addressed with a much sharper answer than “Well, if you had an Executive in Northern Ireland, all these things could be sorted out.” I wish that the answer were as easy as that, but I fear that it is not, and I fear that giving such an excuse for an answer will only fail to answer the pertinent question of how, in this day and age, we can properly reward our police officers and find the resources that will enable us to do so, and what we can cut in other sections of governance to ensure that they are properly paid.

These are national, not local awards for police pay. As my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) identified, we must make sure that the policing budget is strengthened in Northern Ireland, so that the issues that I have put on the agenda tonight can be properly addressed once and for all.

Northern Ireland Protocol Bill

Debate between Ian Paisley and Paul Girvan

2nd reading
Monday 27th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) and I thank him for his thoughtful speech. This debate reminds me a wee bit of the story of the man who asked for directions in Northern Ireland. He said, “Could you tell me how to get to Lisnagunogue?”, and a man said to him, “I wouldn’t start from here.”

The debate about the protocol in Northern Ireland feels a wee bit like that, when we start to examine it. As the Government know—the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), the former Prime Minister, made this clear in her cutting comments today to Government Front Benchers—our party warned from 2019 onwards, and before that, that the protocol would cause problems and that it would not work. Unfortunately, those warnings fell on deaf ears, so it is right and proper that the Government take action this evening.

I remember a sitting of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in which the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) —he is unfortunately not in his place now, but he spoke earlier—commented on the protocol. I asked him directly then, “Would the protocol put in place any barriers or cause any friction in relation to trade in Northern Ireland?” He said, “Don’t worry about it. It will all be light-touch.” Well, it is the heaviest touch that anyone has ever seen in terms of trading relationships in these islands, so we weigh very carefully and cautiously the words given to us by the then and current Governments.

The Government’s decision to bring the Bill to the House is welcome. I believe that their mettle, their steadfastness and their patriotism—that was put on the record by the Foreign Secretary—will now be tested by this matter. The House will then be left to judge whether the Government are sincere. We on the DUP Benches definitely hope that they are. We believe that our word can be counted on and trusted. It is now up to the Government to prove through their actions that their words can be counted on, believed in and be shown to be true.

The Foreign Secretary made it clear in a communication to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee that the problems of the protocol are about the disruption and divergence of trade, the significant costs and bureaucracy for businesses, the undermining of the three strands of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, and the collapse of the power-sharing arrangements at Stormont. Although we do not have time to deal with each of those issues tonight, she rightly outlined some of the problems.

[Paul Girvan]

This is about the diversion of trade, how that has impacted on local suppliers from the rest of the GB market and how they have not been able to access the Northern Ireland market because of the bureaucracy and additional paperwork required.

[Ian Paisley]

I thank my hon. Friend for drawing that to the House’s attention. The diversion of trade is absolutely critical and that was raised by the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner. By volume and value, local purchases from Great Britain are worth £13.4 billion to Northern Ireland. That is four times the value of imports from the Republic of Ireland, which stand at £3.6 billion—I hope that that answers the hon. Member’s question about the value of trade in Northern Ireland. Of the 16,000 businesses in Northern Ireland, 14,900 are small and medium-sized enterprises. They cannot cope with the paperwork, bureaucracy and cost of doing business in Northern Ireland. That is not a teething problem; that is a nightmare for trade.

Last year, the Consumer Council published statistics showing that, of people in Northern Ireland,

“over two thirds (68%) have experienced UK online retailers no longer delivering to NI; nearly two thirds (65%) have experienced delayed delivery of goods from GB online retailers; over half (53%) have experienced reduced access to products offered by GB retailers; over half (51%) have experienced an increase in the cost of goods bought online; nearly a third (29%) have been charged customs related fees for parcels coming from GB”.

Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom! It is not some far-flung part of the world; it is a few hundred miles away, and it is part of this UK. That is the impact that the protocol is having on the daily lives of citizens in Northern Ireland.

People say, “But there are grace periods.” Last month, Mr Šefčovič made it clear that the grace periods, in his view, are illegal and should not be used. We hear, across the House, “Oh, let’s have negotiations.” We do not have a willing partner in this negotiation—hence why, for the past year, the Government have told Europe in a White Paper that article 16 could be invoked. Instead of that being welcomed by the Opposition and other parties, for almost the past 12 months we have heard, “Do not dare invoke article 16. It is a step too far. It would be an atrocious action.” Yet tonight, when the Government say that things have now gone too far, we have to go beyond article 16 and bring in this Bill to solve the problems that have been discussed.

The right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) put a little gambit to the House tonight—“Oh, why don’t we invoke article 16?”—only to be shot down within 20 seconds by his Front-Bench colleagues because they would not support invoking article 16. The hypocrisy is not lost on Members of this House, and neither is how difficult a situation we are in or how urgent the requirement is for the Government to fix it. I call on the Government to move expeditiously to fix this matter. Until March this year, we had had more than 300 hours of negotiations with the EU, and it has not budged. Its mandate will not move.

Labour Members may have been suffering from amnesia, or else make-believe, when they thought that they were negotiating with us on the matter, as they claimed in earlier comments. There have been no negotiations between the Democratic Unionist party and the Labour party. There have been no negotiations between the shadow Foreign Secretary and our party on any of these matters. [Interruption.] The shadow Secretary of State can mutter and mumble from a sedentary position, but he knows that it is true. There have been no negotiations in the process, because Europe pulled stumps. It has not extended its mandate, because it does not want to negotiate. I wish it would. We would quite happily do so, because the provisions of the protocol are very clear under article 18, article 13(8) and article 164 that it can be lawfully suspended—and it should be. We would welcome that, but things have now come so far.

The prize is great. By fixing the protocol issue, we get devolution back, so let us fix it.