Police Federation

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Wednesday 15th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Jonathan Hinder (Pendle and Clitheroe) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the effectiveness of the Police Federation.

I am pleased to speak under your chairship, Mrs Harris. I will start by briefly sharing some of my experiences as a police officer, so brace yourselves because some of it is not very nice. In my time in policing, I was the first to arrive at a triple homicide scene. It was a mother who had killed her own three children. I saw people take their last breaths on Earth at road accidents; I pulled a suicidal man down from a road bridge; I knocked on people’s doors to tell them that their loved ones had passed away; and I was called to mentally ill people self-harming down to the bone with a razor. I was spat at by the people I was arresting and, of course, subject to the most disgusting verbal abuse from the people I was looking after in custody inside the police station. That is the reality of policing. If only it were just about catching criminals, but it never has been and it never will be.

I mention those incidents not because my experience was particularly notable; it was precisely the opposite. That is the reality of being a frontline police officer. They see all of that; in one minute they have to be physically tough in the face of aggression, and in the next they have to be emotionally sensitive with a victim of serious crime. That is what our police officers do day in, day out, working earlies, lates and nights on the public’s behalf. We owe them so much for doing the essential work that most people would not have the guts to even consider.

Being a police officer is mostly a thankless job. They get to the end of a long shift doing their bit for society and they feel that the politicians, the media and the courts do not back them up. Perhaps that is an issue for another day, but in the meantime, we have to ask who is looking out for the interests of our police officers. That brings me to the Police Federation.

The Police Act 1919 stated that, given their unique role in society, police officers could not join an ordinary trade union or take strike action. To be clear, I am not seeking to question that today. However, in recognising the need for representation, that legislation established one staff association to represent police officers: the Police Federation. That was reaffirmed in the Police Act 1996. I want to pay tribute to the many hard-working federation representatives over the decades, including those serving in forces across the country today, for the work they have done representing their local members. I do not diminish their work in supporting individual police officers in their time of need, but I am afraid that the national leadership of the Police Federation is rotten. It is not right that 140,000 frontline officers have to pay their subscriptions and put up with that because it is the only staff association that they are legally allowed to join.

Over the last two years, the unelected chief executive of the Police Federation has paid himself £1.4 million in salary and bonuses. That is paid through the monthly subscriptions from police officers’ wages. That fact alone is shocking, but it is the culmination of years of failure. Most recently, senior members of the federation who asked questions about its governance were purged from the organisation. Elected representatives who reflected the legitimate concerns of frontline police officers on policing issues were also purged. How can there ever be reform if those who ask questions and could have helped build a better federation are seen as the problem?

This issue goes back even further. There was the disastrous handling of the changes to police pensions, where it was found that the federation misled its own members, failed to communicate with them, and victimised officers who were forced to take action on their own. Cultural change was promised after the scathing Normington review of 2014, but a decade later things were still so bad that another report, the Bousted review, which was completed just last year, described

“an arrogant and inward-looking culture born of a centralist mindset and”—

crucially—

“a feeling that the interests and views of rank-and-file members do not matter.”

If so, what is the federation really for?

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I am very interested in hearing the hon. Member’s evident experience. I would like to put on record that I am the chair of the justice unions parliamentary group. It is extremely important that police officers have representation. In only the last three years, we have heard about tragic cases of suicides and hundreds of attempted suicides. It is also evident that the governance of the Police Federation has to be adapted and improved immensely.

[Jonathan Hinder]

I would not dispute that one jot. The present national leadership say that

“a transformed Federation is the best way to deliver effective representation”

but I am afraid that officers have heard it all before. I dare say they will hear it again unless radical action is taken. It is because of this repeated systemic and cultural failure that I have come to the conclusion that only if police officers are given the freedom to establish and join an alternative will they get the representation they need and deserve.

The Police Federation has very few advocates within policing. I thank the many officers who have contacted me to say how pleased they are to see this campaign getting attention, with many confirming that only the monopoly and fear of being without representation when they really need it keeps them subscribing.