PSNI chief outlines dire finances for organisation as staff consider 'danger money' strike action
The PSNI chief constable has outlined the dire finances he is having to manage with a £130million budget shortfall this year alone - and appealed to the Stormont Executive to 'properly fund' the service.
He also said no one would be facing disciplinary action for the huge data breach from last summer.
Jon Boutcher said the error that is set to cost hundreds of millions of pounds was due to a systems failure, as he insisted he not would preside over a “blame culture” within the PSNI. Mr Boutcher also said police staff members pay award was in advanced stages of being signed off. However, he explained how a revised environmental allowance which was promised to staff in 2019 had still to be agreed and was determined to be unaffordable.
Mr Boutcher appealed to the minister and the Executive to make the money available.
And said he had been notified civilian staff were considering strike action around the height of the marching season over an ongoing failure to increase danger money payments.
He explained how other forces in Northern Ireland had multi-year budgets in place to better manage their organisations unlike the PSNI which was handed a budget annully.
He said: "This is close to a billion pound organisation, this is no way to run it. When will we get our budget?
"When will we know if we are going to plug the gap of £130m? Is it going to be the eleventh hour again next year?"
Mr Boutcher said a reduction in the PSNI’s overall budget allocation since 2010 made it an “outlier” among all other UK forces. Police civilian staff are angry at a failure to deliver an uplift to their £580 annual danger money allowance that was committed to five years ago. In comparison, PSNI officers currently receive just under £4,000 annually in acknowledgement of the ongoing threat they face. Civilian staff, who are seeking to have their allowance increased to around £1,000, are involved in roles such as emergency call handling and scenes of crime work. Mr Boutcher said the PSNI’s 2,300 staff members had been “let down” year-on-year due to the failure to pay out an uplift that was promised to them in 2019. “I have to be completely candid I had undertaken to them that we would pay that,” he told board members at their monthly meeting in Belfast. “But understandably the Justice Minister (Naomi Long) feels that we still can’t show the affordability for that. “So, we’re in a position again, with the funding mechanism being determined as we speak, that I appeal to the board, to the Justice Minister and to the Assembly that we get properly funded so those types of awards can be paid to our staff. “Yesterday I met with the staff association Nipsa and they confirmed to me yesterday afternoon that they’re in preparations now to ballot their members for strike action because of that amount not being paid. The timeline as I understand it for that strike action, if a decision is taken for that to occur, would be mid-July, which obviously is a challenging time for us. “As the Chief Constable, I’ve got one workforce – nobody’s more important than anybody else – so I would appeal for the support, the continued support of the board and the Justice Minister in seeking to achieve the budget for this organisation to pay what is a relatively small amount of money in the scheme of budgets for an allowance that was undertaken to be provided to them in 2019.” Mr Boutcher told the board that a PSNI budget that sat at £1billion annually in 2010 had now fallen to below £900,000m per year. “We are an outlier in British policing, no other force face that, no other force in the United Kingdom,” he added. “In the last three years alone, the Garda budget has gone up 23%.” The chief constable said the budget for health in Northern Ireland had almost doubled since 2010 while the education budget had also increased, by around £700,000. “I don’t think this is obviously deliberate on anybody’s part, (but) we have become the poor relation in all things,” he said. “But we are the glue that holds the Good Friday Agreement together, which was signed on the 10th of April (1998), the anniversary being this week, and this decline cannot continue.”
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