PSNI cuts number of police to lowest ever level

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) is to reduce its number of staff by 6% in the coming months.

By March there will be 309 fewer police officers and 115 fewer civilian staff.

The force, which is not recruiting new officers this year, said the cut would leave it with 6,700 police, making it the smallest it has ever been.

Chief Constable Simon Byrne had previously warned Stormont leaders of a "less visible and responsive police service" because of budget constraints.

In a statement on Thursday the PSNI said: "We will have a funding shortfall of around £80m by March this year and envisage bigger shortfalls in the years to come.

"As a result the police service is going to shrink over the next three years."

Chief Constable Simon Byrne said there would be no redundancies and recruitment would start to slow: "Historically we were taking 300 to 400 staff each year, that will now be in the 10s each year until either budget flattens out or people decide to give us more money.

"Our assessment is that every 100 officers we lose, it will take us a year to replace. If we get to the extreme, this could be a decade of damage."

He also said going into next year, the public would start to see a difference on work that was "not seen as a priority".

He said: "We might not be as visible tacking anti-social behaviour and dealing with the issues affecting people on the streets."

He said officers would continue to deal "promptly" with 999 calls, patrol the streets and investigate "high harm crime".

Dramatic as this announcement seems, and probably is, it's not unexpected because for a succession of months now the chief constable has been ringing the alarm bell.

When we talk about the police service reducing in size by 300, that's by March.

Officers who have left or are leaving will not be replaced, but this is only the first year of pain - I suspect similar figures will be talked about in the next two to three years.

The force says non-emergency calls will take longer to respond to, crime investigations will be slower and neighbourhood policing will shrink.

There is also likely to be reduced roads policing and the response to protests and disorder may be affected.

Ultimately we probably are heading at this moment in time in the direction of the PSNI reducing by several hundred officers over the next couple of years

The PSNI said the number of officers it would have at the end of March would be the lowest number since the force was formed in November 2001.

It also said the number would be be 800 fewer than the 7,500 commitment made by the Stormont political parties in the New Decade New Approach political agreement of January 2020.

"The message we delivered today is a bleak one," said the PSNI.

"Inevitably with less police there will be less policing."

The PSNI is largely funded through the Department of Justice and about 80% of the force's allocation goes towards staff operating costs.

The Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, has called for an "all-out campaign to fight deep and damaging cuts in the police budget".

"We will see fewer officers and a marked deterioration in services to the general public if these swingeing cuts go ahead," the federation's chair Liam Kelly said.

"This is shocking news and it will have a devastating effect on each and every police officer in Northern Ireland.

"Our colleagues do their best for our communities and this is the thanks they get."

Stormont's Department of Justice said achieving the New Decade, New Approach commitment was "largely dependent on the availability of executive funding".

It added that any decision on PSNI recruitment was "an operational matter for the chief constable".

In a statement, the Policing Board said while it had wanted to avoid being in the current position "our focus now has to be on continuing to work with the chief constable and his team on minimising the organisational risks to policing going forward".

It added: "The chief constable and his leadership team have worked to protect key areas, but the service assessment is clear that these levels of reductions will undoubtedly be felt within policing, within partner agencies and within particular aspects of service delivery to the community. These will only become fully known as we go forward.

"Despite the reductions confirmed, it is important to note that there is still a significant resource available to policing in Northern Ireland so the board, like the chief constable, would want to assure the public of the commitment within policing and within the board to doing the best with what we have."

Alliance Parry leader Naomi Long said the situation was very serious and that the projected spend for the next three years is even worse.

"One of the things that concerns me is that some of the plans that the chief constable and the police service had for modernisation in terms of digital working and other things that would actually allow for efficiencies, have had to be placed on hold," she said.

"So you end up with the perverse situation that because of lack of resource things that actually could save money can't be done."

Ulster Unionist Policing Board member Mike Nesbitt said Northern Ireland was different from policing areas in other parts of the UK because of a border with the EU, interface areas and the continued existence of paramilitary organisations.

"If we didn't have to dedicate a lot of money, resources and officer head count to tackling paramilitarism we would be in a much better place," he said.

"So if the paramilitaries would only go away, or transition, that would really, really help keep people safe in Northern Ireland."

The absence of a Stormont executive makes financial problems harder to address, with departments operating without proper budgets since the start of this financial year.

New legislation to allow the UK government to pass a budget for Northern Ireland is being fast-tracked at Westminster.

However, the government has warned that the budget for next year will be "very difficult".

On Monday, Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said the UK government had failed to deliver on its commitment on policing in Northern Ireland.