HEALTH spending should not be protected at the expense of Police Scotland’s budget, the head of the officers' union has said as the force faces crippling austerity measures.
Calum Steele, the general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, warned Police Scotland is standing on a financial “precipice” if expected cuts to its budget go ahead, which MSPs were warned could see officers pull back from critical services like community policing.
He said the Scottish Government could not protect the health budget on the basis it would mean making deeper cuts to other parts of the state.
Steele, who represents about 98% of cops in Scotland, said police officers picked up the “slack” from the cash-strapped ambulance service and working as “pseudo” emergency mental health officers.
Massive cuts forecast
Around 4400 officer and civilian staff jobs are facing the axe over the next four years as the Scottish Government recommended major cuts to the policing budget.
Meanwhile, the Scottish Government is planning to increase the NHS frontline budget by at least £2.5 billion over the same period on top of a further £12.9bn for health boards.
Steele told The National: “If the health budget is going to be protected then the expectation is that other services including the police are going to take a disproportionate share of the cuts as a consequence of that.
“But that will have a far greater impact on all of the other services than if services were to take a fair share of the cuts together.
“At this time, police officers are effectively pseudo community mental health practitioners, they’re emergency mental health responders, they’re also picking up the slack in the function of paramedics and all of those individuals that are not currently getting service from health will still look to the police service to perform that function.”
He told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland that the Scottish Government should spend less on the health service to protect Police Scotland.
He said he recognised the constraints on the Scottish Government’s budget caused by devolution and said he would not make calls on the UK Government to increase public spending because he operated in the “here and now”.
Police force faces 'difficult decisions'
It comes after MSPs heard on Wednesday of the mammoth stress on Police Scotland’s budget, with one SNP politician describing the warnings as “stark”.
Even the future of the 101 non-emergency call service is being questioned, senior officials told a Holyrood committee.
Police Scotland’s deputy chief officer David Page set out the impact of inflation on the force’s budget, saying there were “very, very difficult decisions” ahead.
Page said: “The vast majority of our budget is people, so any cuts on our budget will fall squarely on people – police and staff who make up Police Scotland.
“We’re looking at things like having to pull back from the types of policing we do at the minute because we won’t have bodies to do it, to be quite frank.
“Things like community policing, campus cops, which incidents do we attend in terms of roads policing.”
Saying the police often have to pick up “slack” from other government agencies, he added: “Our ability to answer 999 calls, it will be slowed.
“The 101, service, do we continue with that. If we don’t continue with the 101 service, all that will do is shift people into dialling 999.”
Response policing, digital forensics and public protection are all areas which will be squeezed, he said.
He continued: “There’s a real concern we won’t be able to discharge our duties as we currently do.”
The SNP’s Fulton MacGregor said the officials’ statements had been the “starkest” he had heard in his six years at Holyrood.
“We need to sit up and take note,” he added.
Justice Secretary Keith Brown (above) said: “Our largely fixed budgets and limited fiscal powers means the UK Government needs to provide the Scottish Government with sufficient funding to support public services and the economy in these difficult times.
“We have already made difficult choices to support pay offers in 2022-23 and rightly so, as our police workforce deserve this.
“While policing matters and budgetary prioritisation are always a matter for the chief constable, we remain fully committed to using the resources available to us to support the vital work of Police Scotland in delivering effective and responsive policing across Scotland.
“We will work with justice organisations including Police Scotland and [the Scottish Police Authority] to develop and co-ordinate their delivery plans in response to the high-level spending review allocations.
“Despite UK Government austerity we have increased police funding year-on-year since 2016-17 and have invested more than £10bn in policing since the creation of Police Scotland in 2013.”
A Treasury spokesperson said: “The responsibility for funding public services is largely devolved across the UK, but we have provided the Scottish Government with a record £41bn per year for the next three years – the highest spending review settlement since devolution.”
