A row at the heart of Government is coming to a head – and the consequences will shape the future of policing in Britain.

And there’s no mistaking that this future is unclear. The service is in crisis.

When a young constable looks down at their payslip and wonders how they’ll make rent this month, something is deeply wrong.

When experienced detectives walk away from decades of service, broken by the demands placed on them, it’s the police service itself that’s broken.

When chief inspectors and superintendents – often the most senior officers on duty overnight across entire counties – are battling burnout and crushing stress, it becomes a national emergency.

Despite this, police are being asked to do more with less – again – as pressure mounts on already overstretched budgets.

Why? Policing faces a £1.2 billion shortfall. This is before it is asked to deliver the ambitious pledges of the new Government.

Police forces across the country are being forced to shed officers and staff to deliver savings.

These are not administrative cuts. They go to the core of policing’s ability to deliver a quality service: fewer officers on the beat, longer wait times for victims, and less available officers when a crisis hits.

Let us cast our minds back to the summer of 2024. Police officers turned out to protect amid riots and disorder. But there were no additional officers to pick up the day jobs. We need resilience.

Ministers have pledged to halve violence against women and girls, to tackle knife crime, and to rebuild neighbourhood policing. But policing is much more than this.

These ambitions cannot be delivered without sustained, long-term, stable investment in the service. Further cuts will not simply stall progress – they will reverse it.

It is well known that the wider public sector is broken. As a result, every day, the police are picking up the work of others when they become overwhelmed, effectively becoming society’s sticking plaster.

Officers are responding not just to crime, but to the vacuum left by other public services – from mental health to social care.

The job has become a catch-all for the sharp end of state failure, a failure that spends 80,000 police hours a year supervising patients awaiting mental health treatment rather than preventing, detecting and solving crime.

Since 2010, police officers of all ranks have faced wave after wave of mounting pressure. Real-terms pay has fallen by over 20 per cent.

Morale has been crushed. Retention has plummeted. More than 9,000 officers left the service last year – the highest figure on record. Forces are losing experienced personnel faster than they can replace them. Year after year, this is ignored by Government.

The new recruits who do arrive are bright and brave. But they are stepping into an environment where the strain is immediate, the workload relentless, and the support too often inadequate. It is a self-defeating cycle: we train the next generation only to burn them out before they reach the ranks where experience matters most.

A new constable earns less than £30,000. After deductions, many take home barely more than the Living Wage. And the problems continue further up the ranks, too. Senior officers are regularly asked to effectively work 24 hours at a time, breaching the very laws put in place to protect them.

They cannot strike. They are held to the highest ethical standards and under a constant microscope of scrutiny. And they continue to serve, even as pay stagnates and pressures grow.

It is against this backdrop that the spending review arrives. This is the moment where political rhetoric must meet practical investment. It is not enough to talk about “tough on crime”. There must be the funding to match.

What the police service needs is sustained investment in structures, people and new technology, so that chiefs can plan long-term and deliver a service that is fit for purpose. It needs:

• A fair, independent pay review system not bound by Treasury limits, nor instructed in what is allowed to consider.
• Immediate action to raise starting salaries, so policing is a viable, long-term career, not a financial sacrifice.
• A long-term funding settlement that reflects genuine investment and allows chief constables to plan.
• Real investment in officer wellbeing, not just words.
• And a commitment to a defining purpose so that the police police, rather than doing the work of other public bodies.

If the Government is serious about halving knife crime, protecting women, and restoring public confidence in the criminal justice system, it must first invest in the people responsible for those outcomes and fund a police service that can be designed around today’s demand.

The Government says it’s committed to law and order. If that’s true, it must start by supporting the people who uphold it.

The public rightly wants visible patrols, faster responses, and safer communities. So do the police.

Now is the time to act on promises and use this Spending Review to commit to funding a police service that can deliver.

 

This article was first published by The Telegraph on 8 June 2025.