Options For Change - Federation Position

Dear All,

You will be aware of the emails today from the Chief Constable and the Chair of the Police Authority.

On June 24th the Chief briefed the Joint Branch Board of the Federation in respect of the proposals going to the Police Authority on July 16th 2010. The members of the Board asked the Chief a number of probing questions on your behalf. The Chief then left the meeting. Thereafter, following considerable debate, the Board resolved to support the ‘Full and Voluntary merger’ option.

On June 28th we wrote to Stuart Nagler, the Chair of the Police Authority, setting out our position – the text of that letter is below;

Dear Stuart

We write to you on behalf of the Hertfordshire Police Federation and the members that we represent.

The 16th of July meeting of the Police Authority is, in our view, a crucial decision making day for the future of policing for the people of Hertfordshire.

The Chief Constable has taken the opportunity to brief our board on the financial situation that the Constabulary finds itself in both at present and into the future.

Quite rightly we have not had sight of the business case that he will be bringing to you on the 16th but he has set out the three options.

We have come to the conclusion that full and voluntary merger is the ‘least worst’ option, based upon the information available to us. It protects service delivery to a greater extent than the other two options, albeit we know that the financial situation will mean that the service we have been able to deliver will suffer.

We appreciate that the debate that the Home Office is having may result in the demise of the Police Authorities and that therefore you may consider deferring the decision. We believe that whilst they are there, Authorities must seek to achieve what is in the best interest of the people of the county.

Any deferral of the decision based upon someone else being responsible for it at some point in the future, would bring little credit upon what we have seen of the professional approach taken by this authority.

As the staff association we would urge the authority to support the move towards merger, as stated earlier it is the ‘least worst’ option in our view.