The current number of officers in Scotland ‘not sustainable’, warns police authority

Iain Livingstone says there has been a 20 per cent rise in marches. Picture: TSPL

With a host of global events being held in Scotland throughout 2020, including the COP26 climate change conference which is expected to run up a policing bill in excess of £200 million, the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) warned Police Scotland’s budget was plagued by a “structural deficit”.

David Crichton, the SPA’s vice-chair, said the vast majority of the police budget had already been allocated to cover officer and staff costs.

At a meeting of the authority in Edinburgh yesterday, he said it had been “consistently” raising concerns about “financial sustainability” over the past four or five months.

He stressed: “There is a structural deficit in the policing budget. It’s simple arithmetic, it’s not complicated mathematics.

“With almost 90 per cent of the budget allocated to officer and staff costs, it does mean that difficult choices are going to have to be made over the next weeks and months – difficult choices by government, by the authority and by Police Scotland.

“Frankly, current officer numbers are not sustainable within the existing budget, so something has to change on that front.

“The deficit is simply going to continue to increase if something does not change.”

An estimated 90,000 people, including around 200 world leaders, are expected to take part in the COP26 conference.

Police also believe a climate change march planned to coincide with the summit could attract up to 500,000 demonstrators.

Police Scotland’s chief constable Iain Livingstone told the meeting the £200m figure for policing the November event was a “very indicative estimate”. He said accommodation costs alone will run into “tens of millions of pounds”.

Mr Livingstone said deposits on accommodation were estimated at £2m, which needed to be paid by next month.

While Mr Crichton said the COP26 costs should be recouped from the UK government, it remains unclear who will be picking up the bill.

Scottish ministers said they expect the UK government to cover the “core costs”, including emergency services funding, but have pointed to a “lack of clarity”.

The UK government has said discussions with the Scottish Government on COP26 costs are “currently ongoing”.

Mr Livingstone and his colleagues emphasised that with other international events taking place during the year, including four matches at Hampden in June as part of the European Championships football tournament, the force was coming under renewed pressure.

Deputy chief constable Will Kerr said the force would need to deploy “significant numbers of police officers effectively every month during the rest of this calendar year”.

He told the meeting: “Frankly and bluntly, 2020 is going to be about boots on the ground, when you distil it down in its purest policing sense.

“We’re going to have environmental protests that are ongoing on a weekly basis now, the Euro 2020 coming up in June and the preparation for those, some of the ongoing issues and protest activity associated with the political debate about an independence referendum, COP26, and parades.”

Mr Livingstone revealed that last year there had been an almost 20 per cent rise – from around 1,500 to 1,800 – in the number of loyalist and republican marches in Scotland, as well as a higher number of spontaneous protests such as those by Extinction Rebellion.

He said: “My priority is to build a sustainable police service that has the right mix of police officers and police staff that operates within its budget. But at the moment there’s an operational imperative, I sense an element of political imperative, to maintain officer numbers and the challenge for us is showing the value that having a strong police service provides and at this stage, making a case for further investment.”

Mr Kerr said there had been “significant tension” around some of the loyalist and republican marches in 2019, with a number of events requiring a police presence of more than 500. The veteran officer said his “intuition” told him it was “going to be a challenging year”.