The police are not happy. They were offered a 2.5% pay increase, but because of the way this is being applied (i.e. not backdated to when it was awarded) they will get just 1.9%. A similar thing happens to health workers each year. We are offered a pay rise, the health unions argue about it, and finally people get it. Trouble is it is often these days staged, or as this year so complex that you don’t know if you have received your entitlement or not. In the public sector we usually receive something each year in terms of a cost of living rise. In the recent past this has been reasonably close to inflation, this year it is not. I don’t know the headline inflation figure (I am no economist and am writing this before work so have limited time) but my mortgage has gone up significantly as has fuel (domestic and petrol) and food. Added to this the fact I actually have not had a pay rise due to my job being banded lower than my previous one (this is currently being reviewed but will not be back dated either) and me being on protected pay. My husband works in the private sector in manufacturing industry (yes there is some left, just about) and often gets no pay rise during a year, but when he gets one he knows how much it will be and when the end of that month comes he sees it in his pay cheque.

This issue is not about the amount of money people are awarded, it is not about how often they get it but it is about being open and honest with your workers. Police officers do an increasingly difficult and dangerous job; every night there is a news story about someone being killed or injured at the hands of someone else and for every victim and perpetrator there are several police officers working at the sharp end. Police, Nurses, Ambulance crews, Fire officers are all there doing their job getting on with making the changes to their services as dictated by ever changing government policy. They have become more professional, they have become highly trained, highly specialised and all of these professions attract pretty high caliber people into them. For the government, our employers to pretend to us and the public we are being given a certain amount of money only to secretly take it away is scandalous. I don’t agree with any of us striking but the government has to learn to treat us all with more respect and if there is some kind of work to rule that helps to do that then I am all for it.