During the public meeting of the Northern Ireland Policing Board this week, the PSNI Chief Constable, Jon Boutcher, confirmed that the organisation he leads is facing a budget deficit of £21 million in the current financial year. He is pinning his hopes on the October monitoring round, which will enable him to balance the books. 

Policing Board member, and the Ulster Unionist Party spokesperson on policing, Alan Chambers MLA, has described an outcome from the monitoring round that would enable the Chief Constable to cover the current year budget deficit as “a sticking plaster solution that will not enable the PSNI to proceed with their plan to increase the number of officers to a more manageable figure of 7000.”

The current number of officers available for duty has led to a reduction in dedicated road safety officers patrolling the roads of Northern Ireland to detect dangerous driving behaviour. This is at a time when the number of deaths and injuries on our roads is on the increase. Those officers who are still deployed on patrolling our roads are working extremely hard to make the roads safer and reduce the unacceptable number of deaths and injuries that are currently occurring, but require more support to increase police visibility on our roads”.

The Chief Constable also reported on the nine murders that have been reported since June and disclosed that he is having to consider requesting assistance from other UK police services to investigate these murder cases.

Mr Chambers said, "This situation of the Chief Constable having to seek the secondment of detectives from other areas in the UK with the skill set to investigate murder cases must cause the PSNI a degree of embarrassment in having to take such an unprecedented action to enable them to fully investigate serious crimes. It once again highlights the fact that the current level of serving officers in the PSNI is forcing the Chief Constable and his senior management team to attempt to provide the level of policing that the people of Northern Ireland demand with one arm tied behind their back.”

“The Chief Constable is strongly and correctly committed to the principle of neighbourhood policing. This enables officers with acute local knowledge of an area to enjoy close contact with the local community to solve problems before they escalate into more serious situations. As things stand, the concept of neighbourhood policing has been somewhat sidelined due to financial constraints. Given the ability to snip local problems in the bud, the PSNI know that it is a false economy to reduce or totally eliminate neighbourhood policing.”

“Another very important issue that the Chief Constable raised has clear implications far beyond policing. He highlighted the huge boost to the local economy and tourism, but also the impact and the support his organisation is able to offer major events like the recent British Open Golf event held in Portrush. While the PSNI were able to recover the cost of the massive police operation around the Open, the number of officers deployed to ensure the event passed over both successfully and safely, he was serving notice that the PSNI could not commit to replicating such large policing operations under the current model of officer numbers. If such events cannot come to Northern Ireland because of an inability for them to be properly policed the loss to the local economy, with free extensive international exposure, would far outweigh the funding required from the Executive to allow the officer numbers to increase to 7000 over the next three years and then onwards to the staffing numbers of 7500 officers as recommended in the Patton Report”.

“The historic and deplorable underfunding of the PSNI must be addressed as a matter of urgency, and the Ulster Unionist Party would call on the Minister for Justice, Naomi Long MLA, to robustly seek and provide the funding to permit the PSNI to provide the level of policing the people of Northern Ireland deserve. The time for honeyed words and hollow promises is long past. When the PSNI tell us that they don’t have the capacity to investigate local murder cases, then something drastic needs to be done to address this unacceptable reality.”