Cutting 10,000 police officers simply isn’t possible.

Today Labour have said that the 10,000 police jobs predicted to be cut as a result of a reduction in police funding (to levels of roughly a few years ago) are just the start.

The impression given by the Labour party and indeed from Police Authorities and of course ACPO and the Police Federation is that Police Forces across the country will be wielding the axe and thousands of Police Officers will be made compulsorily redundant.Except they won’t, because you can’t make a Police Officer redundant. Why? because they aren’t actually employed by anyone. Past their 2 year probation period, and unless they carry out gross misconduct, an officer’s career will simply continue until they retire which is roughly 30 years later.

The only option left open to Police Forces is regulation that enables them to compulsory retire individuals who have 30 years service, to ask people to take voluntary retirement (often on full pension as a sweetener) or to force individuals who have become disabled in the line of duty to retire. Making redundancies simply isn’t an option.

Now I may be wrong, and I’m not sure about the demographics of the Police Force, but something tells me that there aren’t going to be 10,000 of them who are already working past retirement age and so can be compulsorily retired, let alone more than 10,000.

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