Chief Superintendent Rob Hay, President of The Association of Scottish Police Superintendents
We’ve been talking to the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee about the steps taken by Police Scotland to improve mental health among the workforce. On 11 September, the ASPS Vice President, Supt Suzanne Smith, gave evidence to the committee and spoke about the worrying trend of increasing psychological illness in police officers.
It is a fitting time to look at this problem, because we are trying to deliver a huge amount of policing in Scotland with just over 16,000 officers, when we previously had over 17,000 officers.
The intense demand of policing is falling on a smaller number of shoulders, and that’s when many people find that they’re unable to cope. In policing we pride ourselves on our resilience, but we need to change the conversation to one where people feel confident, not stigmatised, for reaching out and asking for help.
Since 2015, the number of Superintendents has fallen from 210 to around 155, and the job has become more complex and demanding. As we move into a new phase of policing, our officers will have to work beyond the traditional 30-year period.
So we need to reassess our approach to our mental health, both personally and organisationally. We need to make sure that people are able to recognise the signs and triggers that their mental health is deteriorating. I find that it is very rare for police Superintendents to go off sick, but once they do it can be hard to get them back because they’ve reached burnout. I’ve seen that among colleagues and I’ve seen the long-term impact on them and their families.
We need to be more open and compassionate towards ourselves, and understand that we have limits. After all, this job is now a marathon, not a sprint. Line managers must be proactive in asking their officers: ‘How are you?’, and making sure they have a genuine conversation.
We put a huge amount of time and effort into occupational health and supporting officers to get them back to work. But why don’t we put the same amount of effort into keeping people fit and well to start with?
Some of that starts with manageable workloads. A recent survey found that 97% of our Superintendents and Chief Superintendents in Scotland were working more than 40 hours a week. My challenge to ACCs is: what are you doing to make sure the people who work for you have not got too much work, and that you’re not altering duty times too frequently?
This isn’t about helplines and webinars. It’s about having enough people to manage the demand we’re putting on them. If we don’t have enough people, we need to reduce the demand. That’s the only answer. We have to ask them to do less, or do the same over a longer timescale.
We describe ourselves as a ‘can do’ service. We can do up to a point, but not if we’ve made ourselves ill.
The Justice Committee is the right place to have these discussions because – let’s be clear – it was the Government’s decision to reduce police numbers, so they need to understand the consequences of that. You can’t ask a smaller group of people to do the same amount of work.
We have to change the way we do things, now that we are at the start of the second phase of police reform in Scotland. We need to look at Chief Constable Jo Farrell’s vision for 2030, to make sure that our operating model fits within the resources that we’ve got, in a sustainable way that doesn’t make people ill.