One of the biggest frailties in what has been undertaken so far is that some of the human elements are being dealt with last. Most of the legislative stuff has been dealt with and the technical stuff has been thrashed out, but some of that will have an impact on the human side. I think everyone would agree that, if we were to turn that around and make sure that the human side was taken care of first, the technical stuff would work around it.
10:45
I have nothing but the highest degree of sympathy for the position that the British Transport Police officers find themselves in. At the moment, they just do not know what their situation is, which is a failure on the part of all the parties that have been involved in the process. If the SPF had been involved at an earlier stage—we have had a good series of bilateral discussions with the British Transport Police Federation—we would have made sure that those officers were front and centre in the process.
The fact that there are doubts about the pensions position of British Transport Police officers is understandable, because no one has done a like-for-like comparison, but I cannot believe that that was not high on the list of things to be considered. It is assumed—and it might well be the case—that the pension arrangements for BTP officers are superior to those of, for want of a better term, Home Office police forces, but only an actuarial comparison would provide a definitive answer.
The issue of pensions is absolutely germane to the other issues that are associated with the status of the BTP officers when they transfer over to the Police Service of Scotland. Because of the position that police officers hold as office-holders, the occupational pension scheme is the only scheme that is available to police officers in Scotland. I should probably have refreshed my memory on the provisions, but I know that there are provisions that allow for the transfer of cash-equivalent values between the respective pension schemes of the Home Office forces and the British Transport Police service. I would need to remind myself of exactly what limitations apply to that, but it is certainly not unknown for officers to have transferred between schemes in the past.
With the pause in the process, my biggest plea is that we look at the human side to see what can be done to address many of the concerns. We need to look at what is known in the police service as the 1987 police pension scheme, which I understand is the most comparable scheme, in broad, headline terms, to the British Transport Police pension scheme, and to have engagement with officials—Whitehall officials rather than officials on the Scottish side—to find out whether there would be a willingness to open the 1987 pension scheme to allow transfer, were that to be deemed desirable by the officers who will be affected. If such proper options can be presented to officers so that they know what they are looking at instead of facing uncertainty, we will be in a much better position to deal with some of the technical issues afterwards. At the moment, an effort is being made to solve technical issues without understanding whether that will be best for the officers concerned.
If I was a British Transport Police officer, I would be thinking, “I know what I have just now, but I don’t know what I’ll have in the future.” I understand the importance of a triple-lock guarantee to many in the BTP service, but “no detriment” does not mean “no betterment”; nor does it mean that, if individual officers volunteer to seek betterment of some conditions, that betterment should come as a consequence of a willingness to accept perceived detriment to others.
In my view, the logical thing to do is to get the staff associations involved. I am optimistic that my colleagues from the British Transport Police Federation would agree that allowing officers to do a compare-and-contrast exercise so that they know exactly what they could be looking at would help to resolve a huge number of the human issues that have been raised by those who have concerns.
The legislative stuff will take care of itself, and the technical stuff will follow on from the agreements that can be reached between the parties.