The chief constable of Scotland's new single police force has started visiting police stations around the country to discuss potential job losses.
Stephen House said the merger of the eight forces could lead to 3000 support staff losing their job when he was announced as chief constable last week.
He has now been sworn in to his new position, at the Scottish Police College in Tulliallan, becoming the first officer in the new Police Service of Scotland which comes into effect on April 1 next year.
Mr House, former chief constable of Strathclyde Police, said he started to visit offices in the Central Scotland force area last week and aims to meet as many staff as possible over the next few weeks.
"The cuts are potential, and that's the thing to be focusing on. I understand that it's really concerning for people that their jobs are under threat but I think what would be worse would be pretending that that's not the situation. At the moment we don't know exactly how many jobs need to go," he said.
"I think the Government has been very clear in the undertaking that jobs will be lost voluntarily and that it won't be forced redundancies."
He added: "In all honesty, I expect to spend most of my time talking to support staff because quite clearly they have more concerns about the future than police officers have. Police officers' jobs are relatively secure so it's important we spend time with support staff to try and help them understand the situation."
Mr House was head of Strathclyde Police since 2007 and also held senior positions with the Metropolitan Police. The 54-year-old will be paid a salary of £208,000 in his new post.
Local policing will not suffer under the centralised force, Mr House said.
Strathclyde Police Authority has appointed Campbell Corrigan as Acting Chief Constable.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article