POLICE Scotland has said it has a “real concern” that it will soon be unable to carry out basic functions as budget cuts force it to shed thousands of staff.

Deputy Chief Constable David Page told MSPs that the 101 non-emergency helpline could be axed as 4,400 officers and civilian staff are potentially lost in the next four years.

He said Scottish Government plans to freeze Police Scotland’s budget in cash terms until 2027 could reduce it to a “quasi-military force” only used for “the most serious incidents”.

Opposition MSPs on Holyrood’s Criminal Justice Committee called his evidence “terrifying” while even one SNP MSP said it was the “starkest” he had heard in parliament.

In May, SNP finance secretary Kate Forbes announced a “flat-cash settlement” for the justice sector from 2023/24 to 2026/27, which independent Scottish Parliament analysts have said amounts to a real-terms cut of 7.8 per cent across the portfolio.

This includes courts, prosecutors, legal aid, prisons, the Scottish Fire & Rescue Service and the Scottish Police Authority, the body which funds Police Scotland.  

However rising inflation and cuts in next month’s UK budget could make the squeeze worse.

DCC Page said Chief Constable Iain Livingstone was “very concerned” by the figure, and that “very, very difficult decisions” lay ahead.

He told MSPs: “The vast majority of our budget is people, so any cuts on our budget will fall squarely on people – police and staff who make up Police Scotland.”

Cutting numbers would make Police Scotland more reliant on support from other forces in England and Wales at major events, he said, a practice known as mutual aid.

He said: “We’re looking at things like having to pull back from the types of policing we do at the minute because we won’t have bodies to do it, to be quite frank.

“Things like community policing, campus cops, which incidents do we attend in terms of roads policing. Mental wellbeing, things like that.”

Saying the police often had to pick up “slack” from other government agencies, he added: “Our ability to answer 999 calls, it will be slowed. The 101 service, do we continue with that?

“If we don’t continue with the 101 service, all that will do is shift people into dialling 999.”

Response policing, digital forensics and public protection would all be squeezed, he said.

“There’s a real concern we won’t be able to discharge our duties as we currently do.

“We provide one of the best policing services, if not in the UK, in the world. 

“Our officers are part of our communities. You start to lose that. 

“Our clear up rates are good. They could be better, they could always be better. 

“But part of that is because of the engagement with our communities. 

“You know you don’t want Police Scotland to become a kind of law enforcement almost like a quasi-paramilitary force where all you can deal with is the most serious incidents. 

“That’s not what Police Scotland was intended to be.’

Tory MSP Jamie Greene asked him if this was a realistic scenario.

DCC Page said all of those service areas were currently under consideration. 

James Gray, the force’s chief financial officer, said it was not “scaremongering”.

In a recent written submission, the Scottish Police Federation, the body representing the force’s 17,000 officers, warned the committee that if the budget squeeze was imposed “crime will increase, victims of crime will be let down, community confidence in the police will diminish exponentially, more and more people in crisis will be left without any safety net, and the effectiveness of an already overburdened criminal justice system will leave many offenders unlikely to face any form of sanction, or victims receive any form of justice”.

Asked if he agreed with the Federation’s comments on crime rising after cuts, DCC Page said: “I think if you look at experience in England and Wales you’d have to agree with that.”

SNP MSP Fulton MacGregor said the officials’ statements had been the “starkest” he had heard in his six years at Holyrood, adding: “We need to sit up and take note.”.

 

Ross Haggart, interim chief officer of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, later wanted the committee that he faced having to make savings of up to £43m over the next four years, meaning a quarter of the whole-time firefighting service could be unaffordable.

He said around 780 of the 3,500 wholetime operational firefighters could be lost, meaning the loss of personnel for 30 of the 116 full-time firefighting appliances.

He said: “So that gives you an order of magnitude that we would be talking about probably if we were to apply the savings proportionally across the organisation.

“We would probably be talking about 25% of the whole-time firefighting establishment that would not become affordable by the end of the four-year period.”

He said the implication was that crews would take longer to respond to incidents.

Options would include changing crewing arrangements at some stations, removing some fire engines from service, or closing fire stations.

He said: “We will not be able to make savings of those magnitudes without it impacting upon staffing within the organisation and operational staffing within the organisation.

He said SFRS employed some whole-time and some part-time firefighters, so there was not a simple direct link between firefighter numbers and the SFRS budget.

“We will always seek to protect frontline service delivery for communities,” he said. 

“But as I’ve said, the current staffing arrangements and the service delivery model that we have got would not be sustainable in its current form if resource spending review figures turned into annual budgets for us.”

Mr Greene said later: “The warnings from some of the most senior figures in Police Scotland are devastating and terrifying. For their Deputy Chief Officer to warn they may only be able to respond to the most serious incidents is a damning indictment of how the SNP have failed to support our police year after year.

 “If these planned cuts go ahead on the SNP’s watch, they will be putting our communities at grave risk and certain crimes will be put to the bottom of the queue, meaning even more victims of crime will be let down.

“The response from David Page was a truly extraordinary admission from the heart of Police Scotland. Our police officers are already overstretched and completely overwhelmed.

“Any further funding cuts will only push them further beyond breaking point and lead to an increase in crime, as the Scottish Police Federation have already warned.

“The submissions to the committee from across our justice system are consistently clear and cannot be ignored. The warnings from David Page should force SNP Justice Secretary Keith Brown to abandon these reckless plans and finally give our police the resources they need to protect the public.”

Labour MSP Katy Clark said: “A properly supported and functioning criminal justice system is central to our democracy – but these dangerous and disastrous cuts threaten its very existence.  

“We now face a situation in which the people of Scotland will be left with a decimated justice system which will only lead to poorer outcomes for people across society, and where access to justice becomes a privilege just for the rich. 

“This is the greatest cut to justice services in the history of devolution. 

 

“We cannot have a situation in which huge real terms cuts in the region of 20% to Police Scotland budgets lead to the laying off of thousands of staff in the years to come. 

“The SNP Government need to rethink their proposed savage cuts to the justice sector.” 

Justice Secretary Keith Brown said: “Our largely fixed budgets and limited fiscal powers means the UK Government needs to provide the Scottish Government with sufficient funding to support public services and the economy in these difficult times.

“We have already made difficult choices to support pay offers in 2022-23 and rightly so, as our police workforce deserve this.

“While policing matters and budgetary prioritisation are always a matter for the chief constable, we remain fully committed to using the resources available to us to support the vital work of Police Scotland in delivering effective and responsive policing across Scotland.

“We will work with justice organisations including Police Scotland and SPA to develop and co-ordinate their delivery plans in response to the high-level spending review allocations.

“Despite UK Government austerity we have increased police funding year-on-year since 2016-17 and have invested more than £10 billion in policing since the creation of Police Scotland in 2013.”

A Treasury spokesperson said: “The responsibility for funding public services is largely devolved across the UK, but we have provided the Scottish Government with a record £41 billion per year for the next three years – the highest spending review settlement since devolution.”