West Mercia Police set to save 49 PCSO roles

4:00pm Sunday 10th February 2013 in News

SCORES of police community support officer jobs have been saved from the chop.

West Mercia Police has pledged to scrap old plans to axe 49 PCSO roles across the force area between now and 2015.

The move, revealed by police and crime commissioner Bill Longmore during a recent meeting at County Hall, will mean that the current figure of 233 PCSOs is maintained.

The move comes despite 140 police officer jobs being axed as part of a plan to cut £21 million from the force’s budget.

The PCSO pledge was welcomed during a meeting of the watchdog-style police and crime panel, despite some concern that it was attempting to paper over cracks.

Mr Longmore said it was an important measure in helping free up police officers and that the 49 jobs saved would be next reviewed in 2015.

At the moment, PCSOs work on shifts until 10pm, but the review is looking at whether they can be more flexible.

Comments(2)

DAVID1875 says...
6:32am Mon 11 Feb 13

It beggars belief that between them the PCC and the Chief Constable have agreed to LOSE 140 POLICE OFFICERS, but RETAIN ALL CSOs! Why isn't it the other way round? CSOs cannot arrest anyone, cannot work after 10pm at night and cannot even hand out parking tickets! We now have a situation where there is ONE police constable covering TWO local policing areas in some parts of West Mercia. Why not RETAIN all the 140 police officer posts and get rid of all the CSOs? They were only brought in ten years ago when we had record spending on policing, and to make it LOOK as if there were more police on the streets! I urge any local people who have lost a local police officer to contact both the PCC and the Chief Constable to ask them to reverse their decision to guarantee no CSO redundancies.

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jb says...
9:32am Mon 11 Feb 13

DAVID1875 well said, I find it increasingly astonishing that the powers that be are putting balance sheets above public safety. They have lost sight of what the police are there to do, to them it's a case of just how cheap can we put uniforms on the street? It appears from certain comments that they may even be considering extending PCSO'S shift patterns to include night duty, people in what look like police uniforms on the streets with no personal protection equipment at night is a recipe for disaster. I would rather see the money spent on more regular police officers deployed in the right way. Public safety takes a back seat to everything else and that is never right.

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