Forces ‘in the dark’ over officer hours and deployment
Police forces are facing growing scrutiny over their ability to manage their own workforce, after new evidence suggested that some cannot track either how long officers are working or, in certain cases, even who is on duty.
The warning comes from the Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW), which has accused forces of failing to monitor compliance with Working Time Regulations—raising concerns over both officer welfare and public safety.
According to PFEW, many chief constables are unable to say whether their officers are exceeding the 48-hour average working week simply because the data does not exist in a usable form. Of 43 forces questioned, 26 said they could not provide figures without significant manual effort, two said they held no data at all, and 13 did not respond.
Where information was available, it painted a concerning picture. In Norfolk and Suffolk, officers were recorded exceeding legal limits on more than a thousand occasions in a single year, while Greater Manchester Police logged tens of thousands of “exemptions” without being able to distinguish whether these related to breaches of working hours, rest periods, or both.
In a statement, PFEW said: “This is dangerous, unlawful and indefensible. Exhausted officers make life or death decisions. If chief constables do not know how long their people are working, they cannot claim to be safeguarding them.
“Because of this widespread failure, the Federation is now moving to issue formal, legally backed Health and Safety Notices of Improvement.”
But concerns about workforce visibility extend beyond working hours.
A recent inspection by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) into Surrey Police found that the force’s resource management system does not support a booking-on or booking-off process. As a result, it cannot reliably determine who is on duty, where officers are deployed, or what they are doing at any given time.
Inspectors warned that this lack of oversight limits the force’s ability to plan effectively or respond to demand. While Surrey Police indicated it intended to procure a new system jointly with Sussex Police, no timetable had been set at the time of inspection.
The same inspection also pointed to wider pressures within the force. HMICFRS found that some teams were overloaded and that backlogs existed across multiple departments, including sexual offences investigations, child abuse, digital forensics and criminal justice. In some cases, workloads remained high despite additional resourcing, with sexual offences liaison officers managing between 40 and 50 victims each.
Similar pressures have been identified elsewhere. In its latest PEEL assessment of Humberside Police, HMICFRS found that the force was not using its internal demand data effectively to allocate resources. Several departments reported insufficient capacity, leading to high workloads and significant backlogs.
Domestic abuse safeguarding teams were found to be carrying more investigations than they could manage, while some protecting vulnerable people teams described their workloads as “unmanageable”. Elsewhere, a firearms licensing backlog had reached 12 months, and more than 1,000 digital devices were awaiting examination—delays that risk impacting the timeliness of investigations and service to victims.
While these findings do not directly establish that officers are breaching working time limits, they highlight the operational reality in which many are working where demand frequently exceeds capacity and where the systems needed to track and manage that pressure are not always in place.