EXCLUSIVE | WATCH: Police urged to be transparent over work stress

A North East MSP says Police Scotland needs to be honest about stress levels within its workforce.

It comes after the force was unable to reveal how many officers have to take time off due to the stresses they face on a daily basis.

Police Scotland could reveal to us that in 2015/16 AXA PPP, the organisation providing the force’s Employee Assistance programme, dealt with more than 700 cases with a wide range of concerns, from money matters to stress and trauma. In 2016/17, that number was up to 955 cases, with nearly 1,500 issues.

The North East's Tory MSP Liam Kerr says it is worrying the force could not be more specific.

He told MFR News: "If the police aren't tracking this data, and aren't monitoring the health and well-being of their operational officers, then that has to be a cause for concern because we should be supporting these officers properly."

Mr Kerr is lending his support to our #LosingControl investigation - a week-long series of special reports on the state of policing in the North after the closure of Aberdeen's police control room, which was relocated to the central belt in March this year, and as the Scottish Police Authority prepares to meet in August to make a decision on whether the same will happen to the 999-call-handling centre in Inverness.

The MSP is going to the highest level for answers: "I have put parliamentary questions in this week to try and establish how many officers are taking leaves of absence with stress or mental health problems. Obviously the follow up to that will be to find out what is being done to make sure we are giving the support to our officers that they require."

A former local control room worker told us he had to quit over health issues: "You went home ill sometimes at the end of the day. There was one particular time, where all of us, when we went off duty, we were all just ill. Really - just headaches, sick. Even the inspector that day was just ill; it was such a horrible day. That was down to bad luck, in terms of, we had two or three major incidents coming in at the same time, but we had no staff to deal with it.

"When you’re sitting there on a table all on your own and you’ve got this call and there’s maybe another major incident on the other side of the room, sic the stress levels are up. You’ve then got to take more information quicker, you maybe even go outwith what your job is sic to hopefully help that member of the public more, but then the responsibility falls on you more at the same time. If it all goes wrong, who is to blame? It’s going to be me, who’s taking the call, I haven’t got this information, I haven’t got that information. And that’s how it was in the police."

Police Scotland say they are committed to supporting police officers and staff members who are absent from work either through illness or injury and there are effective management processes in place to provide the necessary advice and assistance.

The Scottish Police Authority's Iain Whyte reacted to our investigation's findings, adding: "Records should be kept, and that's something I'm sure my colleagues on the human resources committee will be probing as they're looking in some detail into staff welfare in the organisation.

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