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Police vote for right to strike

20/05/2008

Police officers have voted to lobby the government for the right to strike.

Officers were balloted during the Police Federation's annual conference in Bournemouth today.

A total of 60,572 responses were received with 86 per cent saying the federation should lobby for officers to be allowed "full industrial rights".

In a separate vote 93 per cent said that decisions made by the independent Police Arbitration Tribunal should be binding on the government.

Currently the police are banned from taking industrial action.

Today's vote follows the ongoing pay dispute involving a 2.5 per cent pay rise to be awarded in stages.

This effectively reduced the overall award to 1.9 per cent, provoking over 20,000 police officers to protest on the streets of Westminster.

A similar vote for the Scottish Police Federation ended with police rejecting the motion, but stressing they wanted to have the right to take other industrial action short of striking.

Home secretary Jacqui Smith is due to address the conference at 10:30 BST tomorrow and can now prepare herself for a relatively hostile reception.

The Police Federation chair Jan Berry said today: "I do not see this as a vote for strike action; it's a vote for binding independent arbitration.

"This is a wake up call for the government, and they must listen to what the police officers of England and Wales are telling them."

Earlier she told BBC Radio 4's The World at One programme that officers simply wanted to be treated "fairly" by the government.

"Police officers have trusted the government to deal with them fairly. They do not want better treatment than other people, they want fair treatment," she said.

"There was nothing in our pay deal last year that would have fuelled inflation. Inflation has been fuelled by the prices on the high street and by fuel and things like that, not by public sector pay.

"When you see the police support staff were also given a 2.5 per cent pay rise, theirs was not staged in the same way as police officers, so you have division within the service as well as outside," Ms Berry concluded.