Thousands of hours that bobbies could have spent out on the beat has been lost because police officers are being moved around the country to “share best practice”, The Courier can reveal.
Travel time between locations is included in each shift which means that in some cases officers spent four hours of their 10 hour working day on the road.
Between April and the end of August this year a total of 1,235 policing hours were lost because of the time it took officers from Strathclyde’s Licensing and Violence Reduction Unit to travel to and from the east coast.
Assuming each officer was earning the minimum possible salary of £23,259 a year, the enormous amount of travel time means that between them, officers earned nearly £15,000 just for the time it took to transport them from side of the country to the other.
A Police Scotland spokesman said the officers were not being moved around different policing divisions in Scotland to carry out regular duties but to learn and share best practice.
He added that officers from around the country would be involved in similar transfers to work with colleagues in other parts of Scotland as part of the information sharing exercise, meaning the total number of hours lost will be even greater.
Police Scotland was created in April by merging the eight separate police forces that existed previously in a bid to save the taxpayer around £1.7 billion over 15 years.
Faced with the need to cut £60 million from its £1 billion budget this year, Police Scotland last week revealed it intends to axe public counters at dozens of police stations around the country.
Part of the rationale for the closures was that closing public counters would allow more officers to be deployed in the community.
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