Fed Lead on 2012 Games says officers providing mutual aid away from home will receive minimum allowance of £50 per day

Police officers will be paid for all of the hours they work during the forthcoming 2012 Olympics, the Police Federation of England and Wales has said.

John Coppen (pictured), the staff association’s Lead on the Games, told PoliceOracle.com that with overtime “foreseen” as part of the Olympic operation, officers will be paid for every minute they work – rather than having to work a free 30 minutes after their shifts “for the Queen”.

He added that the 9,000 officers a day from across the UK staying away from home and providing mutual aid on a daily basis to the Games will also receive a minimum of a £50 'away from home overnight' allowance.

Previously – before April 1 this year and the Winsor recommendations – they would have been paid for 16 hours for being ‘held in reserve’ under what was known as the Hertfordshire Agreement.

But Mr Coppen dismissed suggestions that all officers should be paid a one off ‘bonus’ for working during the Games, like some in other careers such as bus and Tube drivers.

Mr Coppen said: “The Olympics will be policed within existing Police Regulations – the only duty pattern that anyone can enforce on the Police Service is the eight hour period. ACPO Olympics took the decision that all duties would be eight hours.

“But they acknowledged there would be some built in overtime, simply because they cannot physically take officers from where they are staying to where they are briefed and then be deployed and get them back again within an eight-hour period. It would have been a nonsense.

“There is an expectation every day that there will be overtime. The overtime [Police] Regulations are quite specific. If the overtime is foreseen – which clearly it is now, the officers don’t have to give up the first four half-hour sections within a week of overtime [for free]. This is foreseen overtime. All the hours officers work they will be paid for.

“Throughout all the negotiations we have been part of, the Official Side [of the Police Negotiating Board] – the Home Office in particular – only wants to pay police officers for the hours that they work. That is what they will be doing.”

On the subject of Olympic bonuses, he said: “Let others show what they are made of by hanging out for bonuses and threatening the Games. We are the people that will do and will make it work.”

Despite attacks to police officer pay and conditions by the government, Mr Coppen said he took the view that officers should “be supportive” of the Games.

He added: “The bottom line is that the Games will go ahead, police officers will be involved and we would like them to perhaps have a more enjoyable experience than a miserable one.

“At the end of the day, the work is going to be there whether you are happy, miserable or indifferent.

“Police officers as individuals will get more out of it if they approach the Games with an open mind rather than a closed mind that ‘all these things are being done to me’.

“It won’t help. It won’t make the time go any quicker and it won’t make the work go away.”