Police have nowhere left to cut

From time to time my police force – let's call it Blandshire Constabulary – undergoes a restructure. Senior ranks are shuffled, squads and teams are dissolved or renamed, policies and procedures are overhauled. I don't take much notice: as a frontline sergeant in a busy multicultural town in the nether regions of England, there isn't anywhere worse they can put me, and nothing they do will change the nature of my work.

To some extent I let talk of impending budget cuts wash over me in the same way. But the latest bout of political sparring over police budgets and pay has got to me and most of my colleagues. When, in 2008, the home secretary at the time, Jacqui Smith, "agreed" a pay rise that was then not backdated, it wasn't the figure that drove 22,000 police officers to march down Whitehall in baseball caps. It was the underhand way in which the deal was done, the evident disdain shown by the Home Office towards rank-and-file officers, and the sinister gamesmanship that pre-empted the showdown, whereby the police were left in conflict with the public they serve instead of in harmony.

Now Theresa May is on course for her own head-to-head, and this time she has over a decade of souring public opinion on her side. She's played her cards like a pro: the first move, back in June, was to announce she was "axing" all police performance targets. Even police bloggers celebrated. Anything Mother Theresa did next was therefore divorced from the widely abhorred performance culture and bureaucracy of Labour's years. Never mind the fact that she has not actually got rid of anything: Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) is still judging the police against exactly the same array of figures and measures. Frontline police officers are still receiving emails containing the words "nearly there" and "bad week". We are still jumping through the same bureaucratic hoops and kowtowing to the same statisticians and their clipboards.

Having fooled everyone into thinking the Home Office was at last on the side of frontline policing, the next move was to announce sweeping budget cuts of 20% over four years. The back-office jobs will go, efficiency will be increased, the frontline needn't suffer. Of course, Blandshire Constabulary's budget has actually already sustained a seven-figure cut, back in 2007. Since then, we've binned most "back-office" functions. We've frozen recruitment and procurement, and we're due to start sharing admin with neighbouring forces.

In this next round of cutbacks, there's nowhere to go. Unless we see reform to HMIC and scores of agencies by which our numbers are crunched and our chief constables rated, we won't see the remaining bureaucrats being dropped. Instead, we'll see redundancies in civilian support staff responsible for investigation and statement-taking, a reduction in the efficiency of custody suites, the dissolution of units that build case files, and many more functions that the public never see. This work is absolutely vital, and so it will be loaded on to frontline police officers. As a response sergeant, I'm already wearing so many hats I can barely turn my head. At some point, the strain will be too much.

On top of all of this, the home secretary has now turned on our pay and conditions. I'm in favour of many of Tom Winsor's recommendations, in terms of the slanting of bonuses and compensation towards the frontline. But the overtime reductions could hit officers hard and some will not be able to survive. Don't forget, officers can't refuse overtime and they can be disciplined, fired or even prosecuted if they try. With no recourse to industrial action, we are helpless to resist an assault on our working conditions. And hanging over us is also the knowledge that if we don't like it, there are queues of applicants wanting to do our jobs – policing is still a vocation people aspire to.

So, how will all this play out, and will the public notice? Bluntly, you're going to see fewer officers doing more work and getting paid less. Anyone who thinks that won't affect the service we offer the public is living on another planet.