Covid policing

Freedom of Information (FOI) Act request ref: 01/FOI/24/6384 

Version Date: 29/04/2024

The Operations and Finance Departments have provided the following information.

Since 1st March 2020 did you have any officers or other members of staff dedicated or responsible for enforcing covid lockdown restrictions? Please provide an FTE figure for any members of staff with these responsibilities.

Please provide an estimate of total costs incurred enforcing covid lockdown restrictions.

During the Covid pandemic, in relation to dealing with breaches of legislation, Devon & Cornwall Police followed the 4E’s approach- Engage, Explain, Encourage, Enforce, with Enforcement being the final option when the other three elements had not achieved compliance.

Dealing with alleged breaches of the legislation was a task for officers and police staff alongside their other policing duties.

In late 2020 the Government provided funding to support 4Es activity.

Devon & Cornwall Police used this funding to have dedicated, double crewed units to deal with allegations of breaches of Covid regulations. The funding was for a period of 6 months from November 2020.

We prepared for a scalable proportionate approach, to have staff involved each day plus additional staff when the tiering at the time was high or very high.

These staff were to be in addition to the threshold for day to day policing.

The total costs were £720,504

Dedicated staff against this fund were one Inspector, one Intelligence Analyst and one Comms Officer, the rest of the cost relate to over time for Officers.