It seems to me to be a mess.
There are remarkable variations in police pilots' Ts & Cs despite the job being pretty much the same in all UK Units. The salaries for police line pilots vary from 34K to mid 60Ks, as far as I can tell. This is for pretty much the same job, and is a massive spread. How can that be justified? It isn't of course, that is just the way it is and no one raises it. The same applied to the benefits too.
As is mentioned in the last post, police pilots are being employed with no twin time (beyond the type rating course). The normal minimum night time is not complied with either.
I am afraid that I share Silsoe Sid's less than optimistic view that the standards will drop - they already have. The link between the lowering of standards and some unfortunate incident will not be automatic nor happen immediately, but it may well occur.
There may be some mileage in getting organised, but there is no guarantee.
In some respects we are our own worst enemy. Many of us cannot do anything else apart from fly (in the sense that we have no other saleable qualifications). Some of us have over time got fed up and left police work. To date though, this has not caused a problem for the employer, because there has been a steady supply of others wanting to follow. Maybe this has dried up a bit at present. A little bird suggested to me recently that the flow of retiring miltary pilots may soon be increasing again. Maybe the employers are just waiting for that?
Those who do leave are the ones prepared to drag themsleves out of the pit. For the "civvies" this is nothing new - they almost certainly paid obscene amounts of their own money to get the licences/ratings to date. Additional ratings are just another one (albeit pretty expensive if it is the IR).
The police financial budget cuts don't help either. They may not act directly, but they set a downward trend to the overall picture.