The £1.4 million pound man: how police federation leadership failed its members

A case study in institutional self-sabotage: money, misconduct and mistrust, the brand collapse of the Police Federation of England and Wales

The police federation’s brand collapse: big money, no accountability, and leadership that’s lost the plot

The Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW) should, on paper, be one of the most trusted voices in British public life: the statutory body representing more than 145,000 rank-and-file officers, with a core purpose to act in the interests of its members and the public, building confidence in policing through transparency, integrity and accountability.

Instead, it has become a case study in how to burn through institutional trust: scandal after scandal, opaque governance, delayed accounts, chaotic internal culture, and now a chief executive on a pay package so out of step with frontline reality that it has become a story in its own right.

Independent reviews, tribunal findings and media investigations all point to an organisation struggling with internal dysfunction, questions over discrimination, and a long trail of scandals. But the damage is compounded by poor leadership and brand communications: a culture of opacity, ritualised pledges to “change” with limited visible follow-through, a lack of compelling spokespeople, and campaigns that drift away from the Federation’s own stated “north star”.

In brand terms, PFEW has fallen hard from being a “credible voice for rank-and-file policing” to an “embattled, inward-looking institution whose communications feel evasive, legalistic and self-protective.” And the leadership shows no sign it understands how serious that is.

At the same time, contemporary research on brand perception and trust is remarkably clear: transparency, consistency and visible accountability are now non-negotiable if institutions want to retain legitimacy.

Put simply: the Federation isn’t just having a governance problem. It’s having a brand trust problem; one it is currently communicating its way deeper into.

1. From credible voice to mistrusted institution

The Federation once had spokespeople who knew policing inside-out: articulate, media-savvy figures who understood pay, conditions, operational risk and public safety, and could argue the rank-and-file case with authority. The very terms of the 2013–14 Normington Review assumed PFEW should be a credible voice influencing public policy.

A decade later:

• An employment tribunal found PFEW discriminated against and victimised officers involved in pension claims, driving calls for a public inquiry into its conduct and failure to reform.

• An independent “looking back” review, commissioned by PFEW itself, documents deep governance and leadership failings tied to the pensions debacle.

• A separate wave of litigation from more than 19,000 officers has just been settled after a disastrous 2019 cyber-attack exposed the data of around 130,000 officers.

  
  

This is not a marginal wobble. It’s a systemic collapse in perceived competence and integrity, the two pillars institutional trust research highlights as essential for legitimacy.

And into this landscape walks one of the most damaging brand stories you can possibly write: a secretive, ultra-high-paid CEO, rewarded for “saving” money on liabilities that arose from the organisation’s own failures.

2. The CEO pay story: how to vaporise trust in two easy steps

2.1. £1.4 million, secrecy, and a federation in crisis

Recent reporting has confirmed that PFEW’s chief executive, Mukund Krishna, received £1.4 million over two years in salary, bonus and pension, about £701,000 per year, including a 100% “retention payment” bonus on top of a £342,000 base salary and pension contributions.

That makes him, by some distance, the highest-paid head of any trade association or staff body in the UK, earning over half a million more than the next highest comparator.

All this is happening while:

• PFEW has been warning of financial strain, reputational damage and existential risk arising from the pensions litigation and cyber-attack claims.

• Officers face real-terms pay cuts of more than 20%, collapsing morale and acute cost-of-living pressure; regular reports of officers using food banks and rising suicide figures.

• The Federation itself only recently admitted it had severe financial difficulties, including problems paying legal fees, contributing to the resignation of its Head of Civil Claims.

  
  

For many members, that pay package over two years approaches what some constables could expect to earn over an entire 30-year career. Even if you argue the exact numbers, the symbolism is catastrophic: at the very moment officers are told “there is no money” and the organisation is under legal and financial siege, its CEO is quietly given boardroom-level rewards. Officers will be asking “for what exactly?”.

2.2. The secrecy is the point

The numbers did not emerge because PFEW volunteered them in a spirit of transparency. They emerged:

• Only after repeated FOI attempts, including an earlier refusal in which PFEW admitted it held the CEO salary data but explicitly withheld it under a “future publication” exemption.

• After a police officer escalated the denial to the Information Commissioner, forcing disclosure.

• Against a backdrop where PFEW has not yet published its 2023 or 2024 accounts, despite regulations requiring audited accounts to be published annually online.

  
  

In brand terms, this is a nightmare combination: extremely high rewards plus visible resistance to disclosure. Studies on perceived brand transparency show that when organisations are seen as withholding material information, consumers and stakeholders sharply downgrade their trust and assumptions of ethicality.

You cannot preach “transparency and accountability” while hiding your leadership’s pay and failing to publish accounts on time. That is the very definition of inauthentic branding and authenticity is now a core driver of brand trust.

2.3. “Saving £70 million” or monetising past failures?

PFEW has defended the CEO’s package by pointing to his role in negotiating down potential liabilities on pensions and cyber-attack claims from around £110 million to about £40 million, a “saving” of roughly £70 million.

There are at least three serious problems with that narrative:

1. He is being rewarded for managing crises PFEW largely created itself. The pensions liabilities arise from a discrimination judgment that found PFEW victimised members seeking redress. PFEW’s own independent review shows it had clear legal advice about the pension risks and still chose not to fund the challenge, triggering the very litigation that later blew up. The cyber-attack liabilities stem from catastrophic IT and data governance failures in 2019 that exposed the personal data of tens of thousands of officers and have now cost PFEW around £15 million in settlements.

2. “Savings” in this context mostly mean officers accepting less. Critically, the reduced liabilities were only possible because officers agreed to lower settlements, partly out of fear that PFEW could go bankrupt. That’s not “value creation”; it’s asking victims of institutional failure to absorb the damage so the institution can survive.

3. He was already involved in the system when key decisions were taken. PFEW’s FOI log confirms that Krishna moved from a COO role into the CEO post; the independent review timelines show that by the mid-2010s PFEW had already been taking — or failing to take — pivotal decisions on pensions. He had been consulting previous to joining the organisation.

   
   

In plain English: you don’t give someone a seven-figure reward for negotiating down the cost of fires that your own organisation set, then call it heroism. It reads as self-preservation at the expense of members, not leadership in the public interest.

 “Savings” in this context mostly mean officers accepting less.

3. A culture where critics leave and loyalists survive

The money is only half the story. The other half is culture and here, PFEW is also signalling all the wrong things.

• In 2025, the Federation’s Head of Civil Claims, Craig Hewitt, resigned, citing severe financial mismanagement and non-payment of legal fees owed to barristers and solicitors representing officers. His resignation letter, seen by The Times, describes ongoing financial problems, defaults on payments and the serious personal toll of his treatment by the CEO on his mental health. Other senior staffing figures have moved on quickly and quietly, creating rumours of pay outs and the use of NDAs.

• Officers have called publicly for a full independent investigation into PFEW over victimisation of members and failure to reform after the pension discrimination judgment.

• The independent panel established to review past failings highlighted long-standing problems in culture and governance, not just technical errors.

• There are ongoing internal cases involving elected PFEW officers who report concerns about transparency in dismissal or suspension processes, including claims of bullying and inconsistent application of rules and regulations.

  
  

The picture that emerges is of an organisation where competent, values-driven people leave, where internal dissenters feel punished or marginalised, and where loyalty to senior leadership appears more highly rewarded than loyalty to the founding purpose of the organisation.

You don’t need gossip to reach that conclusion; you just need to watch who departs, who stays, and what they say as the door closes. In trust research, this is classic “internal trust collapse”: when people inside an institution lose confidence in its integrity and fairness, external trust almost always follows. The Glassdoor reviews are unmistakably critical.

4. Legally crafted statements, missing accounts, and weaponised ambiguity

PFEW’s public statements are increasingly seen as lawyered to death:

• They routinely stress “no evidence” of data being accessed in the 2019 cyber-attacks, while simultaneously paying out £15m to settle claims by more than 19,000 officers whose data was exposed.

• They insist that “transparency and accountability are central” to the transformation programme, even as accounts for 2023 and 2024 remain unpublished, prompting a warning from the Home Office to get their books in order.

• They rejected FOI requests about the CEO’s salary until forced to release the numbers, while maintaining that publication “in the accounts in the normal way” is sufficient transparency.

  
  

From a brand perspective, this is performative openness: carefully selected facts, cherry-picked timelines, and phrasing that gives the appearance of disclosure while avoiding anything that might truly expose failure or misjudgement.

In addition to this, they seem to never actually speak about policing or anything important to officers – have they lost this knowledge? Or is the internal fight taking precedence over everything else?

Modern research on brand transparency is explicit: it’s not just about putting some information online, it’s about proactivity, clarity and objectivity. When stakeholders sense that information is partial, defensive or strategically vague, perceptions of honesty and ethicality collapse.

Right now, if you ask many officers what PFEW (or its CEO) has actually done to improve policing, most could not name a single concrete win. That is a brutal brand verdict.

5. Joe & The Juice: how “lots of little things” destroy a brand

The trajectory of PFEW is worse but eerily similar to what we’re seeing in the private sector with Joe & The Juice.

On the surface, Joe & The Juice is a high-growth, youth-focused brand built on “vibes”: healthy products, good looks, lifestyle marketing. But scratch that surface and you find a growing series of smaller issues, how the snowball started for PFEW:

• A $715,000 settlement with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over allegations that it failed to recruit, hire and promote women fairly, leading to a four-year programme of remedial action.

• Fresh class actions alleging that products marketed as containing olive oil actually contain about 95% canola oil, accusations of deceptive health and ingredient claims that cut straight into the brand’s “wholesome” positioning.

• Repeated employee reviews describing a toxic, hyper-sexualised or bullying culture, high turnover and poor management, directly contradicting the “people-focused” claims on its website.

  
  

Any one of these issues might be survivable if handled with honesty, remorse and visible reform. But research on reputation and brand trust shows that multiple, unresolved integrity signals compound over time, creating a background narrative of inauthenticity and opportunism.

PFEW has already been down the same path:

• Discrimination judgments and calls for inquiry over its handling of pensions;

• The major cyber-attack, followed by years of defensive communication and, eventually, an eight-figure settlement;

• Internal resignations and whistleblowing about finances, the use of NDAs and leadership culture;

• Overdue accounts and a leadership pay scandal that only surfaced under FOI pressure.

  
  

Each episode chips away at the sense that PFEW is an honest broker. The brand story becomes: “We protect ourselves first. Members and the public come second.”

6. What a serious reset would actually require

Brand theory and trust research are not sentimental about this: once an institution has repeatedly violated expectations of integrity and competence, “messaging” is largely irrelevant.

The only way back is to align behaviour, governance and communications around a different set of choices.

For PFEW, a credible reset would mean at least:

1. Immediate financial transparency Publish the 2023 and 2024 accounts without further delay. Disclose executive remuneration proactively, not begrudgingly. Provide a plain-English explanation of how much has been spent on pensions litigation, cyber-attack claims, legal advice and internal restructuring and what members have actually gained from that spend in practical terms.

2. A hard break with the current leadership reward logic. Stop framing reduced liabilities from past failures as heroic “savings”. Link any future executive bonuses to independently verifiable improvements in member outcomes, culture and public trust not simply to surviving litigation of their own making.

3. An independent governance overhaul, not managed self-review. Empower the independent review panel and external auditors to publish unvarnished assessments of leadership, culture and decision-making. Commit publicly to implementing recommendations with clear milestones and external progress checks.

4. Introduce visible, expert, human spokespeople. Put forward leaders who can speak openly about past failings, explain complex issues like pensions and data protection, and demonstrate both empathy for members and understanding of public concern. Someone who has a vast understanding and knowledge of policing. Retire the reflexively legalistic, evasive tone in favour of language that sounds like it was written by someone who actually understands (and cares) what frontline officers and the public have been put through.

5. Re-anchor every decision in the Federation’s original purpose. Ask, before every campaign or intervention: “Would a reasonable member of the public see this as consistent with our duty to act in their interest as well as our members’?” If not, don’t do it or say so honestly.

   
   

Conclusion: a federation that forgot who it’s for

Right now, the story PFEW is telling, through its pay decisions, secrecy, culture and communications, is not the story of a principled staff association holding the line for ethical, effective policing.

It is the story of a leadership elite insulating itself from the consequences of its own mistakes, while asking officers and the public to trust that everything is under control and to finance their actions and mistakes.

Brand and trust research are brutally clear: when transparency is selective, rewards look unfair, and apologies come wrapped in legalese, people assume the worst, and they are usually right.

If you stopped a police officer today and asked, “What has the Federation or its CEO, actually done to make policing better in the last few years?”, most would struggle to answer.

That silence is the loudest brand signal of all.