WEST YORKSHIRE'S Chief Constable has told MPs that Chief Officers are trying to "get as much PPE as we can" to protect officers during the coronavirus crisis.

Chief Constable John Robins was speaking at a remote Home Affairs Select Committee on 6 April about the police force’s preparedness for the pandemic.

He said: “The policing family, that approach to looking after each other as we look after the public, has always been really important to us and will continue to be important to us throughout this crisis.”

CC Robins said that West Yorkshire Police had faced problems getting PPE. He said: “While we’ve got stocks [now], I’m not confident as to how long those stocks will last.”

He added: “My heart goes out to frontline officers and staff who have done a brilliant job over the last couple of weeks, often with times of not having the right PPE.

“They’re stepping forward into this, they’re doing their job of policing incredibly well. Our job as leaders is to make sure we can get as much PPE as we can.”

CC Robins said that West Yorkshire Police Force had faced three main challenges during the pandemic, the first of which was how to police the new restrictions in a way that maintained public confidence in policing, but also protected the NHS.

He added: “Our second challenge is protecting the public from harm in what is a new policing environment in terms of domestic abuse, child abuse, child sexual exploitation and cyber crime. We have to adapt the way in which we’re policing, while still protecting vulnerable people.

“The third challenge is communications: communicating internally to get the right message at the right time to the right staff, and also externally with the public to explain what we’re doing, why we have to do these things and what our new policing style is.”

CC Robins said that public adherence to the new social-distancing restrictions had been “very good”, across the county.

He said West Yorkshire Police officers had issued 20 fines for not adhering to the rules, as of 6 April.

He said: “We’ve taken an approach of engaging and explaining to people. We’ve spoken to thousands of people over the last couple of weeks and worked with them. We’ve only had to enforce 20 cases. And those were cases where people were deliberately breaching [the rules] and were often associated with other criminality.”

He said that at the beginning of the lockdown, there were large gatherings of people in urban parks, so local authorities had decided to close some of those parks. Since then there had been fewer breaches of the restrictions.

Police numbers were going up, he said, as some officers were coming out of isolation - he said that, currently, 8.3 per cent of the workforce were unable to work. He added that former police officers who had offered to return to the force were being lined up for office roles.

He added: “We don’t envisage at this stage having returning police officers out on the frontline, but we may get there in the future depending on how this crisis goes.”