Essex Police may only recruit extra officers if sickness levels are reduced and targets for reducing crime are met.

The new annual budget for the county force, with effect from April, has been increased from £169.4 million to £183.1 million. It was rubber stamped by Essex Police Authority on Monday.

In April Essex Police will embrace part of the Metropolitan Police area in Epping Forest district.

Taking account of this extra work, which includes stretches of the M25 and M11, the cash increase is 3.1 per cent.

There is also a special grant of £1.25m to support the one-off costs of the transfer of responsibilities from the Metropolitan Police.

An Essex Police spokesman said: "Essex Police will also receive a special grant of £747,500 to fund 23 additional officers under the government's Crime Fighting Fund.

"Under this scheme there are provisional further allocations to provide an additional 40 officers for both 2001-2002 and 2002-2003."

The spokesman said this was subject to certain criteria being met each year including two per cent efficiency savings and meeting targets for reducing crime, police officer sickness levels and ethnic recruitment.

Essex Police Chief Constable David Stevens has previously said that stress, anxiety and depression caused Essex police officers and support staff to lose 10,000 working days in 1998 to a cost of £1.3m.

It was also revealed that police retirements through ill health were running at more than a third with those of support staff at nearly 58 per cent.

The new police budget will mean a 4.4 per cent increase for council tax payers, a similar level to last year and one of the lowest nationally.

The budget includes the cost of police contributions to the agency youth offender teams and drug arrest referral teams.

There will be increased spending on call handling, operations and IT facilities at rural police stations.

There will be £500,000 savings from the merger of the traffic and operations divisions and also from a Criminal Justice Department Review. Setting up major incident teams will also bring savings.

The police spokesman said: "Department managers at police headquarters expect to deliver savings of £0.9m. This will mean that some headquarters managers will have delivered savings of 15 per cent over two years."

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