THE head of the Police Federation of England and Wales received bonuses that doubled his pay in each of the past two years, taking his total earnings to £1.4 million, reported the Times.
Chief executive Mukund Krishna’s annual salary was £342,000, information released after a police officer made a freedom of information request.
The federation has now said that Krishna, 46, was also given a bonus equal to his full salary — described as a “retention payment” — for both 2023 and 2024. He also received pension contributions worth about £17,000. This means his package for each of those two years came to £701,100.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, criticised the size of the payments. “This is a staggeringly large amount of money,” he said. “Police Federation members should think very carefully about questions of appropriateness and value for money.”
According to the Times' analysis, Krishna earned more than any other trade association or union leader in Britain. The next highest is Unison’s Christina McAnea, who received £198,000 in 2024 — about half a million pounds less than Krishna.
The figures had not been widely known because the federation had failed to publish its accounts for both years. In September, the Home Office told the organisation, which represents about 145,000 officers, that the accounts needed to be released. The federation said that they will be published at the end of December.
Krishna, who became chief executive in 2023, has been credited by the federation with bringing down large potential liabilities linked to two historic group legal claims. These cases related to pension changes and a cyber attack.
The federation said that while the estimated liability could have reached £110m, the final settlements were around £40m — which it argues saved tens of millions of pounds.
However, some officers involved in the cases dispute that version of events. Lee Broadbent, who led the pensions action, said the reduced settlement happened only because members did not want to bankrupt their own organisation.
“To suggest they got the liability down because of savvy negotiating is insulting,” he told the Times. “We were pragmatic and did not want the federation to go bust. It has been worked out that Krishna has earnt in two years what a police officer would make in 30 years. At a time when some officers are using food banks it is grotesque.”
The federation disclosed Krishna’s pay this week after Greater Manchester Police chief inspector Rob Riddell asked the Information Commissioner’s Office to intervene when his freedom of information request was rejected.
Riddell said: “As a subscribing member I was horrified to listen to rumours of exuberant spending at a time police officers across the UK were struggling to make ends meet. To learn of salaries being paid in the hundreds of thousands a year out of our subs while colleagues were being turned away for legal funding was a step too far.
The federation, which is a staff association rather than a union as police officers cannot strike, said in a statement that Krishna’s package “amounted to £342,000 basic salary, a retention payment of £342,000 for achieving board-approved objectives and standard employer contributions of 5 per cent into the organisation’s pension scheme”.
It added that the retention payment “reflects the achievement of objectives including reducing the federation’s potential liabilities from more than £110m to £40m, saving the organisation more than £70m”.
