Police officers are regularly being asked to work longer than permitted shifts and are too often on duty at night, police union NPB has told the AD.

So far this year the union has collected 173,000 cases in which official working hours were broken and that is ‘an absurd number’, union chairman Jan Struijs told the paper.

In total, the police will have worked 1.36 million hours of overtime by the end of the year, Struijs says.

‘Overtime has become structural,’ he said. ‘And five years on from the reorganisation into a single police force, officers are still being told they have to work overtime or do successive night shifts. They are exhausted.’

Police chiefs point out that the amount of overtime this year will be down on the 1.5 million hours worked last year and that the number of irregularities has also been reduced.

‘If you look at where we started, we have made substantial progress,’ a spokesman told the paper.

Police officers from all three unions were involved in last Saturday’s public sector worker demonstration in Amsterdam, calling for better working conditions and protesting about the introduction of market forces into the legal system.