Everyday policing duties in the North will not change as a result of last week’s deal between the DUP and Sinn Féin over policing and justice issues, but PSNI officers remain concerned over the control of parades. In towns and cities across the North, PSNI officers will act the same after April 12 - when the justice portfolio transfers to a Northern-based minister - as they do at present.

The policing of road accidents, public order incidents with drunken louts, assaults and sexual crimes will all elicit the same response from the PSNI as previously.

However, fundamental change may occur in the direct line-of-sight between police on the beat and the Northern electorate.

Alliance Party leader David Ford, whose party is currently shut out of power-sharing, is expected to be appointed justice minister in a March 9 vote in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Close observers of the North’s justice system have said that there is a profound difference between Antrimbased Ford and Paul Goggins, the Labour MP from Manchester who is security minister.

Ford - or possibly deputy Alliance leader Naomi Long, who is also a contender for the new justice ministry - will also take office with the rubberstamp of the two hardline political parties of Northern Ireland, whose core supporters have only recently eschewed violence.

‘‘We would very much welcome, and see as a positive step, anything which leads to more cohesive relations between the police and the community - and if a locally accountable justice minister is part of that process, then it is to be welcomed,” a spokesman for the Police Federation For Northern Ireland (PFNI) told this newspaper.

A minister whose roots and political fortunes were also within the community could also be expected to take more of an active role in keeping the Policing Board in check, sources said.

Unlike its predecessor, the Policing Authority, which was more of a ‘‘pay and rations body’’ (as one source described it to this newspaper last week),t he Policing Board has been far more hands-on.

It remains to be seen whether a new justice minister would wish to tinker with the powers of the board, or of the district policing partnership (DPP) structure, which includes a monitoring and observation role over the PSNI.

The Policing Board has a number of statutory duties with regard to the DPPs but, in a similar vein, it is unlikely that the new minister would rush into any major review of the board’s functions.

One of the major issues for the Police Federation is, in fact, not too different from the concerns of any modern police force during recessionary times.

Ford’s aspirations for legislative change within the justice portfolio are an unknown variable. The actual structure of the force itself should remain pretty much unchanged, as the PSNI has evolved into a structure almost identical to the county police models which have existed across Britain since the 1969 Hunt Report into the North’s policing.

There is little tangible room for more co-operation between gardaí and the PSNI. In fact, the two police forces already co-operate to a high degree, and some recent successful prevention of attacks against PSNI members were as a result of Garda Special Branch intelligence. Essentially, parades aside, the consensus among observers is that there will be no immediate change to the job which Chief Constable Matt Baggott has to do. The security threat to members of the PSNI remains high.

The Federation has been heavily lobbying for some time for funding to stem the tide of major manpower losses. In the past two years, the force has lost the services through natural wastage of almost 1,500 full-time police reservists, out of a contingent which was approximately 3,000strong at its height.

The PSNI has approximately 7,500 members in total, excluding civilian staff. It is likely that, in the coming months, there will be no remaining reservist assigned to frontline duties.

The Federation has argued that, while the Patten Report into the North’s policing (which led to the foundation of the modern PSNI) felt that the reserve could be phased out, the security situation requires more manpower, not less.

One of the key sticking blocks prior to last Friday’s agreement was the resolution of parade management. Senior PSNI officers last week said they remained concerned that any new parades-management structure would give police the unenviable responsibility of deciding whether a parade could take place or not; whether it had to be re-routed; and into whose backyard it would be allowed to go.

‘‘Whatever comes out of the parades committee element, it must be no worse. There is neither optimism nor pessimism either way. We’ll await the detail on that one,” a senior PSNI source said.

Indeed, in his PFNI annual conference address last September, the Federation’s chairman Terry Spence left the North’s two main political parties, and the British and Irish governments, i n little doubt over what officers at the coalface expected from justice and policing devolution.

Spence said the PFNI understood that pre-devolution negotiations would involve ‘‘what can only be described, as a degree of horse-trading among the parties . . . However, we do not want decisions on parades either handed back to the police or to newly-created arrangements, where agreement is unlikely to emerge, thus effectively handing responsibility back to the police.

‘‘The evidence is clear that the police service is much more comfortable with our current role of upholding law and order around parades. We do not wish to become a target again for people unhappy with how the Parades Commission works.”