Gordon Brown refused to back down over the police pay award yesterday, despite a vote by rank-and-file officers to stage a nationwide ballot to seek the right to go on strike.

In an interview with The Times the Prime Minister insisted that staging the police pay award was “the right decision in the national interest” to bear down on inflation.

But police officers made an unprecedented call for the resignation of the Home Secretary and also decided to institute an historic vote on whether they want to seek the right to go on strike.

Mr Brown admitted that the stance ministers had taken on public sector pay was not popular with the nurses, doctors, prison officers and now the police. And he said that having staged the awards for nurses, doctors, teachers and prison officers, the police would have to be treated in the same way. Asked if the police should be treated differently because they had a no-strike agreement, he said that the same applied to prison officers.

His refusal to back down came as officers across Britain agreed to hold a ballot on whether to press for the right to go on strike.

Rank-and-file police approved plans for the ballot at an emergency meeting in London attended by hundreds of officers, which passed an unprecedented vote of no confidence in Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, for delaying their pay award.

Mr Brown said: “I am the last person to want to be in a position where we don’t give the police what they want. I know the contribution the police make in every part of the country. But the police wouldn’t thank me if the return was that the award was wiped out by inflation and we were back to the old British problem of stop go.”

He said that if they had failed to bring inflation down the Bank of England would not have been able to reduce interest rates last week. So often in the past Britain had had inflation rising when it needed to cut interest rates.

“I thought at the beginning of this year this was the decisive year to tackle inflation. If we failed this year to combat inflation there were problems piling up in future years. I don’t think people have fully understood, with the turmoil in America, the effect that has had.”

Although the decision to stage the pay award applies to police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, officers in Scotland have agreed to take part in the ballot over their right to strike. The SNP administration in Scotland has paid the 2.5 per cent settlement in full.

The vote will take place in the first three months of next year, with mass rallies of officers planned by the Police Federation in London and Redditch in Worcestershire.

Although they are banned from going on strike by the Police Act 1996 leaders of police officers talked after the meeting about seeking a right to strike on human rights grounds. Another possibility is to demand changes to their pay settlement process to make arbitration binding on both sides.

The present row comes after the police rejected a pay rise of 2.3 per cent. The negotiation was referred to arbitration and a tribunal recommended 2.5 per cent. The Government responded by postponing payment from September to this month, in effect cutting it to 1.9 per cent.

Jan Berry, the chairman of the Police Federation, admitted that its motion of no confidence in the Home Secretary was unprecedented but said that police officers no longer trusted Ms Smith to negotiate their pay and conditions.

Ms Berry said: “I don’t remember such a call by the Police Federation being made previously but I also don’t remember a Home Secretary who has betrayed the police service in the way that this Home Secretary has.”

She added: “It is alien to police officers to want to go on strike, but they feel they have been pushed into a corner where their human rights have been withdrawn from them.”

Stan Hebborn, of the Surrey Police Federation, said: “My members are unhappy that they have been offered something which has very quickly been taken away before it had been delivered. The issue is not the amount of money, which is between £150 and £200 per individual. It is more the fact the whole process has been reneged upon.”

Mr Brown stuck to his hard line on police pay at Prime Minister’s Questions and in private meetings with Labour MPs despite growing support among backbenchers for the police position.

Yesterday 42 Labour MPs had signed a Commons motion demanding their pay award be backdated, with more expected to follow.

Average starting salaries for police constables

Ulster £22,000

England £21,009

Australia £20,885

Belgium £20,669

Sweden £19,188

France £14,468

US, (NYPD) £14,237

Poland £5,500

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