PPR0004

Supplementary written evidence submitted the Metropolitan Police Service

Thank you to the committee for inviting AC Matt Jukes and I to attend your recent session on the policing of protest. Thanks also to you and Tim Loughton for taking the time to visit the Met’s Special Operations Room to see our public order policing operation in real time, I hope this was useful in setting out some of the operational challenges we are facing and both the scale of the events and the impact they have on wider policing.

As we discussed at the session there has been significant public order policing demand in London relating to conflict between Israel and Hamas, in addition to this public order demand we have seen a rise in hate crimes, and concerns about safety from communities across London, especially in London’s Jewish Communities. As a response we initiated Op Brocks which is our pan-London policing operation working across prevention, reassurance, enforcement and deterrence. This operation has been running at the same time as the latest campaign by Just Stop Oil. As we mentioned at the Committee session, together this has combined to be the greatest period of sustained pressure on the Met since the London 2012 Olympics and resulted in us declaring this as a critical incident for a period.

At the end of the session I committed to writing to you detailing the financial impact of policing the response in London to ongoing events in Israel and Gaza.

From the 7th of October 2023 to the 17th of December 2023, 26,121 officer shifts have been needed to police demonstrations and vigils, this includes 2,382 shifts from officers on mutual aid. To meet this demand 4,017 rest days have been cancelled due to the pressing need could not be reasonably avoided. Beyond the policing of events, officers have been investigating a significant rise in hate crimes. From the 7th of October to the end of 2023, there have been over 1,700 investigations many of which are ongoing. It is estimated investigations for hate crimes alone will take up nearly 6,500 hours of officers’ time. To reassure these communities impacted by this stark increase we have increased patrols around vulnerable areas. An example of this is that we have dedicated seven officers a day to exclusively conduct reassurance visits to Jewish schools and synagogues in Brent and Barnet.

We currently estimate the total Op Brocks cost to the Met to be £18.9 million from 7 October to 17 December 23. This is made up of £9.5 million of opportunity costs and £9.4 million in additional cost. The additional costs are the accumulation of overtime payments, mutual aid costs, internal and supplementary fleet costs, catering, and cleaning. In addition to these costs, the need to abstract officers from their frontline duties creates an opportunity cost. Although too early to quantify, we know these abstractions of officers from their frontline roles, predominately response and neighbourhood teams, impacts on our ability to police our communities and reform the Met. Abstractions and cancelled rests days also places significant personal pressure on officers and their families. We have some additional reconciliation to do which will see these costs grow and future protests will of course increase these further. This weekend again we are policing a very large pro-Palestinian march and rally on Saturday, as well as a Pro Israeli assembly on Sunday, both of which will require significant police resources, and once again we are using officers from other forces to support our response and to ensure we are able to effectively deliver core services to the public of London.

The Met, as a capital city police service, is funded to an extent for these somewhat unique significant public order policing demands alongside the other pressures of being a capital city via the National and International Capital City (NICC) grant. This grant goes someway to fund the unique demands of policing a capital city however we estimate that this grant significantly is underfunded by up to £240million based on present day demand.  This ultimately means Londoners lose out as we have to fund capital city specific demand from the funding provided to other areas of the Met e.g. local policing.

Unless we are fully funded for this activity the Met has to balance these resourcing pressures within our wider budget – which at the moment reduces the resources we have available implement our reform plans as set out in a New Met for London. The resourcing of protests requires us to draw on a specific cadre of public order trained officers, most of these are in our response and neighbourhood teams which means that these officers are taken away from their core community policing roles often for weekends at a time. This places extraordinary amounts of pressure on the remaining response and neighbourhood teams who are working to keep London’s communities safe.

January 2024