Written evidence submitted by the Metropolitan Police Service
The Met polices 620 square miles and serves more than eight million people across 32 boroughs in one of the world's most dynamic and diverse cities. With more than 43,000 officers and staff, the Met is the UK's largest police service and has 25% of the total police budget for England and Wales.
London’s population continues to grow, with numbers set to reach more than 9 million by 2020. It is home to more than 270 nationalities and over 300 languages are spoken. It has the highest foreign-born population of any major city in the world. A surging population in specific geographic areas, such as East London, emphasises the need to be more flexible, ensuring we match resources to demand. The growth in London’s youth population provides a clear impetus for the Met to focus on prevention, rather than relying on reactive investigation and response.
Over the last few years, we have become more efficient, saving around £578m from our operating expenditure. We can do more, by increasing our visibility on the street, better integrating within local communities, providing our officers and staff with the capabilities to prevent crime from happening, and where it does, to tackle it effectively.
Harnessing technology will mean real-time information and full mobile connectivity for our officers, quicker response, faster detection and tactical deployment based on the risks and threats to the public. From first contact to resolution, we will make it easier for the public to be in touch, electronically and locally.
We will need to prioritise how we use our resources and want to make these choices in conversation with the public and with our partners. Their support will be crucial over the next four years.
This is our response to the Committee’s call for evidence, structured by the questions posed:
1. Reforms which may be necessary to ensure the police service has the ongoing capacity and capability to fulfil its primary task of ensuring public safety, in the face of new and evolving threats and challenges. |
To drive a step change in its BAME representation – where we have made significant progress. However we will never be able to achieve our full aspirations without legislative change – which has worked so well in Northern Ireland (50/50). With legislative change, the % of BME officers in the Met within 4 years would rise to 21.2%, from today's figure of 12.4%. Without legislative change, the figure will be 16.7%, at best.
Increased legal protection for firearms officers – to ensure they are protected and fairly treated in law, when they are called on to make the extremely difficult decisions to keep us safe. We want to ensure that the Government delivers on David Cameron’s call for a review of the legal protections for firearms officers – we need this to ensure we are able to fulfil the uplift of 600 firearms officers.
Reforms to police pay – whilst uncomfortable for the Service as a whole, we need to continue to explore the implications of the very different impact (compared to local employment conditions and standards of living) of the national police remuneration package, and seek innovative solutions. Moreover, forces need more flexibility to use pay levers to meet workforce challenges (the current system provides almost no flexibility). For example, there is a very significant shortage of detectives in London (and across the country). Whilst pay is not the only solution to this, it should be part of a wider package of measures needed to address the problem.
In the day to day complexities of policing a capital city, things will sometimes go wrong. We want to be a learning organisation: we have to learn from mistakes and face them head on. The current work on grievance processes and disproportionality in police officer misconduct are trying to get early, informal resolution of problems and learn from them, diverting where appropriate from formal process. This requires fundamental change to how the misconduct processes work. Officers making genuine mistakes need to be supported to learn - not fear misconduct. The latter simply encourages a closed culture. Wrong-doing needs to be addressed, but the balance is currently imperfect.
A debate is needed on the role of the police – for example, in respect of addressing the challenges of mental health and missing people, and the extent to which police forces should be leading wider prevention activity outside the more traditional (and narrower) perspective of crime prevention. This is an area where central Government should be influential, working with PCCs and forces. This will then inform longer term planning around the skills / capacity / capability needed within forces.
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2. Current and future crime trends and their implications for policing in England and Wales, including emerging or growing categories of crime (such as online crime and child sexual abuse) and under-reported types of crime. |
The Met's size and capability means we are often the police service that deals with major, high-profile national investigations – and over the years we have been dealing with legacy issues from our own previous actions. Historic investigations and the number of inquiries draw heavily on our resources and we have no reason to expect that these will not continue to have a significant impact on us in future years. This is compounded by the increased reporting of historic crimes – since 2012, there has been a 64% increase in the reporting of rape and serious sexual offences, of which the reporting of historic offences is a significant factor. Over the 12 months to March 2015, the total number of all sexual offences reported to us increased by 29% with recorded rape offences up by 20% (857 offences).
Crime is changing and we need to adapt. It's now less likely to occur in public places – the trend is clearly downward – and more likely to happen either behind closed doors or online – in people's homes. The number of offences where vulnerable victims are reporting to us is increasing, along with the number of people who are reported missing or absent. This is the changing nature of demand and risk for policing in London: we are less likely to encounter 'traditional' crime and more likely to be dealing with more complex investigations and vulnerable people – we need to continue to adapt to this. On the back of significant reductions, victims of knife injury have been increasing, as have gun discharges. While more than a third of gang members are under judicial control at any one time, the threat still remains. The amount of people reported missing or absent is rising too. Since 2014 there have been almost 4,000 referrals of suspected child sexual exploitation and it is estimated that the cost of late intervention and re-offending generally costs over £2bn in London every year.
Online crime also continues to grow, with the internet providing the opportunity to commit new types of crime, as well as enable more traditional crimes. Phishing, trolling, malware and the proliferation of child abuse images are examples of criminality which are often hidden online and therefore not well understood. The inclusion of cybercrime in the crime figures for the first time this year challenges the perception that crime is falling – the addition of fraud and cybercrime in the Crime Survey for England & Wales doubled the crime rate and we expect that rise to continue. Increasingly, what have been regarded as 'traditional' crimes have an element of technology / social media / online crime to them. The growth in technology means that a high proportion of all crimes now have an on-line footprint and we need to equip our frontline officers with the tools and knowledge to be able to investigate and prevent crime effectively in this digital era. The extent to which the traditional police model (of geographically-based forces) can deal adequately with crime committed on-line needs a wider debate and strategy.
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3. The extent to which the police are sufficiently equipped to deal with these changing patterns of crime and other operational demands, such as mental health crisis work, and where gaps in capacity and capability are likely to lie. |
The pressure on our partners’ budgets, particularly local authorities, increases our workload and presents an increasing risk that we and partners are not going to be able to keep the public safe. We have estimated that 40% of our work has a mental health element, and a disproportionate (c.30-50%) level of London's public service resources is dedicated to just 5% of the capital's population. The MPS is among those leading the way in combating cybercrime. Two years ago Operation Falcon was established in recognition of the impact fraud and online offending is having on people and businesses in London. Falcon often works with overseas law enforcement during the investigation of its offences. The World Wide Web has removed the traditional boundaries of acquisitive crime and therefore Falcon regularly collaborates with worldwide law enforcement on these cyber investigations. Nevertheless, a wider debate is needed about whether the traditional model of policing can respond effectively to the growing risks of on-line crime. Being able to tackle cybercrime, fraud and other crimes that take place in a non-physical environment requires a totally new skillset for our officers and staff. Training our existing workforce and recruiting new people who are capable of responding to and investigating incidents involving smartphones, social media and organisations physically located outside London (and sometimes outside the UK) is expensive and presents a challenge in terms of being able to pay market rates. Our forensics capability also needs to adapt in order to respond effectively to the increasing digital footprint associated with crime generally.
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4. The relationship between public expectations of the police, including desired visibility and perceived priorities, and the operational realities of policing within the current financial context. |
Our transformation programme, the One Met Model, aims to provide 21st century policing to a global city – providing a reassuring, visible presence on London’s streets and removing the need for our officers to keep returning to police stations. Technology is driving this: we are rolling out 20,000 mobile devices to our officers and staff so that they can do their job on London’s streets or from more flexible locations and have the information they need there and then.
We have been delivering savings for some time, with almost £600m of gross savings delivered between 2013/14 and 2015/16. Looking forward we have plans that will deliver savings of £257m by 2020 excluding reductions to front line officers.
However, as above a wider debate is needed on where Government, and the public, want police priorities (and reducing resources) to be focused, and where the boundaries should lie on activity properly for the police and those activities which should be the responsibility of other agencies. As a service of last resort, the police service has a great tradition of not walking away – but we should not allow the role of policing to evolve by default due to the erosion of service provision by other agencies.
A broader debate is needed on when the public can and should expect the police to intervene. Forces will increasingly have to make tough choices on where to deploy reducing assets.
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5. Police funding levels, efficiency and cost-effectiveness, including the role of Police & Crime Commissioners (PCCs) in driving innovation and reform. |
To ensure London's policing levels match those of comparable global cities like New York would require redressing the gap in the National, International and Capital City (NICC) Grant. Currently the MPS spends some £344m each year (verified by the Home Office) on activity driven by the unique nature of London but receives £174m of funding for this activity. The difference of £170m per year equates to approximately 3,100 officers (or approx. 4,000 PCSOs diverted from local and neighbourhood policing).
The Government’s protection of Police Funding assumes a year on year precept rise, so our policing grant continues to decrease. Our grant is 3.3 times greater than our precept funding. Only 6 forces have a higher grant to precept ratio, meaning we are highly dependent upon grant due to historical factors. The Home Office is reviewing the Police Funding Formula (the method by which police funding is allocated to forces), which will include a review of the NICC grant. The Funding Formula Review has yet to report so we do not know the impact upon the MPS but considering our size and grant reliance, it presents a significant risk to MPS funding.
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6. The role of digital technology in policing, including take-up, risks and barriers to use. |
Digital Technology can drive significant benefits and be a key enabler in transforming policing. There are three key themes that digital technology supports:
A key issue for the MPS is that digital is generally seen as just technology – in reality digital is the convergence of technology and the human; the key issues are not related to the take-up, barriers to use – police officers embrace technology. The barriers are more structural for example:
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7. International best practice examples of innovation in policing, and the extent to which they could be replicated in England and Wales. |
The MPS has a good reputation in terms of the innovating technology use in policing. We are pioneering the use of body-worn video and the rollout of smarter working (through and tablets) and will continue to lead the way in UK policing. Over the next few years, we plan to:
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