London funding shortfall puts 2,700 Met Police jobs at risk

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London’s Metropolitan Police is drawing up plans to slash services and lay off up to 2,300 officers and 400 staff if the government fails to bridge a budget shortfall forecast at up to £450mn next year.

An internal document shared with officers on Thursday and seen by the Financial Times listed contingencies for a worst-case scenario in which funding for the force is not raised significantly.

Cuts under consideration include a 15 per cent reduction in intelligence gathering teams, a 10 per cent reduction in forensic services and a 20 per cent reduction in road traffic teams.

The Met is also looking at scaling back its “ability to tackle serious violence and organised crime”, by “reducing the size of centrally based proactive teams by 15 per cent”, the document states. The squad that tackles burglaries and other serious armed crime could also be scaled back by a fifth.

Negotiations over funding between the Met, the Home Office and the London mayor’s office are ongoing and a decision on the police grant for 2025-26 is not expected until next month.

The Met confirmed that overall 2,700 jobs were potentially on the line but said “no final decisions have been made”.

“As expected we are carefully planning for any tough choices we may have to make to ensure we live within the means of our future budget.

“We have been clear on the financial challenges we face and continue to have productive discussions with the mayor and Home Office to ensure we have the resources to police London effectively,” it added.

In setting out the worst-case scenario, the Met is not proposing savings in areas that have direct contact with the public, such as emergency response or neighbourhood teams, according to people familiar with the matter.

For the past two years, the Met, Britain’s largest police force with about 46,000 officers and staff, has made up for shortfalls in funding by drawing down on emergency reserves. It has also sold off hundreds of buildings to finance capital expenditure over the past decade.

However, those buffers are nearly exhausted and officers have been warning that tough choices could lie ahead.

The Met has spent nearly three-quarters of its £443mn reserve fund since 2022 and has depleted £1bn in capital raised since 2010 from the sale of property.

The reserves, usually set aside for unexpected expenditure, were forecasted by the mayor’s office to be further reduced by at least £156mn by the end of this financial year, leaving £113mn or less in 2025-26.

The Met’s budget this year was £3.5bn, up 3.5 per cent on 2023-24, with £2.6bn from central government and £956mn from local taxes. However, recent funding increases follow a decade of austerity up to 2020 when police budgets in England and Wales declined by nearly 20 per cent.

Without a significant increase in funding next year to fill what the Met is forecasting as a £450mn budget shortfall, cuts to frontline services would be “felt by Londoners”, police officials have warned.

Sir Mark Rowley, Met commissioner, said this month that the means used by his predecessors to balance the books, such as “selling police stations, and using reserves”, had run out.

He warned that “some pretty eye-watering cuts to the services we provide would now be required”.

In its draft budget submission for 2025-26 published last week, the mayor’s office noted that in real terms, and because of the rapid rise in the capital’s population, the Met has suffered the most dramatic funding cuts of all forces in England and Wales in recent years.

It said that for the Met to have matched real-term funding at 2012 levels it would have would required a 27 per cent increase in per capita spending equivalent to £878mn in 2022. Relative spending on policing per head of population was nearly 50 per cent lower than in Sydney and New York, it said.

A spokesperson for the mayor of London said that while potential savings had been identified in the draft policing budget, “no final decisions to reduce any services or officer numbers at the Met have been made”. 

“The mayor is working closely with the new government and the commissioner, with ongoing constructive talks with ministers about the funding the Met needs to ensure we can continue building a safer London for everyone,” they added.

The Home Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.