Where was commitment to the Met in the Spending Review?
3 min read
Yes, the Chancellor had priorities to balance. But surely keeping the millions who live under the care of our single-largest police force had to be near the very top of that list?
Let’s face it. Years of Conservative neglect and mismanagement have left the Metropolitan Police overstretched, under-resourced and unable to perform the kind of neighbourhood policing that instils confidence in local communities.
Officers are routinely “abstracted” from their local beats to cover over-stretched, under-staffed and ill-resourced operations. Local commanders routinely face tough choices about cutting vital engagement and early intervention schemes, like school liaison officers. Crumbling police stations keep permanently shuttering.
The Met Commissioner certainly seems to appreciate the scale of the problem, arguing in May that “ambition and money go alongside each other”.
So when the Chancellor announced more funding for police forces across the country in her Spending Review this week, you could have been forgiven for thinking the tide was finally about to change.
But the words that never came out of the Chancellor’s mouth tell a different story. There was no specific commitment to restoring the Met to its full strength, despite the oversized role that it plays in our national policing. That’s despite the fact that, at my urging, the Minister of State for Policing Dame Diana Johnson confirmed last month that the Met is about to lose 1419 full-time equivalent officers and staff in the next year.
We are left now in limbo, awaiting a drawn-out allocation process that will take up the second half of the year before we find out what share of the new funding the Met will get.
And that is to say nothing of the lack of clarity over what an increase in “spending power” actually means for the Met. You would like to think that this will mean more officers and more neighbourhood policing, but then why could the Chancellor not simply restate the government’s previous commitment to “thousands” more officers? The obfuscation is not encouraging.
We should not be in this position. The Chancellor should have listened to Sir Mark Rowley and made a clear, unambiguous commitment to getting the Met to full strength as soon as humanly possible.
Yes, she must balance the many often-competing demands of different policy priorities and regions. But surely keeping the millions who live under the care of our single-largest police force had to be near the very top of that list.
At a time when knife crime, burglaries and anti-social behaviour worry Londoners in every corner of the city, we deserve better than to be left waiting to find out if the Met will get its fair share.
And what of the Mayor, who promised us that with “the winds of a Labour government at our backs”, he would be able to negotiate successfully for Londoners? His empty promise has been exposed, as clearly he does not have the ear of this government. The vast swathes of London that have a Labour trifecta — at the council, mayoral and now governmental level — will be wondering what they’re really getting from negotiations of this importance playing out within a single party.
I promised my constituents when I was elected last July that I would make policing one of my top priorities. Indeed, keeping people safe with well-resourced community policing is a tenet of the community-focused localism we are known for.
The Spending Review’s policing announcement demonstrates the inability and unwillingness of this government, and of our Mayor, to keep our glorious city safe.
Luke Taylor is the Liberal Democrat MP for Sutton and Cheam and the party’s spokesperson for London.
