Met may have to cut thousands of police and ‘ration’ services if budgets are slashed, says Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe

Please see below article in the Evening Standard:

Scotland Yard will be forced to introduce NHS style “rationing” of its services to the public and cut thousands of police officers unless the threat of swingeing government spending cuts is lifted, the Met Commissioner warned today.


Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said that his force would have to carry out its crime-fighting duties “slower and worse” if its budget is reduced significantly as a result of a Home Office shake-up of policing funding that is currently being examined by ministers.

He added that the challenge faced by police was being heightened by the capital’s fast growing and young population and warned that the increasingly “densely packed” nature of London living was causing “more tension” as people live and socialise in ever closer proximity to each other.

‎Sir Bernard’s comments, in an interview with the Evening Standard ahead of his retirement next week, will intensify concerns about the threat to policing in London resulting from funding reforms being considered by the Home Office. 


Under the changes, which Mayor Sadiq Khan has warned could see up to £700 million cut from the Met’s central Home Office grant, money given to London could be diverted to regional forces under a new funding formula designed to reduce alleged imbalances in the way that cash is currently allocated.

The Met also believes that the special funding it receives to cope with ‎the extra challenges of policing the capital is inadequate. 

A third concern is the expansion of a national “transformation” fund under which hundreds of millions of pounds is removed from the main police funding budget, from which the Met receives the bulk of its income, and used to pay for improvement schemes, mainly in regional forces. The result is a net loss of revenue for policing in London.   

Sir Bernard said that unless these funding threats were lifted the consequences for the Met, which currently has around 32,000 officers, would be severe with “significant” job losses, a poorer service to the public, and a diminished ability to police events such as the Notting Hill carnival and the New Year’s Eve celebrations while protecting other parts of London. 

”We haven’t been very precise about numbers because it’s such a toxic thing but you are not talking about a few hundred, you are talking about potentially a thousand, or thousands, of officers less,” Sir Bernard told the Standard. 

“My judgement would be that if you drop below 30,000 officers that would be challenging, particularly as the city gets bigger.

“It will get harder so what we will have to do is ration, which is what the health service does, and your way of rationing is doing it slower.

“That’s what happens. You can’t ignore things, you can do it slower and worse. It gets harder to have flexibility. You haven’t got as many officers in cyber crime, which is going through the roof, or female genital mutilation, or all the other things that we do. 

“At the moment, we do it a lot by overtime. But you need to have the officers – you can’t fill the gap by asking officers who don’t exist to do overtime. So we say numbers matter.”

‎Sir Bernard said that he recognised that ministers were in a difficult position because “there isn’t enough money to round” but insisted that London’s growing population and the challenges of policing major events and protests staged in the capital justified protecting the Met’s funding.

He added:‎ “Our point about London is it’s big, all things about it are complex, and it’s getting bigger at a pace you don’t see in the rest of the country‎.”

“A million people arrived over the last ten years. It’s always grown but the pace at which it’s growing is increasing. Some parts of London are getting younger.

The north east, east London is getting younger because you’ve got a higher birth rate and more migration and what we know generally is that more young men drives crime.

Those are two challenging things that we have got to work out – more people, densely packed, people living and working and socialising tighter together causes more rather than less tension.

“It’s a problem for the government – the only way round it is to tax more – I’m not blaming them but the consequences are difficult.  

“You just have to do things slower. If there were 15 officers and now there’s 12 you’ve only so much you can do with the resources you’ve got.”

Sir Bernard did not give further details of how rationing might work, but the most likely impact would be on the police response to non-emergency tasks.

A further concern for the Met is that cuts in areas such as local government funding, youth services, health spending‎ could place an increased burden on the force as police are asked to plug gaps left by other public services.

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