The State of the Met

Another day, another set of grim headlines about the Metropolitan Police - this time as the consequence of a new report from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabularies, informing us that the Met is failing in almost every area of its work.

Already in what effectively amounts to special measures, the Met has now been graded as ‘Inadequate’ in:

• Investigating Crime
• Managing Offenders

And it has been graded as ‘Requiring Improvement’ in:

• Preventing Crime
• Responding to the Public
• Protecting Vulnerable People
• Developing a Positive Workplace
• Leadership and Force Management

There were no areas in which is was graded as ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’.

Like I said, grim.

So what the hell are we going to do about it? 

As I have said and written on many occasions in the past, I am no blind apologist for the job I used to do. I believe that policing should be held to a higher standard than any other public service, and there can be no doubt that ‘the Job’ has an eye-watering amount of work to do to get its house in in order.

But there is so much more to it than that. And, if we are serious about doing anything to improve the current state of policing in London and beyond, we need to understand - with crystal clarity - how and why we got into this mess in the first place.

What follows therefore is a brief explainer of a series of factors - many of which the Met has no control over - that continue to have a crippling impact on the effectiveness of policing in London and beyond.

The Cost of Austerity

Austerity devastated policing. 

From 2010-2018:

• The government cut billions of pounds from operational policing budgets
• They cut 44,000 officers and staff from policing in England & Wales alone
• And it wasn’t just the numbers that were lost, it was the experience. Thousands of years of frontline expertise gone.
• And it wasn’t just the experience that was lost, it was the relationships with local communities that had taken years to establish and that are the bedrock of effective policing everywhere.
• Under the coalition government, neighbourhood policing was dismantled and, in many places, all but done away with.
• Hundred of police stations were closed and sold.
• Specialist crimefighting resources - dogs and horses and helicopters and the like - were cut.
• Frontline uniform teams were cut.
• Proactive investigative teams were cut.
• Intelligence capabilities were cut.
• Officers were required to backfill the administrative vacancies created by the loss of thousands of support staff.

And, at every point along the way, the government were warned about the consequences of what they were doing. The response of the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, was to accuse officers of ‘crying wolf’.

But austerity wasn’t only devastating for policing. It was equally so for every other part of the public sector. And when the rest of the public sector stumbled - predictably, unavoidably, inevitably - more often than not, it was police officers who were asked to pick up the pieces.

Austerity was a conscious, deliberate political choice, the effects of which will be felt for generations to come.

And the money situation isn’t getting any easier

At the time of writing, the Met is facing a funding gap of £92 million for 2024/5. 

At the very moment when policing needs to invest in modernisation and reform, funds are tighter than ever before.

Political Failure

The failures of policing are, to a hugely significant degree, the failures of politics and politicians.

It wasn’t only austerity that was disastrous for the Met. Every other aspect of David Cameron’s and Theresa May’s supposed police reform programme was a disaster too. 

And you don’t have to take my word for that.

A 2018 report from the Home Affairs Select Committee accused the Home Office of ‘a complete failure of leadership’ when it came to policing. A National Audit Office report from the same year suggested that the Home Office had ‘no overarching strategy for policing’ in England & Wales.

A complete failure of leadership and no semblance of a plan. It could not have been any more damning.

Media Hostility

The media have a vital role to perform in holding policing to account. I don’t ever want journalists to back away from asking difficult questions - from demanding more and better from the men and women who stand on the thin blue line.

But there is also a need for balance in press coverage of the work that officers do - and, for the last fifteen years or so, there has been almost none.

For the most part, media coverage of policing focuses relentlessly on the negative, with almost no acknowledgement of the everyday heroism of the people who police our streets.

And that imbalance has very real consequences - not only for officer morale, but for basic public confidence in policing.

The Crippling Disease of Short-Termism

Both politically and culturally, we are an enormously impatient society. We want everything done in a hurry.

The problem for policing is that officers are most often dealing with challenges that have been a generation or more in the making. And which, consequently, might well take a generation or more to mend.

But nobody seems to have the time for that - certainly nobody in any position of power or influence. And so we end up spaffing billions of pounds of public money on short-term solutions to problems that turn out not to be solutions at all.

Doing the wrong thing faster won’t ever get the right thing done.

Population Growth

Between 2011 and 2021, London's population grew from 8,173,941 to 8,799,800. And it continues to grow.

With no commensurate increase in policing resources.

Which leaves us with hundreds of thousands more people and fewer officers to protect them.

A Critical Lack of Experience

I have already mentioned the loss of vital policing experience as a direct consequence of austerity - and it is a trend that has continued at an alarming rate in the years since.

The percentage of officers in England & Wales with less than 5 years’ service rose from 14% in 2016 to 36% in 2024. I know of at least one force in the country with a figure closer to 50%.

And that lack of experience - combined with significant inadequacies in underfunded police training - has direct consequences for the local response to crime. The inspectorate report published this week makes direct reference to officers "trying to manage large workloads beyond their training and knowledge”.

In policing, experience is everything.

The Physical Toll of Policing

Policing has never been for the faint-hearted. Every day in the Met, 18 officers are assaulted in the execution of their duty.

Some of them takes years to mend. Some never fully recover.

And, for as long as they’re off work injured, they’re not available to take calls.

The Psychological Toll of Policing

During the course of our lives, most of us will be exposed to extreme trauma on no more than 3-4 occasions.

During the course of their working lives, police officers will be exposed to extreme trauma on 400-600 occasions.

It would be impossible to do the job of a police officer for any length of time and to remain untouched - unaffected - by the things that you seen and do.

And, sometimes, officers break.

I know, because I was one of them.

In the last financial year, 1846 Metropolitan Police officers were signed off work due to stress, depression, anxiety or PTSD.

Pay and Conditions

No-one ever joined the police for the money. But we all need to be able to make a living. And, in recent years, that has been increasingly difficult for officers to do.

Pay has fallen in real terms.

Pension provisions have been significantly eroded.

Some officers are even being forced to rely on Foodbanks to get by.

And that is every possible kind of wrong.

Workforce Attrition

One of the most immediate and obvious consequences of all that I have set out here is that officers are leaving the service in their droves.

The Met Police Federation recently published figures showing that the number of officers resigning from policing in England and Wales has risen alarmingly - from 1558 in 2012 to 4668 in 2022/23.

That’s almost 5000 people leaving policing in the space of twelve months. Not because they have reached retirement age. But because they don’t want to do the job any more.

Police morale is currently as low as I have known it in my lifetime. And that’s on all of us.

So where do we go from here?

There is so much more that might be said, but I’m trying to keep this as brief as I can.

The simple fact is that policing is in a mess - and that there are no quick or easy answers to the situation.

But if we are to stand any chance of recovering things - and I believe passionately that we can - we need to begin by understanding how we got here.

And, in the meantime, we need to remember that this is not some sort of theoretical or abstract debate. It is about as real and immediate as anything could ever be. 

Because, while you are reading this, there are thousands of police officers out there - remarkable women and men of immense courage and humanity - who are simply trying to do their duty.

Officers who joined the police because they wanted to make a difference in the world.

Officers who are prepared to put themselves in harm’s way in defence of complete strangers.

Officers on whom any one of our lives might one day depend.