Written evidence submitted by the Metropolitan Police
Service to the Home Affairs Select Committee on policing of
protests.
Thank you to the committee for inviting AC Matt Jukes and I
to attend your recent session on the policing of protest. Thanks
also to you and for taking the time to visit the Met’s Special
Operations Room to see our public order policing operation in
real time, I hope this was useful in setting out some of the
operational challenges we are facing and both the scale of the
events and the impact they have on wider policing.
As we discussed at the session there has been significant public
order policing demand in London relating to conflict between
Israel and Hamas, in addition to this public order demand we
have seen a rise in hate crimes, and concerns about safety from
communities across London, especially in London’s Jewish
Communities. As a response we initiated Op Brocks which is our
pan-London policing operation working across prevention,
reassurance, enforcement and deterrence. This operation has
been running at the same time as the latest campaign by
Just Stop Oil. As we mentioned at the Committee session,
together this has combined to be the greatest period of sustained
pressure on the Met since the London 2012 Olympics and resulted
in us declaring this as a critical incident for a period.
At the end of the session I committed to writing to you
detailing the financial impact of policing the response in London
to ongoing events in Israel and Gaza.
From the 7th of October 2023 to the 17th of December
2023, 26,121 officer shifts have been needed to police
demonstrations and vigils, this includes 2,382 shifts from
officers on mutual aid. To meet this demand 4,017 rest
days have been cancelled due to the pressing need could
not be reasonably avoided. Beyond the policing of
events, officers have been investigating a significant rise in
hate crimes. From the 7th of October to the end of
2023, there have been over 1,700 investigations many of
which are ongoing. It is estimated investigations for hate
crimes alone will take up nearly 6,500 hours of
officers’ time. To reassure these communities impacted by this
stark increase we have increased patrols around vulnerable areas.
An example of this is that we have dedicated seven officers a day
to exclusively conduct reassurance visits to Jewish schools and
synagogues in Brent and Barnet.
We currently estimate the total Op Brocks cost to the Met to be
£18.9 million from 7 October to 17 December 23. This is
made up of £9.5 million of opportunity costs and £9.4
million in additional cost. The additional
costs are the accumulation of overtime payments, mutual aid
costs, internal and supplementary fleet costs, catering, and
cleaning. In addition to these costs, the need to abstract
officers from their frontline duties creates an opportunity cost.
Although too early to quantify, we know these abstractions of
officers from their frontline roles, predominately response and
neighbourhood teams, impacts on our ability to police our
communities and reform the Met. Abstractions and cancelled rests
days also places significant personal pressure on officers and
their families. We have some additional
reconciliation to do which will see these costs
grow and future protests will of
course increase these further. This weekend again
we are policing a very large pro-Palestinian march and rally
on Saturday, as well as a Pro Israeli assembly on Sunday, both of
which will require significant police resources, and once again
we are using officers from other forces to support our response
and to ensure we are able to effectively deliver core services to
the public of London.
The Met, as a capital city police service, is funded to an extent
for these somewhat unique significant public order
policing demands alongside the other pressures of
being a capital city via the National
and International Capital City (NICC)
grant. This grant goes someway to fund the unique demands of
policing a capital city however we estimate that this
grant significantly is underfunded by up to
£240million based on present day demand. This
ultimately means Londoners lose out as we have to fund capital
city specific demand from the funding provided to other areas of
the Met e.g. local policing.
Unless we are fully funded for this activity the Met has
to balance these resourcing pressures within our wider
budget – which at the moment reduces the resources we
have available implement our reform plans as set out in
a New Met for London. The resourcing of protests requires us
to draw on a specific cadre of public order trained
officers, most of these
are in our response and neighbourhood teams which
means that these officers are taken away from their core
community policing roles often for weekends at a time. This
places extraordinary amounts of pressure on the remaining
response and neighbourhood teams who are working to keep London’s
communities safe.
