Not enough police for London after population boom, Met chief warns
Scotland Yard does not have enough officers to meet the rising demand from crime after a population boom in the past 15 years, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has said.
Setting out his pitch ahead of the Government's spending review on June 11, Sir Mark Rowley estimated that the Met would need the 'best part of' £1 billion extra funding to match the number of officers it had relative to London's population in 2010.
It follows an increase of one million in the capital's population, partly fuelled by immigration, to 9.1 million in the past 15 years. That has seen the number of officers fall from 402 per 100,000 head of population to 362, according to a Telegraph analysis of official data.
Net international migration into London over the past decade is estimated at about 975,000, including both those coming from overseas and Britons returning home.
'We're carrying the scar tissue of years of austerity cuts, and the effects of that,' said Sir Mark. 'Forces are much smaller when you compare the population they are policing than they were a decade or 15 years ago.
'Our numbers [of officers] are falling rapidly. London is over a million people bigger since then. Demand is going up 5 per cent a year, every year across the country. Five per cent more people are calling 999 looking for help from police. That's a massive number, and that compounds year on year.
'If I was to have the resources today to match the population that we had 12 to 15 years ago, we would have the best part of £1 billion more. New York is the same size city, but they've got massively more police officers and police staff to deal with it.
'We're under capacity on international measures. We're under capacity if you look across Europe in terms of police officers per capita compared to the UK.'
The number of police officers in the Met in 2010 stood at 32,503 before dropping to under 30,000 in 2019 after spending cuts by successive Tory chancellors. Boris Johnson's drive to increase police officers by 20,000 saw Met officer numbers hit a peak of 34,503 in 2023.
They have since fallen to 33,013, but are projected to drop by another 1,500 unless Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, plugs an estimated £260 million hole in the force's budget for the coming year. Nationally, the 43 police forces estimate they have a £1.3 billion funding gap over the next two years.
Under cost-cutting plans to save the £260 million, the Royal Parks police and officers stationed in schools face being scrapped. The Met is also proposing a 25 per cent cut to mounted police, a 7 per cent reduction to dog teams, possibly stripping the Flying Squad of firearms and restricting front-counter opening times.
The budget cuts would have been £450 million without extra cash announced earlier this year from the Home Office and Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London.
Sir Mark said police chiefs backed 'radical reform' to make forces more efficient, but the Government's triple pledge to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls, and recruit 13,000 extra officers, would not be achieved without significant extra funding.
'We want radical reform in policing as well. We think there should be fewer police organisations across the country that can be more efficient, more capable. We need a proper National Police Agency that helps coordinate things,' he said.
'So we're up for change. We're up for doing things differently. We're up for being radically reforming. But it also needs more money, because policing is a people game.'
The Home Office announced a £1.1 billion increase in police funding for 2025-26 to take total funding in England and Wales to £19.6 billion, although forces said this was not enough to prevent them having to make cuts to officer numbers.
However, police chiefs say they still face the £1.3 billion shortfall. The Home Office is yet to settle in its negotiations with Ms Reeves over its spending plans for the next three years, 2026 to 2029, when the next general election will be held.
It is understood that the Home Office is facing some of the biggest cuts and is seeking to squeeze at least £2 billion more out of the Treasury.
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