Met Police chief Sir Mark Rowley has warned of “eye-watering cuts to the services we provide to London” as the force is hit by a growing financial crisis.
The capital’s top officer insisted Scotland Yard had run out of ways to plug funding gaps and he was “deeply troubled” by the situation it was facing.
“This is not just about this year’s decisions, but it’s a cumulative effect of decisions over the last decade or so which have put us in a more and more precarious position,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Political Thinking with Nick Robinson.
He added, just weeks after the Budget: “The Chancellor has been very clear - it’s a difficult public sector context. You add all those things together. And you get a dramatic change in budgets and of a scale that’s never going to be absorbed by efficiencies.
“And it’s going to require some pretty eye watering cuts to the services we provide to London.”
He stressed that previous ways which the London Mayor and Met commissioner had found to bring in more revenue, such as selling police stations and raiding reserves, had “run out”.
Warning of “very difficult choices,” he added: “We need to be going in the upwards direction.
“But actually it looks like we’re going fairly rapidly in the opposite direction.
“We can be a better organisation, more efficient, better at using the resources. We’re making lots of progress in that, but we can’t really meet the ambition of ourselves, of London’s communities or politicians without a credible resource to meet that challenge.”
Police and other public services leaders are pushing for more funding for their organisations.
The scale of the Met crisis was laid bare earlier this year when the force, which has a budget of up to £3.5 billion to keep London safe and lead the fight against terrorism, admitted it is “not fit to serve Londoners effectively” in its current state.
In evidence to the Police Remuneration Review Body, the Met said a third of its officers will have under four years of service next year as it struggles with pay levels, high workloads and falling application numbers.
On policing pro-Gaza, Far-Right and other marches in London, Sir Mark said in the wide-ranging interview that his officers “don’t bow to pressure” as they enforce the law in what has become a “polarised, aggressive world” in situations with which they were dealing.
Some of his officers policing marches and demonstrations had had “stickers being put on them in incidents and then got death threats online”.
He explained further: “On the same protest or the same event, officers are called ‘fascist’ and ‘woke’. I mean, that’s slightly ridiculous.
“On the same day, officers will have allegations that all officers are sort of racist and bigoted and then someone else saying it’s two-tier policing and officers are somehow…cosying up to minorities and not being neutral. I mean, this is the consequence of being a service that operates in the middle without fear or favour under the law.”
He also stressed that the public scrutiny put on police officers risked “narrowing the recruitment pool” and making officers on duty “more cautious about their decisions”.
He added: “They sometimes stand off things. They don’t want to get trained to do pursuits. They don’t get trained to use tasers there....They hand in their public order tickets because they don’t want the cameras in their faces.”
