Welcome, Commissioner. Thank you very much for your first appearance in front of this Committee since the election. I think this is the first time you have had the chance to come and see us in person. We have a number of questions to go through, and I know you have to finish at 4 o’clock sharp. You are very welcome to make an opening statement.

That is very kind. I want to pick up briefly on three things: the progress we are making at the Met; the police reform White Paper; and the criminal justice system. Three and a bit years on from starting as Commissioner, picking up after a series of scandals that damaged public trust, I am proud of what our teams have been doing to make progress in the policing of London. More than seven in 10 people trust the police in London—the majority of the rest are uncertain, and a small proportion do not trust the police—and that is a rising number. To have a rising number in today’s times, when most independent surveys show that trust in the state and institutions is going down, means that I am really proud of what the teams have done. I will put crime in three baskets. First, we have kept driving down serious violence. You might have seen in January that we marked that last year had the lowest per capita homicide rate London has ever seen. That is extraordinary, when cities like Brussels, Berlin and New York have about three times that rate. That is down to immense hard work by our teams, tackling the most dangerous people and working with partners who divert young people away from violence. Secondly, violence against women and girls was a big challenge for us. We have strengthened our work in that area with training, resources and better leadership. All our outcome rates—the cases solved—have doubled or tripled. The gap between women’s and men’s confidence in the Met has been closed as a consequence. We see more reports coming forward, which is good. Thirdly, on volume crime, burglary and vehicle crime are at five-year lows, and we have turned the corner on phone theft, with 10,000 fewer victims this year. That is all while dealing with three headwinds. First, we have taken 1,500 people out of the organisation through standards interventions to deal with integrity issues—a scale of intervention not seen before. Secondly, overall, we have had to shrink by 3,300 because of budget pressures created over the past three years, yet we have still gone forward on performance. Thirdly, we have had the disruption of an increasing amount of protests to deal with. My teams have been working extraordinarily hard. The White Paper is a once-in-a-generation chance to set up policing for the future. The current policing set-up in the UK was designed in the early ’60s. It is well out of date and has had lots of braces and accommodations put around it. There are collaborations, national leads and national organisations. It is a complicated spaghetti that has bastardised the version we previously had, and it is well out of date. A reset to deal with the challenges of the day is overdue. I welcome the police reform White Paper the Home Secretary has put together, and a sense of direction that says that policing capability needs to be looked at in the round. It is about police officers, police staff, the technology and the other things that go together to make a good organisation. A one-dimensional approach that is just about police officer numbers is not the right way to do it. Of course, we do need to have the right size organisation for the future. I am troubled by our budgets, which I am sure we will discuss. I am most worried of all by the criminal justice system. It is fantastic to have the Leveson 1 and 2 reports to chart a way forward for reform, but it is almost impossible to overstate the parlous state it is in, and the risks that presents for communities and victims in a justice system that is going slower and has a weaker grip on offenders in the system.

Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon, Commissioner. The last time you came before this Committee, some three years ago, it was an entirely different iteration. You have given us a little insight into the positive progress you have made in that time. How have your priorities shifted from what they were when you were last here? I also have a question about the White Paper. There is now a focus on trying to reorganise, so that we have a more responsive neighbourhood police force. I think—I could be wrong, as this issue is devolved and it is more relevant to Police Scotland—that, because of the Met’s different responsibilities, there is not enough scope to focus on neighbourhood policing, particularly in London. Would you agree with that, and do you think the White Paper will sufficiently address it?

We have a series of questions on the White Paper later, so could you please touch on it briefly? We can cover it in more detail later.

On priorities, I set out three years ago that we were going to deliver more trust, less crime and higher standards, and those top-level missions continue. I have touched on some of the progress that is being made. It has not changed at headline level, and we have consistently looked hard at serious violence, at violence against women and girls, and at the day-to-day volume of crime that affects the most people. We are making progress on all those fronts. One of the things that has changed is that, when I was being interviewed for this job nearly four years ago, it was not on the basis of making these improvements while dealing with an organisation that is shrinking rapidly and having its budget squeezed. It has been a challenge to add that into the melting pot of leadership and decision making, and it has made it much harder. Technology was always on my mind as an issue for reform. When I was outside policing, I worked with some technology companies. That has gone further and further up the priority list, because there is no way that we can meet the challenges of policing modern criminality while dealing with a shrinking organisation unless we can accelerate the way we deploy modern technologies to speed up our processes and set up the frontline with the best tools to be as productive and effective as possible. On the White Paper—and I have picked up the hint to be very brief on this point—having a deliberately organised structure, with fewer organisations across the country, can help neighbourhood policing because, when there is a complex set of 43 forces and lots of collaborations, a lot of capacity is burned in making that architecture work. If we organise ourselves well, we can put a bigger proportion of resources into neighbourhoods. The issue in London is slightly different. The pressures of policing a capital city are not properly funded, and that is one of the challenges for us. Our abstractions from the policing of neighbourhoods are much greater than I or communities would wish. I am not talking about our national security responsibilities in relation to counter-terrorism and those sorts of issues, because those have a ringfenced grant—as you will remember from your time in the Home Office, Chair—so that is almost to one side. The day-to-day capital city stretches in London, from things like protests and other events, are drawing in more and more resources. This year, I think there will be about 80,000 officer shifts on those central events. We get some capital city funding, but it is little more than half of what is required. This Government put a bit more into that pot last year, which is welcome, but we still reckon that we are about £180 million short. Basically, neighbourhood policing and day-to-day policing are paying for the pressures of policing a capital city.

We also have more questions on that subject later.

Super.

You will obviously have seen Baroness Casey’s report, in which she described the Met as having severe institutional failings and talked about “systemic and fundamental problems”. She also described the Met as having “initiative-itis”, in that new initiatives are pushed out from the centre but do not quite cut through on the frontline of policing. Phase 2 of your “A New Met for London” has come out, with some very laudable, positive-sounding objectives. Given what Louise Casey said, how are you going to make sure that it actually cuts through and translates into reality on the frontline of policing?

I am a great believer in having a plan and trying to stick to it. In the winds of crises, big operations and challenging policing, that is difficult, but it is absolutely critical. From very early in my tenure, we have set out with one strategy built around those trust, crime and standards objectives, and around three areas of reform. That has been about pushing more resources to local level. We talked about community crimefighting, and that has led to less central resources, with more in neighbourhood teams and local teams dealing with violence against women and girls. Secondly, tackling the culture and standards issues in the organisation assertively. That is not me doing it to the organisation. The vast majority of officers and staff in the Met want to be in an organisation that feels healthy, in which they feel supported and able to step forward. Thirdly, sorting out the foundational underpinnings that go to our success. We have continued on that trajectory. Phase 2 of “A New Met for London” is the next set of things on the to-do list to continue in that direction. A consistent strategy has been absolutely key, and we have changed the balance of central versus local by having stronger neighbourhood teams with more senior leaders. We have put superintendents in each of the London boroughs, and we are making sure that the issues that communities are seeing in Tower Hamlets or Bromley, which may well be different, are influencing our priorities and resourcing decisions as much as the intelligence picture we can see from the centre. You then get a healthy balance from both top-down and bottom-up, and that is delivering the visible results that I spoke about earlier.

As you have alluded to, you have a challenging financial backdrop that forces prioritisation. How does “A New Met for London” guide your prioritisation? You have already alluded to prioritisation being forced upon you by the demands of being a capital city and by the ringfencing of counter-terrorism responsibilities. Is that what drives your prioritisation or are there other ways that you do it?

That strategy drives our prioritisation. For example, our budget pressures last year meant that we could not deal with all of it through efficiencies. We had to deal with some of it through service changes and service cuts. We started by asking: what are we protecting? We decided to protect neighbourhood policing and the work we are doing on violence against women and girls. Having strengthened that, we did not want to weaken it. We put more resources into some areas, so we made the problem bigger because our priorities said that we needed to strengthen our work on some of the street crime issues, which has helped us to turn that around. We are protecting these and strengthening those, and that made the choices harder. However, that is what you do when you make difficult leadership choices.

Of all the things you had to cut as a result of that prioritisation, if you had to pick one that was a mistake—or the closest to a mistake, if you are not willing to admit that—or that you wish you had not had to do, or that has had negative externalities that you have had to deal with in other ways, which would it be?

At the risk of sounding glib, I do not regret any of them. If you gave me a cheque now that bought me a thousand more police officers, I would not be recreating those roles. I would be doing something different with it, because of the high priority and workload in, say, our violence against women and girls teams or the need to try to reduce the abstractions from neighbourhood policing and tackle those areas. There are things that are more important to invest in than the things from which we have taken out resources.

I want to go back to neighbourhood policing, because I witnessed something this morning and, as you are here, I might as well take the opportunity to ask you whether it is a problem in London. I witnessed a man shoplifting, and I am not talking about one or two items. He cleared whole shelves, put them into a trolley and walked out of the shop. I asked staff whether they were going to call 999, and they said that they do not bother any more. They said that it was the second time it had happened today. They brought me down another aisle with the most expensive hair products in the shop, and all the shelves had been cleared. That was twice in one day, and they said they have stopped reporting it because there is no point, so I phoned to report the crime. They were so unfazed by it, and I was really quite taken aback. Does that surprise you? We have talked a lot about an epidemic of shoplifting across the country, but do you recognise this as an issue?

I recognise a very variable response from shops to shoplifting on their premises. We encourage them all to report it, and the good stores have really good security regimes, report it and help us out in ways that I will come to in a moment. Some stores do not. We have worked on that this year: we are close to doubling the number of shoplifting cases we are prosecuting; we are using things like criminal behaviour orders to control the most dangerous offenders; and we are working with a group of major stores that are working with a technology company that uses intelligence-type software to pull together all the reports and, across the CCTV videos, identify a series so that we can say, “That person has done those 20 thefts”, and go after them. They then get a bigger sentence, and that controls it.

That is not happening across the board.

We have some really good examples. We are determined to bear down on this. We are nearly doubling the number of cases we are prosecuting, and we are tackling some of the organised crime behind it. For example, we have seen goods being stolen from mainstream supermarkets and resold in corner shops. There is an industry there, and we have closed down lots of corner shops as a consequence. I have challenged some parts of the retail sector to do better. Some of them do not report anything. If we go there, they do not give us the CCTV footage of the crime and will not give us any statements. They do not allow their staff to have time to give statements, and they do not pay their staff to go to court to give evidence. To me, that is unacceptable. Meanwhile, some of the fantastic national chains, such as Boots—

That’s where I was this morning.

Boots is normally really serious about it, so that is really out of character. Across the country, Boots reports it and is normally very good.

Following on from what my colleague said, I represent an outer London borough, and the shoplifting is prolific in my seat. I am very pleased that the BCU borough commander has really stepped up and done a lot of work. I asked the Home Secretary about this, and I think we ran out of time. Neighbourhood policing means everything to the people I represent, but it is a huge problem if the police are constantly abstracted out of the area. What is the way forward? As my colleague just said, the shops around my seat are regularly cleared. The local BCU is responding to that, and I think AI will be great. When I was on my way into Westminster yesterday, I was called into a local coffee shop at a station. Its door had been kicked in. The police turned up and looked at the CCTV, but they did not know who it was. You can use AI, issue the CBOs and be very proactive, but when we cut to it, having a named person in the neighbourhood who you can reach out to is not going to be any good if they are regularly abstracted into London. What is the solution?

Thank you for that. First, in a case like the one you talk about, we are already using facial recognition software. The public debate tends to be about the use of live facial recognition in public, and we may talk about that later. When it comes to reactive use, with the CCTV we get of offenders in such cases, we are able to identify about 40% of them pretty much straightaway because they are already in our systems as we have come across them before. That is really powerful, which is why we need the retailers and others to produce the CCTV and give it to us, so that we can do that. Our neighbourhood policing abstractions are bigger than I want, and I do not dispute that. As I touched on earlier, we are not funded to deal with the growing pressures on policing a capital city. Over the past year, policing protests has taken the best part of 80,000 days. I have some numbers here. We had to manage about 500 protests centrally, and sometimes we had thousands of officers on those. We do not have an extra box to open for that, so it is coming from across the Met. We have worked hard to reduce the impact on neighbourhoods over the last couple of years, and we are now taking a bigger portion from other parts of the organisation, but most of our police resources are in local policing, serving communities, so it inevitably tips that way. If the £180 million gap for policing the capital city were closed, we could massively bring down that abstraction rate. It is fantastic that, despite those distractions, we are arresting 1,000 more people a month in London at the moment, and a lot of that work is being done by the neighbourhood teams, who are doing fantastic work. Like you, I am frustrated that they are there three or four days a week, rather than five, but they are doing fantastic work and are really making a difference.

Before I ask the question I was going to ask, I want to go back to neighbourhood policing. In Merton we have lost both our front counters, in Wimbledon police station and Mitcham police station. Why do you think that front counters—police stations—are not important to neighbourhood policing?

Let us separate police stations, police bases and the actual front counter. In much of London, front counters are rarely used. The arrangements that we have gone to in London are similar, and in some cases more generous, than what you see in forces around the country, which have done the same over the last 10 years. The closures that we have done are of counters that maybe had two people a day, or something like that, come in to report a crime. They are very low usage, and a very expensive way of dealing with that. If you speak to communities, picking up the point made last, what people want most is the patrols in their area. I would rather cut the front counters that almost nobody uses than the patrols on the streets. In terms of buildings and presence, it is clearly important to have officers distributed across London. It is also important to have neighbourhood policing teams close to their patch. In an ideal world, they ought to be able to walk out of their base and be on their patch with, maybe, a 20-minute walk. There are the best part of 700 wards in London, and there are over 100 where we cannot do that, which is disappointing. We recently published a new estate strategy that is unaffordable. It was deliberately put out to challenge local and national Government about properly funding the infrastructure of policing. A large part of our estate is sub-optimal, and the money that we need to spend just to keep our existing buildings working is not available. Our budget does not even cover keeping sensible standards in the existing buildings. There are other challenges, such as putting neighbourhood team bases closer to communities and meeting the challenge of the electrification of vehicle fleets. That has a big impact on policing because we have to put massive charging infrastructure in place. It is not about chasing any green targets, but is simply about following the market change. We need to spend multiple billions on the estate over the next few years. We do not have that money, and that is the challenge. One way to make some progress on that, despite the budgets, is if partners can help us by sharing other buildings, at low rates, in communities. That might help us with the neighbourhood team part of the challenge. I am trying to stretch us as far as we can on that, but we should absolutely have neighbourhood teams based in and close to the community. The evidence is that people would rather have police on the streets, tackling issues, than on a front counter doing very little.

Wimbledon police station had far more than two visitors a day, and that has been closed. Are you having discussions with councils about sharing premises?

Yes.

Are you discussing that with Merton council?

We are doing it across London and co-ordinating that with City Hall. I cannot remember the individual conversations with each council, but that is the intent.

The Committee was deeply shocked by the “Panorama” programme on Charing Cross station, as I am sure you were.

Yes.

Before I ask what you have done about the problem shown in that programme, why did the Met not know about it already? How could it happen without the Met knowing about it?

The Met having long-term issues in standards is not news, and I have been very clear about our determination to tackle this. As I said at the start, through vetting, misconduct investigations and so on, we have removed 1,500 people from the organisation because of standards issues. That is well over three times the existing rate—it is beyond anything that has ever been done before. One area I have had to put more resources into is our professional standards environment. That has had a big positive effect on the organisation, but we are not through it yet. We are still identifying pockets in the organisation where people are hunkering down, despite the efforts of our team. That is what you would expect. I just described the efforts we have made so far; it is easiest to describe the strategy in three parts. First is tightening the front door—what is your vetting like at the point of entry? It was too weak. We have now more than doubled the failure rate at the front door, through more intrusive checks and more assertive decision making. You first get the front door tighter, and we will be doing more on that going forward, by acquiring new social media monitoring tools and other things. Secondly, you encourage more reporting and get more vigorous in responding to allegations in the organisation. As I said earlier, our good people want to be in a good organisation. We have three times as much reporting, which has helped to generate people leaving the organisation. Thirdly, you have to look at all the material you already have and look back at legacy issues and legacy information about people that has not been dealt with—where, if you look back at all the things you know about John Smith, it is very obvious that he should not be a police officer. That is why we pushed for changes in vetting regulations, which has eventually been achieved. Through that combination of efforts, we have had some effect. We are making good progress toward being as robust as we can possibly be, but we are still finding issues. We found an issue in one of our BCUs with a group of leaders who were involved in a criminal conspiracy, and they have all been arrested and suspended. We had the case that “Panorama” unfurled for us. We will keep turning these cases up and we will keep getting there. There will be fewer and fewer of them, but in an organisation that is ruthlessly determined about its integrity and reputation, and that is coming from a difficult place, you will see this on a regular basis.

Were you aware that there were problems in Charing Cross before that “Panorama” programme? Was it a difficult station, known for having problems?

There was not a particular strand of information about that misconduct. When you watch the programme, you see a group of people in a closed environment, in custody. You see a small number of them behaving in a really toxic way, and other people who are afraid to challenge them. It is a troubling thing to see, and some of the attitudes they displayed were vile. That had not been surfaced. I have just come from a leadership summit; we have been doing some work with our top 700 leaders about how to be more intrusive as a leadership team and what can be done differently. At some point in the future, that would have been surfaced. As I said, we are slowly working through the organisation, in the biggest doubling down on standards that policing in this country has ever seen by a long way. We are a large part of the way through it, but we are not finished. Meanwhile, the majority of our people are fabulous people who are stepping forward and making a difference.

You have previously talked about custody staff wearing body-worn cameras. Has that idea been developed?

I think we put in a letter back to you, after you wrote to us when that happened, the ideas we were exploring. It was a long list of ideas, and that is one we decided not to do. We came to the conclusion that the CCTV coverage in custody is so close to ubiquitous that body-worn videos would not actually add much to that environment. We have identified one or two blackspots in corridor corners and such in custody blocks, and we are closing them down through CCTV rather than body-worn video.

The officers at Charing Cross who were in the “Panorama” programme should never have been police officers, and there is clear evidence of people who passed vetting who should never have been police officers. What are you doing to properly check people with allegations of sexual assault or complaints about inappropriate and sexual behaviour, to make sure that they are taken out of the police?

You can see cases that have come to the surface and people we have removed from the Met in recent years where there was a warning sign when they came into the organisation, and they were given the benefit of the doubt. You can see cases of that, and those were poor decisions. Sometimes people were under pressure for recruitment numbers, and they should not have been put under that pressure. Poor decisions were made. As I said, one thing we now track, which was not routinely tracked before, is the vetting failure rate at the point of entry. That is now bouncing around at about 10% or 11%. It was a lot lower previously. We are tracking that. On the things we are doing differently, we have a much clearer set of instructions in guidance to our decision makers on vetting; that is clearer and more assertive. We are doing more detailed checks when people come into the organisation, and we are constantly investing in new tools. This year, we are rolling out new social media tools that will give a more penetrating view of someone’s social media history. But vetting is not just about that initial moment; it is also ongoing. We are now routinely washing officers’ details against the Police National Computer and other intelligence databases, so if something new comes up elsewhere in the land of data, in the Met or elsewhere, we are making sure we are spotting that very, very early.

So women in London can have confidence in you—confidence that you are checking the allegations of sexual assault against police officers, before they have to phone 999? That is taking place across all police—

At the point of entry and all the way through, we are building a system that is as robust and determined as it possibly can be. That is why, as I say, 1,500 people have left the organisation. I will give another example. The misogyny and sexual assaults in so many of the cases that have led to officers leaving the organisation are appalling and disgraceful, and embarrassing for the service. One of the things I did on day one was what we called Operation Onyx. Earlier I spoke about the strategy, which was to tighten the front door and, going forward, get better at responding to allegations and encourage more reporting, but also to look backward at the data. One of the looks backward was at every sexually related allegation that had been made in the organisation for a decade, ranging from an allegation of an inappropriate comment all the way through to sexual assaults and other horrific allegations. Clearly they were things that had not been proven, because these people were still in the organisation. Of the 1,600 that were looked back at, nearly 400 have now left the organisation as a consequence, so that shows a more assertive approach. That is one example.

What about the effects this has on usable manpower? In November 2022, you said 500 officers were suspended or on restricted duties due to allegations of misconduct. Another 3,000 were not deployable because of physical or mental health issues. That means 3,500 officers were then not deployable. What are the figures now?

I would have to come back to you on those, but the—

Are they improving or getting worse?

I am pretty sure the numbers of those suspended and restricted are lower, but I would have to come back to you on those. Clearly the resource implications must not be the reason for not suspending somebody. Those are the sorts of mistakes that have been made in the past. It’s the road to hell, really, to start to let that influence those decisions. But those numbers are coming down, I am pretty sure. In terms of people with health issues and on adjusted duties, we have over the last 18 months been working through a process. We have several thousand police officer jobs in the Met where people with restrictions can make a 100% contribution. Not every job requires you to be charging around on the streets confronting dangerous people, so we are doing a better job of aligning people’s restrictions with those skills. We are also asking more of our occupational health experts. We are discovering that a minority of individuals have been playing the system, are fully fit and should be back out at work. That is happening as well. But the majority are being found the right roles for them. We are dealing with that, so it is having a minimal impact on operational policing.

I was hoping you would reassure me more, because this was a real issue four years or three and a half years ago when you were asked. I was hoping you would tell me, “Yes, we’re getting rid of people quickly. Not many are on restricted duties and in the waiting process. We are addressing the issue of those with mental and physical health problems.” I thought you would be really on top of that. “The figure was 3,500 back in November ’22, but now we are actually addressing it, and I have evidence we are doing so.” But you seem somewhat vague on whether the numbers have gone up or down.

I just don’t have those numbers in front of me. I can write back to you on it. There have been some reductions in the numbers, but it is not just about the numbers of those with restrictions, because some of these are officers who were damaged in the course of their work. There is a dangerous implication in your question that we just cast them aside and say, “You’re no good to us any more.” I am sure that is not what you meant.

The ones who are not properly deployable—

But you might not be properly deployable because you are damaged by what you have dealt with in policing, whether psychologically or physically. We should not be casting them aside glibly, but we should be business-like and find them a role where they can fully contribute. That is what we are doing. A restriction does not necessarily mean you are not fully contributing. You need to match the restriction to the nature of the role. That is the important point.

I see that, but can we have figures on the ones who are not being used productively?

We are doing a big redeployment in the organisation; if you know people in policing, you will probably hear that from them. We are making sure that alignment is taking place. We are also finding the minority who are abusing the adjusted duties process and may be fully fit, and we are dealing with that and getting them back to work. I will get you the detail on the suspended and restricted officers for misconduct reasons, but we are not going to try to reduce that just for resource convenience, for obvious reasons.

To finish off on the standards piece, what is your response to the Government’s proposals on a licence to practise, and how do you see that linking to how you do standards work in the future?

I think the potential benefits of a licence to practise are more about increasing the positive than dealing with the negative. It is fairly obvious to say that to have a licence to practise, you need to be an officer with integrity—that is not a radical proposal—so we aim to get more robust to put that in place. A licence to practise for the future for our profession is about having people who are responsible for their own development, keeping their skills and knowledge up to date and maintaining the qualifications they have as detectives, response officers, neighbourhood officers, firearms officers and so on. There is an expectation, as there is in other professions, in terms of maintaining and developing those skills, which is shared between the individual and the organisation. The benefits are obvious in terms of a more professional and better police service where the officers and staff within it feel more valued. The risk is that if we do it wrong, we create something so bureaucratic that it sucks lots of capacity away from the frontline. That is not a reason not to do it, but we should go into it carefully.

So it would contribute to building a positive culture as opposed to tackling a negative culture?

Exactly that.

You made a number of changes to the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection command. To what extent has the culture there changed?

It has been very positive. There has been a whole range of changes, from leadership all the way through. When you get underneath cultural issues, some of it comes down to real basics. For example, the operating model was designed around cost, not around supervision, management and standards, so over many years, reasonable pressure from Parliament to reduce the cost of it had led to shifts and duties being organised to do the bare minimum to cover required posts. But if you end up with everyone on different shifts, starting and finishing at different times and starting from different places, and you spend the bare minimum on leadership, you end up with people who are not in teams and are not supervised. We have had to reset the operating model, and parliamentary authorities have been supportive in that process, so that we have teams working together more and we have more supervision. There also was not enough rotation, which means you risk creating stagnant teams, so we have done some of that. The diversity balance tends to be different in armed commands. We have done some special work to break down the barriers to entry for women officers, which is having a big effect in terms of changing the diversity in the mix. That was led by a couple of sergeants and an inspector from Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection who were male officers. I remember the three of them saying to me, “We’ve got daughters. We’re not proud of this. We want to fix it.” They have created a scheme that has familiarised and encouraged women officers to join, and that is changing the balance. If we look at some of the key data around it, for example, they used to have higher rates of conduct cases, and those rates are now much lower and much more comparable with us. I can see the effects of the changes that are taking place.

You have previously called for changes in the accountability regime for firearms officers, and the Government proposed some of those towards the end of last year. Can you give us your view about the changes that have been proposed?

It was an accountability review commissioned when Suella Braverman was Home Secretary. It reported when James Cleverly was Home Secretary, and Yvette Cooper as Home Secretary then announced in Parliament that she was going to act on it and deliver those recommendations. Several of them have been acted upon. One example would be anonymity. Other parts of it are still to be acted on. Two of the most critical recommendations relate to the alignment of thresholds for assessing officers’ conduct in use-of-force situations. At the moment, there are three thresholds—imagine being held to three different thresholds in your workplace by three different processes. One is the criminal threshold, one is the inquest threshold, and one is the misconduct threshold. Because they are all different and have to get dealt with sequentially, the whole process takes too long for officers and the families of those they confronted. We had an officer who was finally out of that process, found with nothing wanting after a misconduct hearing that took place last autumn, about nine years and 10 months after he shot somebody dead. I have met him, and the effect of that on him and his family is just awful. He went to work to do his job of protecting the public of London and had to make a really difficult split-second decision. That intent from Government is good and welcome. Because it is regulatory rather than primary legislation, the change to conduct regulations can be done quite speedily. The Home Office has started work on that, and I hope it is going to be done in a very small number of months. The change to get coronial thresholds realigned to criminal thresholds, which they used to be until about five years ago, requires primary legislation, and the Ministry of Justice is leading on that. I hope that appears in a Bill quite soon, because until those things are aligned, officers are still being put in unreasonable jeopardy.

In terms of the regulatory environment and perhaps other considerations, is the Met now in a position to be able to attract and retain the firearms officers it needs to keep London safe?

It was very fragile. It is not perfect, but it is a lot less fragile than it was, and the recruitment is going in the right direction. They have recognised that Government and Parliament are looking to fix these issues, and that is appreciated. We do put them in an extraordinary position, don’t we, to be asked to do that as part of your daily work and make a decision that is literally life and death? We expect, and it is only proper, that that is really seriously scrutinised, but we ought to be able to find a way to do that within 10 months maybe, rather than 10 years. That is the challenge. They are so professional and careful. We have 4,000 firearms deployments a year in London. We are arresting 1,600 people on those operations. We are seizing about 1,000 weapons, and we are firing shots once or twice a year. That shows the degree of care and professionalism. Those officers are a big part of driving down lethal barrel discharges in London, taking the offenders and the weapons off the streets, which is part of our having the lowest homicide rate ever. We put them in those situations to make those decisions. They deserve a scrutiny process that is speedy and has one hurdle in it, not one that goes on this Byzantine, multi-year journey.

Do you accept the conclusions of Dr Shereen Daniels’s report on racism in the Met? She described the Met as having discrimination “baked into” its institutional design.

We will take challenge from all sorts of different perspectives, and we are grateful for Dr Daniels’s report. We are committed to a police service that is inclusive and anti-discrimination, and Dr Daniels has given us a perspective on that which is helpful and insightful. One of the things that is most powerful to me is that it resonated particularly with some of our black officers and staff and their perspective within the organisation. That is a useful reflection. As we look at the next stage of our plans on culture, particularly on being an inclusive, anti-racist organisation, we are taking account of her recommendations. These areas get more and more contentious in the middle of more and more polarised debate and culture wars. There are three reasons that policing has to remain committed to inclusion and anti-racism. First, our founding vision for policing in this country and in London was about policing by consent. That has an implication about relationships with the communities. We police a complex, diverse, globally connected city. Secondly, the law gives us all sorts of duties about fairness and encouraging equal opportunity and diversity. Thirdly, there is lots of good evidence from the MBA-type world and studies of healthy, good organisations that the best organisations are inclusive. If you are inclusive, you make the best of all the talent you have and you have the ability to understand and connect to the world. If you are monocultural, you miss that opportunity. That is critical, particularly for policing a city as complex as London. We are taking account of her insights as we build the next stage of our plans.

The Met said that it would reflect on what Dr Daniels found. Do you recognise the picture that she paints of the Met in her report?

Not everyone has the same perspective, do they? I am not going to criticise it. I am a white, 60-year-old bloke. I have young black colleagues with a different perspective and experience in the organisation. If Shereen is playing some of that back, I have to listen to that. It is a valuable insight. We are not all going to see the world the same way, but hearing other people’s insights is part of being an effective organisation and taking account of that in our plans going forward is important.

Following on from that, what actions have you taken personally to address the issues that Dr Daniels raised in the report?

As she said in her report, if you rush into an action plan on the back of this, you are missing the point, so we have not done that. As I said earlier, we talked a lot about standards. We are doing an awful lot of work on standards and culture more generally. Over the last three years, we have done a lot of work on training around culture and diversity. We have looked at particular issues that go into the operational effect of how we conduct stop and search, which is a vital and effective tool, but it needs to be done with respect and courtesy as well as for good, effective operational reasons. We have looked at issues like victim-blaming language. We have looked at leadership skills. As I said earlier, I have just come from a leadership summit where we talked about what the top 700 leaders in the organisation can do on culture. We have a momentum in terms of improving the organisation, which is borne out in our performance figures and the increasing trust of London. It is interesting that the trust figures show that trust in the Met has risen and that the trust of the communities with the lowest trust in the Met—the LGBT+ community and the black community—has risen fastest. That gap is closing. It has not closed, but I am pleased that it is going in the right direction.

It is not the first report over many years with similar findings. We touched on the Casey review earlier, which specifically found institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia. After it was published, you promised a two-year follow up to assess any progress. That was during March 2025, but it has not really materialised. Could you tell us why that is and if there are any plans to do that?

Sorry, but you have obviously missed the announcement. Dr Gillian Fairfield is doing the follow-up review on the mayor’s and my behalf. She started about six weeks ago. In fact, I was with her this morning.

So it is another review?

No, it is not. You were saying, “Why haven’t you done the review?” but you are criticising it for being another review. That seems slightly odd.

No, you were saying that you would do a two-year follow-up—an assessment, I suppose—showing us where you had moved forward. The worry among some communities is that it will just be another assessment as opposed to an action plan.

I am responsible for the actions and the action plans in the organisation. The piece of work led by Gillian Fairfield is not another review in the same way as the first—the Casey one. Louise Casey said in her recommendations that two years in—okay, we are doing it two and a half years in, as we decided that was the better timing—it would make sense to have a checkpoint. She was quite clear that all the issues we were dealing with would not be resolved in that time period, but that there should be a checkpoint to look at progress made, and to give opinions on what the highest priorities were going forward. Obviously, we have a plan on what we have decided is most important and how we see ourselves making most progress going forward, and I have talked about how we are making progress on trust and confidence already. I imagine that Gillian Fairfield will find that we have made progress. She will probably like some of our plans, and she will probably have ideas on what we can do differently. That will be welcome.

Do you accept that the Metropolitan police has gone through a period of being institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic?

We have had this debate previously. That is not the language I choose to use. I have been really clear that there are systemic issues, which go to the culture and organisational failings. We touched on some of those earlier on. We are tackling those systemic issues. This is not just about a few individuals, but about how the organisation behaves, how it is organised and how effectively it is serving London. I am proud of the progress we are making on dealing with those issues. We would not be reducing violence, increasing the cases we are solving on violence against women and girls, reducing street crime, increasing trust, having some of the highest levels of confidence of city forces in this country in local policing, and increasing faster the trust of those groups that have the lowest trust in policing in London if we were not making progress. This is not something you do in a couple of years. This is a long-term journey, but I am proud of the progress our teams are making.

On the confidence of victims, in the 12 months up to September 2025, 63% of victims said that they were satisfied with the service provided by the Met overall. What are you doing to ensure that all victims, including those with protected characteristics, have the same satisfactory experience?

We definitely see improving that as a priority going forward. A piece of work has just started, testing on one of our BCUs in the south-east, which we will be rolling out over the next year. At the moment, we have too complex a process from a crime being initially reported, through the different hand-offs to different people, all the way through to an investigator. That takes too long and can too often leave victims disappointed with the experience. We are taking a new approach that will accelerate that, so that victims will get a much clearer understanding of where their case is going much sooner in that process. It started a week ago; I had an update on it on Monday. It is only a week, but in the first week, it has looked like something that will work and make a difference on that.

You have talked about things going up slightly in certain communities, but that points to the fact that levels of trust were found to be markedly lower in those from black and mixed ethnic backgrounds, and in people from LGBT+ communities. They cited over-criminalisation, under-protection, and institutionalised racism, sexism and homophobia again, as well as other prejudices, as their reasons for having low trust in the police. I want to understand, especially since you do not recognise the institutional failings, what work is being done to understand why those trust levels are low and address them directly.

First, I think the picture is more nuanced and complex than the question suggests. When you look at them in terms of diversity, and different levels of trust in the police and of confidence in the policing of your area, the pattern is quite varied. For example, Asian communities have higher levels of trust and confidence in the police than average. London’s white communities have higher levels of trust, but lower levels of confidence than average. Black communities have lower levels of trust, but higher levels of confidence in the effectiveness of policing in their area than average. Focusing on just one dimension pretends that this is a binary issue. It is much more complex than that, which is perhaps not surprising given the nature of London’s communities and the history. Some of that history is nothing to do with the police, but some of it is down to policing and some of the things we have got wrong in the past and sometimes still today.

I am confused. You said it is nothing to do with the police, but it is to do with what you have got wrong in the past.

I didn’t say that. I said that some of the differences will be about environmental and community factors that are nothing to do with the police, but some of them will be about things that the police have got wrong in the past or today. There is a mix of factors behind it. That is the only point I am making. It requires specific solutions to specific parts. I will give an example of the work we have done to build trust with black communities. The significance of stop and search in that relationship is enormous over the years; you can go back to the 1980s. It is a very effective operational tool that reduces crime, but, if done badly, it can damage trust and confidence. We spent a lot of time with people from the community looking at what a stop and search charter would look like, and what commitments the community want from us, beyond our legal obligations, that will make a difference. That work is published and is featuring in our training on how we operate with stop and search. That is one example of the changes we are making. Another example is community scrutiny groups. There are panels in boroughs that can look over stop and search and body-worn video of taser incidents and so on, and they can scrutinise and challenge the police on our tactics. There are multiple strands of work to drive those improvements, but the fact that the trust of black communities is growing fastest is a positive.

I am very conscious of time, and we have quite a few other topics to cover. Paul Kohler wants to come in with a quick follow-up.

Very quickly, what role do you think restorative justice has to play in victim satisfaction? What role should the police have in facilitating that process?

Out-of-court disposals, which would be one part of it, potentially have a big role for the future. Previous work across the country on out-of-court disposals finds that, in the right cases, they can deliver higher victim satisfaction because they are dealt with quickly without the long legal process of a court case. Clearly, they are not for the most serious crimes, but for many crimes they are appropriate. There is not a good national system for restorative justice. The last Government paused partway through resetting out-of-court disposals. We currently have a set-up where cases do not count as solved if they are solved outside the court process, which is a disincentive to use those tactics. One of the recommendations in the Leveson review to improve the clogged justice system is greater use of out-of-court disposals. I think it is a missed opportunity at the moment, and I know the Government are considering it as part of the Leveson recommendations.

Whenever I talk to police officers about restorative justice, they always talk about out-of-court disposals as if they are synonyms. Restorative justice is not just about out-of-court disposals. That is understood by the police, is it not?

It is one way. There are other ways of delivering restorative justice, such as warnings and training programmes. There is a whole range of different ways you might do it. One issue is who will manage these processes. Will it be probation, policing or the third sector, and how is it going to be funded? I see restorative justice as a subset of out-of-court disposals. That is all I am saying.

Forty-six per cent of Londoners feel that the Met does a good job. How successful do you think you have been in tackling neighbourhood crime? I am thinking of shoplifting, car thefts, tool thefts and so on. How do you think you have done?

We are making progress, but there is definitely more to do. Forty-six per cent say that the Met is doing a good or very good job in their area, but it gets to 81% if you add in fair, so fair, good and very good is 81%. Given the resource stretch and so on, I think our teams are doing well. Our data on the different metrics around that tends to be the best of the city forces in this country, so I think we are doing well on those benchmarks, but you would want it to be higher. We are arresting 1,000 more people a month and doubling the number of shoplifting cases we are prosecuting, and there are going to be at least 10,000 fewer victims of phone theft this year compared with last year, with all the operations the teams are doing. There is extra work against antisocial behaviour and drugs, as well as the criminal behaviour orders. Those teams are doing an enormous amount of work. I am proud of the progress we are making, but there is definitely more to do; if I had more resources, a chunk of them would be in neighbourhood policing.

What do you think you could do to increase people’s confidence in the Met? I speak to people in my constituency who have been victims of crime, and a lot of them do not bother to report it, so the percentages we are all quoting today might not be a true reflection of the amount of crime. If you have had your car stolen, you are told, “Okay, here’s your crime reference number—ring your insurance company.” On that basis, do you think you should be dealing with it on a national level, rather than locally? It is sometimes serious crime. Sir Mark Rowley: I think you can overstate the under-reporting, if that is not a confusing phrase. I think we are drawing reporting through for most types of crime. Things like shoplifting will never be fully reported, but things like burglary are reported, for insurance reasons. When I look at the impact we are having on crime, I also look at other people’s data. For example, there are fewer people turning up at casualty injured through violence. You can look at things like footfall. With the work we have been doing on street crime, I am encouraged by the fact that in December the footfall in Westminster and the west end was up compared with the previous year. Those sorts of data points—casualties and footfall—give a sense of the public’s sense of safety.

Could it be that you have focused on the west end because of the phone thefts, and that the other parts of London, including the outer London boroughs, do not quite have that presence?

It could be that, but it is not. For example, in our winter plans, I think we had 18 locations in London that we could see from previous years were the most likely to be targeted by crime at that time of year. We put extra patrols and plans in all those areas, and—I am trying to do this from memory, so I might be slightly out—there was 15% or 20% less crime in those areas this year compared with the previous year. By being focused, you can have an effect. Of course, the west end is bound to be one of those, but it was not the only one. There are town centres across London where, in the run-up to Christmas, people are socialising and shopping more. They are places people want to feel safe and enjoy themselves, and therefore they are places that criminals will target if we do not pay extra attention to them. That is what we did, and that is how we delivered lower crime this year compared with last year.

Do you still feel that local forces should deal with phone theft? We had a presentation in Parliament from the Met. It is organised crime that is behind it. Do you not think that should go to national level, or do you still think it should be local?

It is bound to be some of both. If you look at phone thefts, you have people on the streets stealing them, and some of them are teenagers who know they can make some quick money out of it. That is not really organised. Some of it is more organised. We have had some organised pickpocketing gangs coming from eastern Europe and elsewhere. Then you have people who are acting as handlers. Some of them are reselling them in London, and some of them are passing them on to third parties, who are exporting them internationally, so you have the whole international trade. We have been working on operations across that spectrum. At the top end of that, we have been dealing with some organised crime groups based in London and working with the National Crime Agency to connect to law enforcement in China and other countries where phones are being exported. You need to join the whole piece together. It is not going to be about national or local; it is bound to be about how you join all that together across the system. You might have seen in the press last autumn that we charged one gang who were exporting 30,000 to 40,000 stolen mobile phones a year to China. It was an extraordinary operation. We are currently doing another intensification period, and we are taking out more handling gangs at the moment. You will see some press stuff on that in due course. It is a really determined effort, and that is why there are 10,000 fewer victims in London. The key question on this, which the Technology Committee in Parliament picked up on, is how you design this out. There will always be a market in this with the value of these phones second hand. I think most of us are old enough to remember car radios being stolen; the car industry redesigned that and the radio is so integrated into the dashboard that you couldn’t possibly steal a car radio any more. The equivalent with mobile phones is through the operating systems—Apple iOS and Google Android. If you had your phone stolen and you were able to deactivate it so that it was a brick forever and could not be reconverted into a usable phone, that would completely kill the second-hand value. There would be a couple of parts in the phone—maybe the screen and the cameras—but it would be pretty useless. That would have a big effect. It has taken a long time, but the conversations on that with Google and Apple are getting more constructive. That is a way to completely reset it and get us out of this cycle where there is a lot of money to be made exporting tens of thousands of phones from European cities to Africa and China.

We started a call for evidence last week in our inquiry on the role that organised crime plays in neighbourhood crime. I am sure we would welcome some evidence—

We have buckets of evidence to send you, Chair.

That’s what we would like to have. We will move on to questions on the police reform White Paper and then on policing of protests.

You have already spoken about this, but what do you think will be the greatest benefits to the Met police as a consequence of the reform Bill that is coming through?

I will answer on the benefits to policing and then how that filters through to the Metropolitan police. At the moment, we are working in a system where, once things move away from the local, it immediately gets very complicated. Whether you are talking about international operations or specialist functions, if you want a helicopter, you go to West Yorkshire; if you want ballistics intelligence, you send it to West Midlands. The whole thing is byzantine and has grown up over decades. That complexity is then mirrored in the support area. In policing we have 43 forces with separate technology functions, and separate functions for the acquisition of technology and equipment. That slows it down and means that it is not as advanced as possible, and that means we are less integrated in terms of our data and intelligence than we could be. All of that, which sits behind the shop window of local policing, which we have all spoken about and said we should value, is more complex. Rationalising that has big benefits for the whole of policing, including for the policing of London. One of the changes that, in my mind, is necessary and is talked to in the police reform White Paper is having fewer police forces so that every local force is fully capable rather than needing so many collaborations. Clearly, the Met is not going to need to be bigger, so it does not affect us in that way, but having one national body rather than multiple national functions will help. We have some national functions, including counter-terrorism, so in due course, once we have established a secure national body, there is potential for that and the National Crime Agency to go into those bodies. These are things you cannot do quickly overnight. If you rush this in 18 months, you are taking very busy and complex national functions and treating them badly, but if, over a small number of years, you formed a national body and brought these functions together, it would be much better for policing. It picks up the previous point about local and national: if we have a sensible number of local police forces and one national body with the right balance of power between them, then I think we can achieve a lot more than we are at the moment, with resources tied up in this complex, knotty system that we have built over several decades.

What do you think the disbenefits will be of the police reform Bill?

I don’t think there are disbenefits. I think there are risks if we do it wrong, though. If you did it badly, you could automatically create a system that pulls all the resources to the centre, nationally. If you did it badly, you could lose the support of all the good people in police organisations across the country if they cannot see a path for themselves in the future in terms of their terms and conditions. If we do it badly, we will not enable ourselves to take advantage of the technology revolution on the journey. There are things that we need to take account of, but every challenge in policing points in this direction. One of the things we are going to need to think about on the way is performance: keeping a grip on day-to-day performance, but also, in a police service that is squeezed for resources, a clearer agreement nationally on what the most important areas of police performance are would be helpful.

You talked about how the Met is focused on tackling serious and organised criminal activity. What do you think the impacts will be if a national body is overseeing that?

At the moment we have a national body doing organised crime work: the National Crime Agency. I do not see the intent in this that no organised crime work gets done in the local forces. You need some of the organised crime capability close to communities. We just talked about the work on mobile phone theft, and how organised crime is driving some of that in London. You are better off doing that close to local policing. Conversely, some of the organised crime work is linked to the gangs exporting internationally and requires working with the Chinese Government or other Governments, and you want a national body to help to do that. We need that capability at both levels, but heavily interoperable and working closely together, and I think that is entirely achievable. At the moment, we effectively have three tiers. Some forces across the country still have their own organised crime capability; some do not. You then have regional-level collaborations because some forces are not big enough to hold it, then you have national functions. It gets very confusing. This is a more sustainable approach that we are talking about.

How do you think the implementation of the reforms will impact policing as they come through the system?

We should not be under any illusion: to do something like this is a big, complex change. Creating new organisations and restructuring will require a tremendous determination and shared leadership from the Home Office and police leaders, working together to bring this into effect. It is not going to be straightforward, but the opposite is that we just say, “Well, we’re stuck with the system we’ve got and we’ll stay there because it’s what we’ve got,” regardless of the fact that it is less and less fitted for today’s world. You will examine, and probably have examined, things such as cyber-crime, fraud, international organised crime—specialist capabilities and policing needs. None of those can be done well 43 times. We are in this muddled set-up with 43 local forces and multiple national bodies: it is not the way to meet those challenges for today.

What are your views on the timescales that have been given for implementation?

I am sighted on some of the timescales the Home Office are discussing; I am not sure that they have been published, so I am not sure that it is for me to announce them. I think that getting on quickly with the first stages of a national body, phasing it and building its skills over several years is the right approach, but we need to do the changes to local policing in parallel with that because they all need to fit together.

You told our predecessor Committee that responsibility for counter-terror co-ordination should stay within the Met. What has changed your view?

I said that about a decade ago, so you have dug through your archives very effectively. It was a slightly simpler world in terms of how terrorism was operating, and it was in the context of discussions of simple changes to policing rather than a proper root-and-branch reform, which is what we are talking about now. The pace of operations then, in the middle of facing ISIS and all the other things, was very difficult. There are a range of reasons, but it is still within the Met. I have been in and out of the Met since then. Given the state of the world and the state of policing, we are getting more out of date, and we need to be set up for the future.

You have some experience of the proposed reorganisation because you have reorganised yourself from 32 boroughs into 12 larger basic command units. What learnings could you advise other police forces of from the work that you have had to do to achieve that?

It was the right change to make. It was not executed as well as it needed to be and it has taken some follow-up interventions to get the system working. I think the key thing that we got wrong was that there was not enough resource placed at the local level in neighbourhoods at the start, so that end of policing got devalued. That was one of the areas where we were put into special measures, so to speak, by the inspectorate. The balance within the organisation was struck too far towards the centre and we have rebalanced that. It was definitely the right decision to move away from trying to run local policing 32 times in London. Some of those units were too small to meet all the challenges of today. Moving to 10, 12, 14 or something like that—we looked at different options—was definitely the right thing to do. In hindsight, some of the implementation would have been done differently, but we have caught up with that. The performance figures I spoke about earlier, such as having the lowest homicide rate in London and having less injury violence in London than in other cities, shows that that is working.

Hello. I am sorry to have been delayed. I am Peter Prinsley, the MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket. Looking at the police reform White Paper, I understand that there is going to be a new strategy for recruiting graduates. Is that so? How do you see recruitment changing and assisting with your endeavours? Are we recruiting the right sort of people into the police force right now?

It is quite a broad statement in the White Paper. There is still a lot of work to be done. I think there are several comments in the White Paper about a different workforce strategy for the future. It is instructive to look at the National Crime Agency, which has quite a different mix of people that come into the organisation from different routes. That is worth seeing. In the Met—I helped start this a decade ago—we now bring people directly in as detectives, and that has been useful. There are certain people who see themselves in a detective career but are not so interested in the uniform operations end of things. That has brought different types of people into the organisation. I think it is still true that the majority of our people who join policing have degrees. It is a slightly old-fashioned notion that there are no graduates in policing—there are plenty. I think there is scope for different accelerated routes into policing and accelerated promotion. I am cautious about direct entry into operational leadership roles at a senior level, simply because the responsibility a frontline officer has is enormous. They have massive devolved authority. They are arresting people, investigating complex cases and making lifechanging decisions. I think it is difficult to put someone into an operational leadership role over that if they have not done it. Given what we expect of our operational leaders, it would be a bit like someone entering directly as a consultant brain surgeon. I would probably rather have someone who has worked their way towards that than somebody who is in their first week. But we do have lots of senior leaders in policing who are part of the leadership who are leading other functions, like technology and people, and they bring different skills in. I have seen very powerful examples of good people coming into policing from adjacent sectors such as social services, the National Crime Agency and intelligence agencies. People who have adjacent operational leadership skills are very valuable—not people coming in from Sainsbury’s.

I want to try to get you out on time, so—

Sorry, am I answering too slowly?

No, it’s fine; don’t worry. I just want to make sure that you get out on time.

Essentially, do you think that we are putting sufficient resources into the training of our senior police officers?

No. Was that quick enough? When I started in the Met three years ago, I made a promise to try to give a week’s leadership development to every leader each year. One of the things I had in mind as a comparison was the military. According to the data that I can recall, 15 years after leaving Sandhurst, a colonel in charge of 1,500 people will have done 72 weeks of leadership development in that period. It is a very structured approach. If we look at chief superintendents in the Met who have had comparable progression and were an inspector maybe 15 years ago, most of them have had two or three weeks, if they are lucky. I think the military is a bit overindulgent—someone will criticise me for that—but we are skeletal on that, and it is not acceptable. Successive Governments have massively cut investment in national police training over the whole length of my career since the ’90s. That is a big, big mistake, and I hope through reform we are able to rebuild that.

Let us move on to policing of protests.

You said that, on average, you police over 500 protests a year. How does the law on public order provide your officers with the powers they need to keep Londoners safe?

I think the law on public order is well out of date. I am encouraged that the Home Secretary has asked Lord Ken Macdonald to review protest and hate crime legislation, to see what changes can be made. The reason that is the case is that the core of the Public Order Act around protest was written in the 1980s—a very different context. There have been tweaks and amendments multiple times since. Halfway between then and now, the Human Rights Act came in, so for every protest-based policing decision, an officer has to consider the specifics of protest legislation and the generic principles of the Human Rights Act and find a balance between the two. We have seen so many cases where the command decision an officer made within a day of planning an event or on the ground during the event is then pored over all the way to the High Court or the Court of Appeal over subsequent years, examining whether those balances were right. That is not a fair position to put police officers in. It is due an overhaul, and I hope Lord Macdonald finds that. We operate without fear or favour under the law. There is a lot of debate about our policing of protest. A lot of it seems to be based on what people hope the law might be, rather than what it actually is. We routinely find ourselves making a judgment in the middle of a situation about protests and counter-protests where we are putting conditions on both of them to restrict the impacts on communities and restrict the risk of violence, and people on one side of the political or geopolitical argument say, “You’re favouring them,” and people on the other side of the argument say, “You’re favouring them.” I am disappointed, frankly, that too often, parliamentarians join in and add to the heat of everyone trying to push policing to be more in favour of their side. That is not our job. It is our job to be neutral and independent. The vast majority of what we have done over the last few years, I think we have got right. Occasionally you look at cases and think, “Actually, we could have been a bit more assertive there,” or, “We were a bit too assertive,” but most of the time we have got it absolutely right. It has been a very challenging operating environment for us. For my officers on the ground, it is extraordinarily difficult when you have people trying to catch you out, putting phones in your face and trying to wind you up. We had an officer have a pro-Palestine sticker stuck on his arm, get photographed and then get death threats for supporting Palestine. We have had horrific things happen as people have been trying to use policing as a football, and that has been very difficult, but we will keep operating under the law as it is today without fear or favour.

We recently met Greater Manchester police, and they talked about the new phenomenon of auditors in protests. Is this something you are having to deal with in London, and is it requiring a new policing method?

Yes. We do the vast majority of protest policing, so we get a lot of that. I want to be careful that my answer does not imply something. I am going to say something very clearly up front: if somebody wants to film something an officer is doing in the street, that is okay—we’ve got nothing to hide—but do it at a respectful distance. Don’t try to telescope yourself into the situation and make it harder for the officer to deal with. That is the thing that is very difficult for officers. We have protesters turning up and saying, “I’m an auditor,” as if it is some legal office, and therefore you cannot deal with them as a protester. Well, you are still on this protest—whether you have a camera in your hand or not is irrelevant. That is another part of the challenge, and then they will put edited clips online to try to misrepresent officers’ actions. We have had to remodel our approach to social media and communications to try and get much more agile and dynamic to deal with that. Candidly, getting the facts quickly in the middle of an operation is difficult, but we have got much better at that and are being more assertive: “That is not true. We did this. This is why we did it.” All those sorts of things, and putting out the whole video of an incident from officers’ body-worn rather than the clipped one. It is a great challenge for officers to wrestle with. I have my numbers here. It is going to be north of 500 by the time we get to the end of this financial year. We were at 416 as we came into this year. We are heading towards about 75,000 shifts by the end of the financial year, which is probably a total cost of £40 million or £50 million. And that is £40 million or £50 million of policing that is not policing communities—the point Margaret made earlier.

We have only a few minutes left, and we want to cover policing of football, because we have been doing some work on that.

What approach would the Met have taken to the issues that arose in the Maccabi–Aston Villa game?

Clearly, I will not speak for the West Midlands, but you get any key report on policing—the Chief Inspector of Constabulary did a pretty forensic review of what he thought had gone right and wrong in that case. We have looked at that and taken a judgment on whether there is anything we can learn from it in terms of our approaches. We are confident in the flow of intelligence and the proper auditing of intelligence, from the picking up of information to how it flows through and influences decisions. We are broadly happy with our processes on that. On the way our commanders make decisions and the audit trails on that, and on how we oversee operational risk as a senior team up to and including myself and the deputy, we are happy with how we do that. We have a pretty well-established process for doing community impact assessments, but we have some thoughts on some minor improvements to that. The critical issue—I have discussed this with my command team—is about brutal operational clarity and policing purpose. If you are feeding information in on the basis of, “Is this sporting event safe to take place?”, your consideration has to be about the event and the spectators, not about wider issues. There is the safety of the event, which I think stands on its own. There is a separate issue, of course, which is the policing of that. If there are people who object to the event taking place, you might require some quite sizeable policing. But separating those two things out is really important. My team, and one of my team leads nationally, have been working on the policing of major events. I think SAGs are overdue some reform. They do not really have a statutory basis. They are pretty variable across the country. I think some of them in some parts of the country are being chaired by local politicians. I am not sure that is a proper operational and policy separation. Some of this may be sortable by better guidance. I know that one of the national centres is working on that. But I do wonder whether they might need a legal basis at some point in the future.

How does the Met interact with SAGs?

Like other police forces, we are a part of SAGs. We are not generally chairing them. We feed in our assessment based on intelligence about crime and disorder. There will be other considerations for a SAG, but we will feed in what we know and what our considerations are about crime and disorder for a major concert, sporting event or whatever else. There is a difference. Picking up on the point about protest, legally it is important to separate that out. On protest, we take account of the community’s view in a different way, because Parliament said we could put conditions on protest if it was going to cause serious disruption to the life of the community. You said to us, ”Take account of the impact of protest on the community.” So in terms of us putting conditions on protest, we are not just looking at the protest itself; we are thinking about its impact on others. For a sporting event, if it is a lawful thing to happen and as long as it is safe, we should do everything we can to enable that.

Lastly, what does the Met say to officers about the use of AI?

We are using AI, like every other organisation. We subscribe to the national guidance on its ethical use. Clearly, the most critical thing in this is about the human in the loop and the quality assurance of what is going through and the processes you have. One simple example of high-end tech is our use of live facial recognition on the streets. Facial recognition does not decide whether someone is going to get arrested. Facial recognition says, “I’ve got a high degree of confidence that that person who is walking past the van is that person who has been wanted for three years for rape.” The officer stops that person, checks out whether it looks right to them, checks potentially with a fingerprint in the street, and then makes the arrest decision. We do an annual report of all the data out there—just shy of 1,000 arrests were reported up to September last year. About a third of them were people wanted for offences of violence against women and girls. Three million people walked past the vans in the period of time, and there was a 0.0003% error rate. That is 10 people where it said, “I think that one is wanted”, when it was a mismatch. Four of those were not even stopped, because it was obvious to the officer that it was not right. Six were spoken to briefly and on their way. If you compare that with human error, it is far, far lower. It is far less intrusive than normal police operations. And while there is clever technology saying, “We think you should speak to this person”—sorry Peter, I didn’t mean to point at you in that way—

I’m always getting recognised.

—the officer is making the decision. That is the critical point.

Thank you very much. There are still many things we could ask you, but I am aware that you have to go. Thank you again for coming. We will not leave it so long to get you back. We are particularly keen to hear about all the work you have been doing in the initiatives and to see how they are developing.