Who is accountable for the performance of London’s police? There is no single politician whose job depends on what happens at the Metropolitan Police Service. Rather, the Met is an organisation with two masters, albeit the two aren’t exactly equal. The outcome? Messy, confused responsibilities leading to unclear decision-making that leaves Londoners unsure who is in charge.
There is plenty of good reading on why we find ourselves in this position. A starting point is Professor Tony Travers’s excellent book, The Politics of London, which tells the story of the tussle back in the late 1990s between those with a bold vision for a new devolved settlement for the capital and Whitehall’s age-old refusal to give up power.
Police accountability was caught up in this. The Greater London Authority Act (1999) spelled out the policing powers of the Mayor of London and the London Assembly. They were a dilution of the original vision of the Mayor having sole responsibility for policing in the city and instead left the Home Secretary with considerable power, notably over the hiring (and firing) of the Met Commissioner.
The Met’s national as well as London responsibilities were used as the justification. Professor Travers and my LCA colleague Robert Gordon Clark flagged this in an early comment piece for the Evening Standard back in 2000.
We’ve ended up with London’s Mayors scrutinised and held to account for the Met’s performance by the Assembly and, arguably, by the media and the public too. Yet, despite this, Mayors have no legal power to decide who is in charge of it. Worse, it means commentators can blame the Mayor of the day for the conduct of operational matters that are wholly the responsibility of the Commissioner.
For 25 years, this untidy model has loomed over London’s policing. One of its many shortcomings has twice been exposed when Mayors have made known their lack of confidence in Met chiefs – in the first case by Boris Johnson in 2009 and then by Sir Sadiq Khan in 2022 – resulting in Commissioners being effectively forced out of their jobs, despite those Mayors not having legal powers to do so.
I haven’t been shy about laying into the dog’s breakfast of politicians’ powers and responsibilities that applies to the Met. My views were forged during my years as Sir Sadiq Khan’s policy chief and have been reinforced during the years since.
I believe the Met is too large to operate effectively. Its national functions, such as counter-terrorism and royal family and VIP protection, should be shifted to a new organisation. And the Home Secretary should lose the power to fire-and-hire the Commissioner, with this instead residing solely with the Mayor or, at the very least, becoming a truly joint decision between the two rather than Home Secretaries’ being pre-eminent. Such changes, along with internal structural overhauls, would result in an organisation freed to focus solely on policing London.
A shift of that type would raise further questions. At present, London’s Mayors are required to draw up a police and crime plan, setting priorities for the Met. But they have no control over day-to-day operational policing. Given the size of the mandates Mayors win – a million votes and more – should they have more power to give the Met directions?
Who should have the power to ban problematic marches, the Commissioner, the Mayor or the Home Secretary (at present, it is the latter, and only if the Commissioner requests it, although many people think the Mayor has this power).
But once clearer and simpler arrangements had been made, London’s voters would be in a far better position to make judgements about the Met’s and Mayors’ crime and policing performances.
I read with interest the government’s ambitious plans for shaking up policing in England and Wales. These are extensive and would see national functions combined into a new British equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States. The head of this new organisation would become the most senior police chief in the country, dislodging the Met Commissioner from a position he or she has held since London policing’s earliest days.
Swept away would be directly-elected Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) outside London with the Home Secretary regaining the power to hire and fire Chief Constables. But where would that leave those Mayors who are de facto PCCs, as is the case with London’s and Greater Manchester’s? And how will this fit with the new system of local government being created in much of non-metropolitan England?
Here, the government’s intentions are less clear. Will there be a weakening – or removal altogether – of the Mayor of London’s role in the capital’s policing? With the Met’s national functions stripped out, gone with the stroke of a pen is one of the main reasons used to justify the Home Secretary’s involvement in London’s policing. But rather than a reduced role for the centre, might Whitehall’s powers over it actually be strengthened?
And what about the future of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) – body formed in 2012 to replace the Metropolitan Police Authority – that support’s the Mayor’s oversight and scrutiny of the Met? What of the still-new London Policing Board, a panel of appointees set up as recommended by Louise Casey in her far-reaching 2023 review of standards and institutional culture in the Met (and which an aggrieved Assembly police and crime committee would like to see dissolved).
Then there is the separate matter of the small but significant City of London Police, which serves the Square Mile independently of the Met, but also leads nationally on fraud. Will that responsibility too be passed up to a new FBI-style organisation? Has the very existence of the City police been brought into question?
There is also an argument for the Met to be given responsibility for all transport-related policing in London, rather than its rail services, including the London Underground, being the responsibility of the national British Transport Police, as at present.
Much detail needs to emerge before we can fully understand the ramifications for London of what Shabana Mahmood has in mind. Perhaps it is a rare opportunity to both clear up the muddle in which the Met is caught and strengthen London’s devolution settlement – and all in time for the Met’s 200th birthday in 2029.
Yet some of the early signs suggest that the old tendency of the centre to hoard and claw back power is re-asserting itself. Governments may change, but Whitehall’s giant sucking sound never goes away.
Nick Bowes was Mayor Khan’s director of policy from 2016 until 2021. He is now managing director, insight and public affairs at LCA. Follow him on Bluesky. Image from Met Police X/Twitter profile.
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