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The Met remains in special measures as the latest inspection report reveals inadequacies in the force’s management of sex offenders, how it deals with online child abuse offenders and its approach to investigating crime. With a £400m hole in its funding, the Met is struggling to implement the reforms set out in its transformation plan, A New Met for London.
His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) last inspected the capital’s police force in 2022, where it placed it in Engage (it’s terminology for special measures) status and criticised the way it handled 999 and 101 calls. While it finds some improvement in this area, the inspectors have ‘serious concerns’ about the way the Met is monitoring sex offenders and its systems for dealing with perpetrators of online child abuse.
In a section focused on managing offenders and suspects, the report highlights a cause of concern about how the Met manages risks posed by registered sex offenders in the community. It criticises a lack of training for officers, inconsistent practice and a lack of oversight of performance. In one case, the inspectorate found that a registered sex offender hadn’t been successfully visited by officers since 2017.
“As such, this individual and the risk they pose to the community wasn’t being managed. The Violent and Sex Offender Register showed that eight attempts had been made over a six-year period to contact the individual, but there had been no proactive consideration of arresting the individual or issuing a warrant.”
Added to this, the report says that it found evidence that ‘too many visits to registered sex offenders are announced in advance’ which is says contravenes national and Met standards in this area. The inspectorate makes a range of recommendations for change within the next six months to improve the Met’s management of the risk of these offenders.
Similar issues exist within the force’s Online Child Sex Abuse Exploitation (OCSAE) team in terms of consistency of approach across London, management of data and performance. The inspectorate is so concerned about this, it says that the Met should immediately review its operating model with a focus on how it triages digital devices to ascertain where to focus its investigation, and ensure a consistent approach to image grading.
The second area graded inadequate is how the Met investigates crime. The report says that the force doesn’t allocate its investigations to teams with the right skills and experience; it also has concerns about the right levels of supervision. The Met has a crime allocation policy but the inspectorate it isn’t widely understood and consistently applied. Within six months, the inspectorate says the Met should introduce a risk assessment process to deal with allocation issues, resolve the policy and supervisory concerns in this area.
Published against a backdrop of far-right riots after the murder of three young girls in Southport, the report recognises the pressures that the Met faces in dealing with the rise in protest across the capital. It links this will the force’s inability to recruit enough officers as part of the uplift programme and retention is also highlighted as problematic.
“Given the size and scale of the changes being carried out, the transformation of the force is still very much a work in progress. A lot more needs to be done to implement and establish those changes across the whole organisation.”
Lee Freeman, HM Inspector of Constabulary.
The Met says there is an overall budget gap of £400m for this year as the force seeks £4.5bn to carry out all of its duties. In addition, the cost of implementing its New Met for London plan – to complete the transformation it set out in response to Baroness Casey’s report into the murder of Sarah Everard – is estimated at £170m but only £78m is available for it. The inspectors say that the funding position represents a ‘significant risk to the capability and capacity of the force to implement the improvements that are required’ and will slow down the pace of reform.
Elsewhere in this 60-page detailed report, the inspectorate says that the force needs to improve its approach to tackling anti-social behaviour, finding evidence that the force is missing opportunities to stop it or reduce its effect, it says senior leaders should increase the emphasis on preventing it.
This will be of interest to the new government as part of Labour’s first steps for change which set out five national missions, with one focused cracking down on anti-social behaviour and a pledge to ‘take back our streets.’ The Labour manifesto pledged an extra 13000 more neighbourhood police officers on the beat to help deal with this problem.
In this report and the one from 2022, the inspectors found that the force is not recording anti-social behaviour consistently and does not have the analytical capability to examine the data. A move to a single system for recording anti-social behaviour called NEC Connect ‘should improve the quality of the data,’ it says.
In the last year, the force recorded 240k incidents but only issued 783 ASBOs and the inspectorate questions why the rate is so low relative to other forces in England and Wales. The inspectorate notes that “this means that the force is missing opportunities to use orders to reduce instances of antisocial behaviour.”
The full report can be found on the HMICFRS website.
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