Cost of policing royal events under scrutiny as violent crime soars
THE SECURITY operation for the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge cost police more than £6m, figures have revealed for the first time.
Nearly £3m was spent on overtime costs alone, with hundreds of officers drafted in to help police crowds watching the event in London in 2011.
While next month’s wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle will be on a smaller scale, Thames Valley Police are preparing for around 100,000 spectators.
That will make it one of the force’s largest ever security operations, which will require reinforcements from other forces, including the Metropolitan Police.
Ken Marsh is chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers in the capital.
He said the extra hours required of officers for a combination of large operations and an “unprecedented” level of violent crime in London have become a “huge drain” and must be seen as part of a wider welfare issue which is putting front line services at risk.
Figures obtained through several Freedom of Information requests showed that, in total, £6.35m was spent policing Kate and William’s wedding, including £2.8m on police overtime. Of that, £3.6m was paid by a Home Office grant. An estimate for the
total cost of the security operation put forward by the Metropolitan Police in 2011 placed the figure closer to £7.2m, according to a previous Freedom of Information disclosure.
Mr Marsh (inset) said: “Obviously, this is a huge drain on my colleagues in terms of the hours that they have to work.”
He added: “If you ask human beings to work the sort of hours they’re working, something has to give.”
And while the UK’s national tourism agency Visit Britain said that the country had experienced a seven per cent increase in visitors between April and June 2011 compared to the previous year, those hoping for a boost to the wider economy from a major royal event may have been left disappointed. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show the combination of an extra bank holiday and the warmest April for 100 years contributed to a slight dip in economic activity. The figures for the cost of policing come ahead of preparations for the next royal wedding on May 19, and a row over police staffing levels amid claims that the spike in killings in London is linked to cuts in police numbers. A further Freedom of Information request found that the overtime cost for the 2011 wedding represented around four per cent of the total £74.4m overtime bill for the force that year, which also suffered extra demands on police time due to the London riots.
A Thames Valley Police spokesman said costs for the police operation and any additional infrastructure will be shared between the force and the local council, but that any opportunity to recover costs from the Home Office at a later date “will of course be explored”.
A Home Office spokesman said: “Police funding has increased £460m in 2018-19, including £280m from council tax precept, so that at a local, national and counter terrorism level the police have the resources they need.
“Forces include reasonable contingencies within their budgets for unexpected events in their areas and they also hold usable reserves of over £1.6bn, compared to £1.4bn in 2011.”