Met warns strikes will hurt war on crime

Commissioner warns of ‘unsustainable’ demands from health and care services

PUBLIC sector strikes will distract the police from fighting crime, Britain’s most senior police officer warns today.

Sir Mark Rowley, the Met Police Commissioner, said officers were being dragged into spending more time on health and social care work by keeping an eye on mentally ill and vulnerable patients in A&E departments rather than catching criminals.

In an article and interview with The Daily Telegraph, he said he planned to withdraw police from some of these tasks because the time spent on them had become “unsustainable”.

He warned the problem would only be “exacerbated” when other public services outside the NHS went on strike, noting that it was “something that the police as Crown servants cannot do”.

“If agencies we work closely with strike, it’s hard to imagine that more work won’t potentially overflow in our direction unless we’re very robust about it,” he said.

Sir Mark said it would “hurt officers all the more” to take on these roles in such circumstances when they “are not allowed to strike, feel they are not fairly rewarded and they’re the ones who will stay around 24/7”.

He made the comments as nurses prepare for their first nationwide strike alongside rail workers, civil servants, passport staff and Border Force officers.

Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, is expected to announce sweeping public sector cuts in next week’s Autumn Statement. In a challenge to the Government, Sir Mark said the Met Police needed a 27 per cent increase in its funding “just to stand still” in comparison with a decade ago.

“We must invest urgently in our fragile foundations,” he insisted. He said the Government-funded increase in police officers was “great” but said it had been partly funded by paying officers less in real terms and “hollowing out” the Met’s support services that “set officers up to succeed.”

Sir Mark admitted that it might not be “realistic in the current climate” to fix the challenges with money but he said there was a need for fundamental reforms of the police’s “blurred and bureaucratic” mission where officers were not only diverted to health tasks but also hampered by excessive form filling and paperwork.

“The blurring where we take on more and more work into social care, mental health is unsustainable. We seem to have fallen into taking calls that the ambulance service can’t get to which are fundamentally health issues. We’re dealing with massive amounts of mental health cases,” he said.

He said just 22 per cent of calls to the Met related to crime while more than half of officers on some shifts were tied up watching over people with mental health crises in hospital or in custody. Asked if he would withdraw police, from such tasks, he said: “I definitely will do. We’re starting to make plans on how to do that. It’s really tough because these are difficult issues but I’m spending lots of police time dealing with things that aren’t police work.

“Meanwhile, there’s police work that we’re not doing. That can’t be right.

“We’re just doing the work around how to draw those lines. We’ll be talking to the ambulance service and to the health service about those boundaries.”

He said policing had become obsessed with the idea that bureaucracy would boost trust, such that “officers

are more concerned about getting in trouble for not writing things down properly than they are about facing a dangerous criminal.”

“Trivial incidents that were not treated as crimes 20 or 30 years ago now have to be recorded in minute detail and then pored over. It hasn’t generated more trust [in police], has it? So I think if you view it as an experiment, it’s failed.”

He said his priority was reducing crime even ahead of tackling corruption, sexism and misogyny.

“I am absolutely determined about tackling crime, about putting police officers on the streets and communities and that’s what all this reform is about doing,” he said. “The embarrassing fact is that some of our foundations are not as strong as they need to be in respect of our integrity and I need to be clear that I’m sorting it.

“But fundamentally communities are less interested in the foundation than they are about what we deliver.

“My script, which I have mentioned before is more trust, less crime and high standards. And it deliberately starts with trust and crime and puts standards on the end.”

Meanwhile, Downing Street accused the civil service union of weaponising the migrant crisis by orchestrating strikes with the aim of overthrowing the Government.

The Public and Commercial Services union, (PCS) which represents civil servants in the Border Force, voted to strike over pay and conditions.

It represents workers in 124 government departments, which include the passport office and job centres.

It has now emerged that earlier this week Fran Heathcote, the PCS president, said the union’s “key demand” was to “get this government out” and usher in the Labour Party.

The revelation will increase calls for Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, to go further on anti-strike legislation. At present, the new law will force transport companies to provide a minimum level of service should workers walk out.

However, during her brief stint as prime minister, Liz Truss said she wanted to go further – extending the notion of a minimum level of service to critical public services such as the NHS.

Last night a government source said: “The Border Force union is trying to cause chaos at Christmas and ruin the festive plans of thousands of families just to help their masters in the Labour Party. It is totally unacceptable.”