Boosting the Met
The Metropolitan Police is at a pivotal moment. It has to address decades of a failing internal culture whilst also rising to the challenge of new crimes, and getting back to the proper community policing London needs. But it's doing so whilst its funding continues to shrink. That has to change.
The funding crisis in the Met
In summer 2025 the Met Police announced that they would be closing more than half of their police station front counters across London. The Mayor seemed to wait to announce this over the summer break - when it would receive less scrutiny.
I think this is outright wrong - and I'm proud to say that alongside Lib Dem colleagues across London, we've been calling on the Mayor to explain how long he knew this before telling us, publish the impact assessment, and grow a backbone when it comes to asking the government for the funds the Met needs to do its job properly.
The Met Police announced this week that Sutton Police Station will soon no longer have a twenty-four hour police counter. The front counter is now only set to operate between 10am-10pm on weekdays and 9am-7pm on weekends.
This is unacceptable - it will leave people in Sutton and across London less safe. This disgraceful Mayor has broken his promise to keep a twenty-four hour front counter in every borough.
The Mayor's shocking carelessness and inability to stand up to his own party has got us here. If he had any integrity he would row this back immediately. Police front counters are still, for many people, the first port of call to report a crime that has just happened to them in public. God forbid anyone should experience a crime after ten o’clock at night.
For Sutton High Street, which has already seen its high-street police team reduced massively in recent months, this is particularly worrying.
It's a reminder that the Mayor and Government are not giving the Met Police the funding they need to do their jobs - keeping us all safe. It's why my Lib Dem colleagues and I across London are taking the fight to the Mayor - pushing in Parliament and the London Assembly for the Met to get the fair share of new funding for the police announced in the spending review.
The Sutton High Street policing team has now been cut back from 11 officers to just 4. I have written to the Mayor and the Met to demand an explanation, and to reverse this shocking decision.
I'm regularly in discussion with the Policing Minister, who has come to expect me to call out police cutbacks in London for what they are - deeply short-sighted and unfair. I will be continuing to lobby on behalf of our local police to get the resources they need - including their fair share of the new funding the government announced earlier this year in the spending review.
Getting this on the national stage
In November 2025 I asked my second PMQ - and I knew right away that I had to use it to get the Government to recognise that cuts to the Metropolitan Police in London will leave us all less safe.
Over the summer the Met confirmed they will have to reduce the number of 24/7 police front counters to just two across the entire city - despite Mayor Sadiq Khan’s 2024 election manifesto pledge that he would keep one open in each of London’s 32 boroughs.
And this isn't all - earlier this year the then Minister of State for Crime and Policing Dame Diana Johnson confirmed to me during a debate on the Crime and Policing Bill that the Met would be cutting 1,419 officers and staff in the next year.
The Prime Minister wasn't there (typical!) so Deputy PM David Lammy had to step in. You'd think that a London MP like himself would jump at the chance to recognise how important the Met is - but instead he refused to acknowledge issues caused by the cuts, and quoted figures for national police funding instead.
