Assembly asks Mayor to lobby Government over £55m cut to police technology budget

The London Assembly's Budget and Performance Committee wrote to the Mayor on 7 July asking him to press the Government to restore funding for police productivity work, after the Home Office technology budget supporting it fell by £55m.

The committee's release states that HM Treasury withdrew the funding to implement the work from 2025-26, and that the Home Office technology budget was cut from £105 million to £50 million in the same period.

That is a cut of 52% in a year.

The committee's release states that the independent Policing Productivity Review of November 2023 made 26 recommendations, which could "free up approximately 38 million hours of police time each year within five years". It puts that at around 20,000 additional officers across the UK.

The publication page for the letter states that the committee calls on the Mayor to "lobby the Government to seek restoration of this funding and secure sustained investment to support the delivery of productivity improvements across policing".

The release states that neighbourhood officers spend an average of 18% of their time on patrol, on Home Office Police Activity Survey data that excludes the Met. It asks the Met either to take part in the survey or to develop its own tracking.

How much of the withdrawn money would have reached the Met is not on the record. The publication page gives no Met officer numbers and no Met figure for this work.

A second committee wrote six days later. Susan Hall AM, chairman of the Police and Crime Committee, wrote to the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime on 13 July.

That letter's publication page states that the committee "heard that following MOPAC's blocking of the Palantir contract, the Met would need to make further 'tough choices'". MOPAC is the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime, which holds the Met to account and sets its budget.

The page states that Hall requested "clarity over what these tough choices might be, and how they will impact London's policing". It gives no value for the blocked contract and no date for the decision.

The GLA's own decisions register does not carry that decision. The register holds 3,916 records, filterable by decision type — Assistant Director, Deputy Mayor for Fire, Director, GLRO and Mayor — with no type for the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime.

The Assembly's publications index, checked on 14 August, lists no reply to either letter and no publication mentioning Palantir. Its most recent entries are a Fire Committee letter on wildfires of 29 July, two Economy, Culture and Skills Committee letters of 23 and 21 July, and the Transport Committee's YouGov survey of 15 July.