00:00So, Assembly members will be familiar with the Met's financial situation and the policing is having to make a series of difficult decisions about how to save money to protect frontline services.
00:11So officers are out and about and in our communities preventing and detecting crime.
00:16With a £260 million black hole in our budget, it's inevitable that some of the choices we're having to make will change the way we police London and will be unpopular with some people.
00:26We are reducing the gap through a mixture of driving as hard as we can at efficiency savings and reducing our headcount by about 1700 officers and staff.
00:36There is no way of doing this that will not be noticed or its effects not felt somewhere.
00:42We can no longer do all of the things we once did in the same way, so we need to make difficult choices and prioritise.
00:49This essentially comes down to us having to choose between keeping officers on London streets where they can respond to the public and local communities.
00:57Or in the case that we are discussing today, retaining the current position on all front counters, which may be a symbolic point of access, but are largely underutilised, especially overnight.
01:09Front counter usage has been in steady decline since 2012, when 12% of all of our reported crime came in via station offices.
01:18Since then crime reporting across front counters has reduced to 5% as people have shifted to use of phones and online means.
01:26At some front counters, we see less than two and a half crimes a day reported.
01:31In the busiest, which is Charing Cross, that's 15 crimes, so within a 24 hour period, we are reporting less than one crime an hour.
01:39The average across all of our front counter estate is four crimes per day, reported across three shifts, which are often staffed by two people.
01:47We have made deliberate choices to protect neighbourhood policing, response policing and public protection.
01:54Services we know that matter most to Londoners, so we can be there when the public needs us most.
02:01This has included growing our neighbourhood teams by over 500 officers and PCSOs over the last two years.
02:07This year we will move a further circa 500 officers into community crime fighting and town centre teams.
02:13Whilst we are shrinking as an organisation overall, we are changing the shape of our organisation to better serve the public,
02:20and meet the increasing demands for policing at a time when every unit of that demand is getting more complex.
02:26Our current proposal is that some of our front counters will need to close.
02:31We think about 14 of our 24-7 front counters and four of our counters that are only open reduced hours.
02:38The remaining front counters will have their opening hours reviewed as part of the detailed design of this process.
02:43Now that the staff that are being affected have been told, and we have published a list of those likely affected for encounters,
02:52and Assembly members, councils, local members of parliament and other local leaders should all have had the opportunity to be contacted by local MET leaders to discuss this well in advance of today.
03:02I hope that has happened. Taking this action will save both £7 million a year in revenue and 3,752 hours of officer police time per month.
03:15I will explain that a little bit. The officer time is required to backfill shifts that can't be resourced by public access officers.
03:23So this equates to 469 officer shifts per month, so approximately 5,628 officer shifts per year, which in light of pleas across the board for more visible neighbourhood policing could be better spent on the streets.
03:38This is about value for money as well as modernising our services.
03:42I do understand the concerns of Assembly members that this might be viewed as a withdrawal of visible policing on presence from our communities.
03:51Our intent is the opposite of this.
03:53These decisions are about making the MET more accessible and visible in neighbourhoods when the organisation is shrinking.
04:00And in order to do so, we need to cut the pie a bit differently to what we have done previously.
04:05In this case, my view is we are making a decision to reduce an underused resource whilst maintaining some coverage across London.
04:1420 front counters will remain open to allow us to continue to strengthen neighbourhood policing teams and focus on getting officers closer to the wards that they police.
04:25As I mentioned finally in closing, we will be retaining 20 front counters across London to ensure that there is access
04:32and are working to form the detailed design, which will include what the opening hours of those front counters will be, as well as the staffing levels.
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