Scotland Yard axes 60 murder detectives to save millions
Scotland Yard is cutting 60 murder detectives across London in an attempt to save millions from its budget, The Telegraph can reveal.
Metropolitan Police bosses are making large cuts despite the murder rate in London remaining stubbornly high and detectives warning they are already operating at full capacity.
Under plans seen by The Telegraph, every one of the Met’s 20 homicide squads will lose three detective constables, reducing the headcount in each from 18 to 15.
The move is intended to shave £4.2 million or 10 per cent off the murder command’s annual budget, as the Met grapples with a £400 million funding shortfall.
As well as cutting the number of detectives in each team, the overtime budget will also be reduced, meaning those remaining are likely to see a drop in overall pay.
In addition, the Met’s specialist crime proactive units, which seek to disrupt and prevent violence before it occurs by going after weapons and known criminals, are also facing a 10 per cent budget cut from 2025.
In an internal Scotland Yard email, Detective Chief Superintendent Neil Cochin, the Met’s head of homicide, warned his team that every part of the force was facing cuts and homicide also had to play its part.
The memo, seen by The Telegraph, said: “For many years the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] has been underfunded but it has used reserves to mask the extent of this. This is akin to using family savings to pay the bills, it works for a while but eventually the savings run out and you face a budget crisis.
“The Commissioner is pushing the Home Office, Government and City Hall for more funds but we also need to look at how we work, how we can be more efficient and how we can be more innovative with the money that we do have.”
As part of the budget plans, Sir Mark Rowley, the Met’s Commissioner, told his top team that homicide would have to reduce its £42 million budget by 10 per cent in the coming year.
The memo went on: “The reality is that there are only two main options to save £4.2 million quickly – reduce the number of MITs [Murder Investigation Teams] by 10 per cent (ie. 20 to 18 teams) or reduce the size of the teams to achieve the same saving.”
Mr Cochin said after some consideration it had been decided to reduce the number of posts rather than teams.
Such are the concerns over the potential impact on the homicide command that the cuts will not begin until September and staff have been reassured the cuts will be achieved by natural staff movements rather than getting rid of individual officers.
But one senior homicide detective said the announcement had gone down badly because those working in the teams were already at full stretch.
He told The Telegraph: “Anyone who thinks that the murder rate is going down needs to have a look at our workload. We are absolutely flat out.
“We are all dealing with so many cases, it’s not even funny. We are so stretched that people are going off sick with stress and things are now only going to get worse.
“We get that there is a funding black hole but the answer is for the Government and the mayor to find the money not to make it harder for us to solve murders.”
While overall murder rates have been slowly coming down, there were 103 homicides across London last year.
Many investigations are complex, requiring hundreds of man hours to scour CCTV footage and download smartphone data.
Earlier this year, The Telegraph revealed how the Met was also under pressure to move experienced detectives from homicide and place them into other units such as rape, robbery and burglary.
It followed criticism in the Baroness Casey review that accused specialist units of monopolising the best investigators, leaving front-line policing as the “poor relation”.
The report pointed out: “A Met murder investigation will receive a whole team of experienced and specialist trained detectives, whereas a woman raped and left in a coma would likely be dealt with by one trainee detective constable. What message does that send to the living victim?”
