Newly released figures show a record of officers leaving the Met Police this past year, mostly through resignation. Officer numbers in the capital are now down to levels last seen in the midst of Home Office austerity.
The Metropolitan Police Service is huge, with a budget of £5 billion. It makes up a quarter of the total spend on policing in England and Wales. While policing a population 9 million across Greater London’s 32 boroughs, it also holds important national policing portfolios such as Counter Terrorism.
In this ‘Stats Corner’ blog, I dive into the Met’s recently published workforce figures. This is hot off the press, including diversity comparisons, turnover trends, rank profiles, and the various functions/roles performed by the 45,150 people now working for the Metropolitan Police.
I hope you find it helpful, whether you’re an aspiring strategic police leader, working in the Met, or just interested in policing. And if you are seeking promotion in the police, wherever you are in the UK, my tried and tested, tailored support gives you the best possible preparation in the quickest possible time.
This follows on from my other recent published support and personal coaching to aspiring officers in the Met. Rank Success was again first on the scene with comprehensive guidance for the new assessments for senior leaders, along with lifting the lid on the ‘gamification’ of promotion for Federated ranks.
If you’re an aspiring leader in the Met, here’s a raft of relevant content specific and tailored to the Met Police I’ve published over the past couple of years…
- Met Senior Leader Assessments (blog, podcast)
- Gamification of Promotion Assessments (blog, podcast)
- Met PDR Promotion Process (blog, podcast)
- The Met’s Staff Survey Results (blog, podcast)
- Met Police Strength 2024 (blog)
- The Casey Review (blog, video)
- PEEL Report for the Met Police (video)
- Met Commissioner’s Speech (podcast)
Please give my podcast a follow and subscribe (£4.99) to support my work in producing such market-leading materials if any of this has helped you. I do all this in my spare time to bring you the maximum value, make sense of things for cops, and generally level the playing field of promotion.
Now let’s get to the stats…
Met Police Officer Strength Lowest Since Austerity
With a budget of over £5 billion, the Met polices a population of 9 million people around London. As such, they are the largest UK police force comprising 18% of the UK officer strength and have recently published its latest workforce figures up to March 2026.
These give an advanced view of police strength, before the Home Office publish national figures in a few months’ time. It doesn’t make for pleasant reading. However, it does give a decent perspective of a sizeable portion of the country’s officers, and perhaps an indication of what may be occurring in forces more generally.
As demonstrated above, their officer strength is massively down on 2025, with nearly 2,000 fewer Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) officers. This continues the downward trend since Uplift peaked the Met’s strength to 34,500. The last time police officer strength was this low in our capital city was in the midst of the ‘Austerity’ years.
So why the big drop in just a year? It comes down to a combination of record leavers and very few new recruits, as we’ll explore in the next section. Before getting to that, officer service length and apparent inexperience has been a big issue raised by the Police Federation in recent years following the surge of Uplift. Below compares the service length for officers in the Met…
Only 6% of officers in the Met have less than two years’ service, owing to the low recent recruitment numbers. Another 17% are in what the force categorises as 2-4 years (presumably meaning 2 up to 5?). Then 23% are in the 5-9 year bracket. 54% of officers have been serving for between 10 up to 30 years.
Going further, there’s a few hundred who have gone beyond the 30 years mark. And I really take my hat off to the 7 officers who have served for over 40 years… wow! How times have changed since joining in the ‘80s, the era in the Metropolitan Police (upon which ‘Ashes to Ashes’ was set!). I would be really interested if you wanted to share your story in a guest blog or podcast!
Record High Leavers, Record Low Joiners…
Last year, the Met Police recruited record low officer numbers for the year, at less than half their usual intake (694). There were also record high leavers (2,463), meaning that officer numbers drastically dropped by 1,832 FTE. This represents an officer turnover rate of 8%, higher than any point in the last decade.
The Met also publishes broad reasons for officers leaving in their droves, which I’ve put into the graphic below. Retirements now only account for around a third of leavers (it used to generally be two thirds). Resignations account for almost half of all officers leaving, often during their first few years of service following the rushed Uplift.
Transfers out to other forces made a sizeable chunk, with over 300 officers in the year making this choice. Tragically, there were 12 deaths of officers in the Met Police too.
On a related note, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) recently agreed to introduce long-awaited mandatory recording of police officer suicides. This is in addition to the police national suicide action plan implemented by Oscar Kilo to educate and support the workforce, reduce stress and improve data recording, given the unique risk policing poses as a profession. It’s wider aims are to help create a culture that supports mental health, tackles stigma and ensures everyone affected by suicide or suicidal thoughts can access timely support.
Dismissals are at record highs, with 166 officers dismissed in the 2025/26 financial year. That’s 14 officers sacked per month, possibly slightly more since the force counts in FTE not headcount here. Proportionately, far fewer police staff, PCSOs or Specials were dismissed, totalling just 38 from its nearly 14,000 workforce for these roles.
The Met is no doubt ruthlessly rooting out more officers aligned to its focus on standards, as part of its ‘New Met for London’ strategy. For example, it now has well over 1,500 officers and staff working in its ‘Professionalism’ command.
The ‘Resignation’ and ‘Transfer’ categories hide the true reasons for quitting. But these are crucial for leaders to understand if they wish to do anything practical to stem the flow of increased officer turnover in recent years. The Met’s own staff survey results are a good place to start. Performing frontline duties occasionally with your team, especially for more senior Met leaders, is a far more powerful method I encourage and support to ‘keep in touch’.
Staff Increasing, PCSOs Recovering, Specials Declining…
Before diving deeper into the police officer workforce, let’s spend a moment on how the workforce mix is changing in the Met Police.
As at the end of March 2026, there were 11,558 FTE staff employed by the Met, over 200 more than 2025 and continuing an increasing trend since 2018. Prior to the dark days of austerity in policing, staff in the Met had peaked at over 14,000 according to prior Home Office figures. Police Staff now form 26% of the Met’s 45,000 overall strength.
PCSOs have been making a slight recovery in the Met since its 2020/21 low of 1,152 FTE. PCSO strength now stands at 1,389, bucking the national England and Wales declining trend.
However, things don’t look so positive for the Met’s Special Constabulary. At a headcount of 1,023 in March 2026, this is less than a third of the MSC strength a decade ago and less than a fifth of its 2011/12 peak of over 5,700. Another 201 Specials left the force in the past year, representing a turnover rate of a whopping 20%.
Diversity of Met Police Officers
There are over 300 languages spoken among London’s 9 million population, with 46% being from what the Met Police call an Ethnic Minority Group (EMG). A further 17% are from White Other (including white minority groups such as Eastern European) and 37% are White British.
The Met Police place significant importance on its workforce diversity, particularly in relation to its officer representation of EMG and women. Being representative of the resident population served is seen as a key driver of improving public confidence and cooperation.
For EMGs, the Met’s long-term target is 40%, with a 28% milestone by 2030. Officers have gradually increased from 10% EMG in 2010/11 to 19% by March 2026. For context, 72% are White British, 7% are White Other, and the ethnicity for nearly 3% of officers is not recorded.
The Met did achieve its highest proportion of EMG officers in last year’s (low) recruitment, at 26%. However, it is clearly unlikely to hit those workforce milestones or targets anytime soon, even if the Met were to double its intake of EMG officers.
For female officers, there is a 50% long-term target for officer representation, with the 2030 milestone aimed at 40%. Currently, 32% of the Met’s officers are female, which has risen from 23% female in 2010/11. 23% of its female officers have part-time working, showing the importance of flexible working for women in policing, compared to 2% part-time working for male officers.
Police Staff in the Met are currently at 57% female, for which their stated goal for the next 3-10 years is to maintain this at over 50%.
Back to officers, for promotion to Sergeant and Inspector level, there are similar goals and milestones for each protected characteristic. However, the rate is even lower than general for EMGs, at 15% for Sergeant and 12% for Inspector ranks. Female officers comprise 26% of Sergeants and 24% of Inspectors in the Met, again lower than the general proportionality of women officers.
Where Does the Commissioner Prioritise Service?
Well over half of the Met’s officer resource is assigned to its 12 geographic BCUs. Most of the rest are spread between Non-BCU Frontline Policing, Specialist Ops, and Ops & Performance. Then there’s just over 2,000 officers allocated to non-frontline departments.
Before we dive in further, here’s how the Met is structured according to an organisation chart the force previously published (as at early 2024):
Below shows exactly how the Met Police allocates officers to each of its frontline policing departments and unit. The BCUs on average each have around 1,500 officers, with the largest allocated to the Central West BCU (1,948 officer FTE). This covers Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, and Westminster.
The largest department by far in terms of officer strength in its Frontline Policing – Non BCU portfolio is Central Specialist Crime. Northleigh is the operation name for the Grenfell Tower fire that occurred in 2017 and has 145 FTE officers allocated. Notably, the Royal Parks OCU now has zero strength, since its controversial disbandment to save money in 2025. This function previously had around 80 FTE officers.
The Met doesn’t break down its Specialist Operations strength further, but there are further breakdowns in its Operations & Performance arm. The MO7 Taskforce is the largest here, with 908 officers. This mainly covers public order, including the Met’s TSG, the Surge Team and Mounted Branch. The Specialist Firearms Command and Met Intelligence form the next largest areas in these Met Ops (MO) branches.
The Met also places 2,065 officers in the below support departments. Learning & Development appears the biggest but note this also holds the student officer strength, along with officer trainers and such. There’s 123 FTE officers allocated to work in tech and change teams, with another 18 performing a public communications function.
Professional Standards departments have ballooned in policing over the last decade. There’s now 671 FTE officers allocated to this function in the Met. That’s over 1/3 of those allocated to PSD across England and Wales.
This is also a relatively top-heavy branch of the Met. Of these 671, 86 FTE are at or above the rank of Inspector. There’s another one FTE at Chief Superintendent level and a further 8 above this rank within the Professionalism Headquarters unit. In fact, the relatively small Professionalism portfolio hosts a quarter of the Met’s most senior police officers (those at or above Commander rank).
For comparison, the Central West BCU mentioned earlier is the Met’s biggest single department, with three times the officers allocated to PSD (1,948 officers FTE). Conversely, it has just 67 FTE at or above Inspector.
Ranks in the Met…
Finally in this stats-heavy blog, it seems a good point to finish things on the rank profile. So here’s the Met’s strength by rank as at the end of March 2026:
78% of the Met’s officer strength are Constables, as either PCs or DCs. There are on average around 5 Constables per Sergeant, but this ‘span of control’ will vary largely by team. Going back to 2010, prior to the Austerity years, there were nearly 1,200 more Sergeants in the Met (and 500 more Constables), which brought the ratio down to 4 per Sergeant.
As it happens, there were also 350 more Inspectors and over 100 more officers in the ranks at or above Chief Inspector. So that is nearly 1,700 fewer FTE in total in its leadership posts, compared to the Met’s not-so-distant history.
It can be quite immense for folk in other forces to perceive an organisation having 34 people at Commander (equivalent to ACC rank) and above. But it’s almost 10 times the size of my local force where I served as a DI, Devon and Cornwall, which has 5, so this seems reasonable.
For more information on ranks and associated pay for each, see my recent blog all about police pay. And if you’re seeking promotion through the ranks, either in the Met with their new promotion processes, or anywhere else with my toolkits or guidance suitable for all UK forces (and beyond!), please feel free to get in touch. No AI bots or forms to fill in, just a friendly conversation to support your leadership aspirations and to help you nail your promotion.
Kind Regards, Steve
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