Leaks and crumbling ceilings: Met says half its buildings face closure

A large section of the ceiling is missing in one of the women's bathrooms at Shoreditch police station. Some of it is now sitting in a crate on the floor.

"We had a leak from the toilet system on the floor above," explains David Mathieson, the Metropolitan Police's director of real estate development, pointing out how the sewage water has seeped into the carpet next to the lockers.

"The systems are just so old, we keep patch repairing them, but they need to be ripped out and replaced."

He's showing us around the station to illustrate the problems, after Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley warned the Met faces having to close buildings and lose 1,700 officers and staff due to a £260m budget shortfall.

In a report presented to the London Policing Board last month, Sir Mark said that, unless the Met received more money in the government's Spending Review on Wednesday, London could experience "sustained increases" in knife crime, violence against women and girls, and theft.

He warned this meant the government's key pledges to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls in a decade, and to boost neighbourhood policing, were also at risk.

Sir Mark added that the Met would be forced to close up to half of its buildings over the next decade "due to them being no longer habitable or legally compliant".

In November, the commissioner warned the Met faced "eye-watering cuts" to services and a £450m funding gap, although he's since acknowledged that extra funding from the Home Office and City Hall means its final settlement is "nearly £100m better" than feared.

However, last month he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that police forces across the country were carrying the "scar tissue of years of austerity cuts" and said they needed more money to meet government ambitions on policing.

The government has promised thousands of neighbourhood police officers and nearly 400 police community officers will be recruited for forces in England and Wales over the next 12 months, as part of the target to hit 13,000 by 2029.

BBC London has asked repeatedly for an interview with Sir Mark ahead of the Spending Review and has approached the Home Office for comment.

"You'd normally refurbish a building every 25 years," Mr Mathieson tells me. "Our budget is now once every 125 years."

The Met says it's already shrunk from 620 buildings in 2010 down to 260, in order to find money for front-line services.

Shoreditch police station closed to the public in 2017, when London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan said government cuts meant he had no choice but to make savings.

But although the shutters are down, the building is still operational, as a base for the Hackney Safer Neighbourhood team and as a training facility for officers learning to use Tasers.

Mr Mathieson takes us on a grim tour, pointing out how the sewage leak has gone right through the building, into the instructors' lockers on the lower floors - now replaced by a red bucket - the missing ceiling s along the corridor, and the single boiler providing heat and hot water.

"We should have two but we didn't have the budget," he tells us, adding that the building will have to close completely if the boiler fails.

He tells me that four defunct boilers - which he thinks date back to the 1960s when the station was built - have been kept so they can "cannibalise them for parts around the other bits of the estates".

The upstairs women's bathroom, which was flooded in March, remains out of order, with parts of the ceiling taken down simply to make the building safe.

Just across the corridor, on the back of the locker-room door, is a poster encouraging officers to "take pride in your workplace".

In April, the Met detailed a list of savings it would need to make in order to protect front-line services such as neighbourhood policing and public protection teams, which tackle sex offences and domestic abuse.

Those plans include scrapping the Royal Parks Police and Safer Schools officers, along with cuts to forensics and mounted police and potentially taking firearms off the Flying Squad.

The commissioner has said he wants the force to grow in size to 38,000 officers and 19,000 civilian staff, but said the Met was expected to have just 31,248 officers and 10,972 staff by the end of the year.

He predicts the force will lose about 1,700 officers, PCSOs and staff, but that additional funding may allow the force to reduce the losses by speeding up recruitment.

In the face of protecting front-line services, it might make sense that refurbishing buildings is less of a priority, but Mr Mathieson tells me it's clear that it's having a terrible impact on officer morale.

"The quality of the space you live and work in is absolutely intrinsic to your sense of self worth... your sense of being valued," he says.

He opens another door, revealing a locker room with peeling paint and stained flooring.

"Imagine this is your first day as a Met officer, and you're being asked to get changed in here."

Insp Ryan Rose, who works on Taser training, agrees, telling me that thousands of students through the base and often comment on the poor conditions.

We watch as some trainees line up in front of us on the indoor target range, and an instructor tells the group to "listen, react, engage," before they fire.

"One of the core principles of Taser training is we try and instil professionalism in how you handle the weapon," Insp Rose explains, "and we are doing that in a very non-professional environment.

"It's really cold in the winter, it's really hot in the summer."

He says the students are currently having to go to another part of the building to find working toilets, which is disruptive.

"It slows down the training... leaks on the range and leaks in the toilets... sometimes we need to shut down training."

"The perfect thing to do with this building is to completely gut it and start again," says Mr Mathieson.

"It needs a complete, thorough refurbishment, but that will probably cost £30m, and that means we can't spend £30m on any of the 259 other buildings in the rest of the estate.

"I'm always having to judge where are the biggest, most critical problems and put the funding into those."

On Monday, it was announced that police budgets would get a real- increase in each of the next three years, but it is unclear whether that rise would fill the budget gaps the Met commissioner has highlighted.

The BBC understands that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is the last minister yet to agree a funding deal with the Treasury before the Spending Review.

Technology Secretary Peter Kyle told the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that police forces were being given £1bn extra funding this year, and said other public services were struggling "because of the inheritance that we had as a country and as a government".

He added: "We expect the police to start embracing the change they need to do, to do their bit for change as well. We are doing our bit."

A spokesperson for the mayor of London said the previous Conservative government had "chronically underfunded the Met".

"Sadiq has done everything in his power to the police and recently announced record £1.16bn investment for the Met to protect neighbourhood policing in our communities, secure 935 front-line police officer posts and significantly reduce the level of cuts the Met had been planning."