Overtime bill for policing the Notting Hill Carnival in 2022

Freedom of information request reference no: 01.FOI.23.029423

I note you seek access to the following information:

Baroness Casey's Final Report published today includes the following:

"We were told of well-known overtime ‘rackets,’ such as shifts for major events like Notting Hill Carnival and New Year’s Eve being filled by officers on overtime, rather than being scheduled as part of regular shift patterns, even though the dates are known well in advance.

We were told that senior leaders had endorsed this, or looked the other way, while a model developed where officers could work overtime when it was convenient to them, and refuse it when it was not." (p192)

I can see that the overtime bill for policing the Notting Hill Carnival in 2022 was £5,397,032:

1. Please provide the number of officers who received this sum.

2. Please provide all information held which refers to any attempt you have made to curb overtime spending on the Notting Hill Carnival since January 2021.

3. Please explain what you mean by 'opportunity costs'. Do you mean something other than the salary bill for officers excluding overtime?

Decision

I have today decided to disclose some of the requested information. Some data has been withheld as it is exempt from disclosure and therefore this response serves as a Refusal Notice under Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act) by virtue of the following exemptions:

Section 12(2) - Cost of Compliance would exceed Freedom of Information Act Limit

Reason for decision

The MPS is unable to determine within the cost/research threshold set out by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection Act Fees Regulations 2004, whether any information relevant to the following part of your request is held:

Q2 - Please provide all information held which refers to any attempt you have made to curb overtime spending on the Notting Hill Carnival since January 2021.

In this regard, I estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the appropriate limit. For agencies outside of central Government, the cost threshold is set at £450 and represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours [at a rate of £25 per hour] determining whether the public authority holds the information. This also includes locating, retrieving and extracting the information requested.

The MPS is unable to identify whether any information is held by the MPS in respect of any attempt to reduce overtime spending on the Notting Hill Carnival from 1 January 2021 to 21 March 2023.

The MPS is the UK's largest police service, employing more than 43,000 police officers and staff. The MPS is comprised of four main business groups being:

• Frontline Policing
• Specialist Operations
• Met Operations
• Professionalism

Frontline Policing provide policing services to London's 32 boroughs through 12 Basic Command Units. They deliver local and neighbourhood policing as well as specialist crime investigation capability. Specialist Operations has responsibility for the security and protection of London from terrorism, extremism and subversion whilst Met Operations provide additional operational capabilities to reinforce and support Frontline Policing and Specialist Operations. The Professionalism Command is responsible for making sure that MPS employees adhere to the highest professional standards.

These four aforementioned business groups are supported by a single Met HQ that provides strategic services covering People, Change, Commercial Services, Finance, Legal Services, Media, Communications, Strategy and Governance and Digital, Data and Technology. Our Shared Support Services provide transactional and support services which includes hire to retire, career transition/awards, procurement, referencing and vetting. Each of these business groups and the various directorates that comprise Met HQ and/or Shared Support Services, can be further broken down into the various units, departments and teams that make up the MPS.

A number of the MPS Commands, units, departments and/or teams referred to above, could have generated an email, document, report or similar, that refers in whole or part, to reducing the Notting Hill Carnival overtime spend. Searches would accordingly have to be completed across the MPS to determine whether any information is held that is relevant to this part of your request. It is not possible to provide a precise estimate of the time required to determine whether any information is held that is relevant to this part of your request, however it is clear that the extent of the research required to locate any applicable information is vast. I accordingly estimate that it would take a single member of staff a period of time far in excess of the 18 hour research/cost threshold of the Act to determine whether any information is held that is relevant to your request for information. For this reason, I have refused your request for information.

It should be noted that the Information Commissioner's guidance states that 'Section 12 makes it clear that a public authority does not have to make a precise calculation of the costs of complying with a request. Only an estimate is required ... what amounts to a reasonable estimate can only be considered on a case by case basis.' The Information Commissioner also advises 'where a reasonable estimate has been made that the appropriate limit would be exceeded, there is no requirement for a public authority to undertake work up to the limit.'

CONTEXT
The MO6 Command has confirmed that there are established processes for minimising the overtime spend when policing the Notting Hill Carnival. The vast majority of officers are warned that they will be required to work the Carnival many weeks in advance of the event and/or have it rostered into their duties to minimise the overtime spend. Additionally, the majority of the overtime spend comes from the cost of paying officers to work on a bank holiday, as well as asking them to complete long days. It should be noted that the bank holiday rate of pay is set out in police regulations and must be paid when police officers work on this date.

The table provided below shows the reasons why the overtime was paid and highlights that the percentage of overtime paid for officers to work the Carnival at short notice (-15 days’ notice) was relatively small. It should also be noted that some short notice warning of officers to work is inevitable to cover staff sickness and/or where operational requirements have changed.

Notting Hill Carnival 2022 Overtime Breakdown	Amount
Double Time (Bank Holiday)	£4,246,403
Time and half (-15 notice)	£137,081
Time/ time and a third (end of rostered tour)	£936,806
Total	£5,320,290

Commanders on Carnival actively seek to keep officer shifts during the event as short as possible, both to minimise the overtime spend but also for officer welfare as most officers work extremely long hours over the Carnival weekend. If we reduced the length of officer shifts on the event to reduce the overtime spend, we would need considerably more officers to work the event which would create costs in other ways.

All overtime in the MPS worked by officers has to be approved by a supervisor and manager electronically so there is an auditable record of claims and approvals. All Carnival overtime is logged with a specific code on the Met’s IT system so we have clear records of who has claimed what in relation to the event. Senior officers are held to account for meeting their budgets of which overtime is usually the most scrutinised component.

Disclosure

Ordinarily, when one part of a request is refused because the cost of completing that part of the request would exceed the appropriate limit, this results in the refusal of the request in its entirety. This approach is in line with the guidance of the Information Commissioner (the Freedom of Information ombudsman). However, on this occasion to assist you with your request, I have provided the information held below.

Q1 - Please provide the number of officers who received this sum.

7343 police officers and members of staff received the sum of £5,320,290 in overtime payments. This figure has been amended since the MPS published its costs for the Notting Hill Carnival 2022.

Q3 - Please explain what you mean by 'opportunity costs'. Do you mean something other than the salary bill for officers excluding overtime?

The opportunity cost refers to the loss of a potential gain when one alternative is chosen in favour of another. The published opportunity cost refers to the estimated salary, excluding overtime, of the police officers and staff that were diverted to police the Notting Hill Carnival as opposed to performing a different task. The published figure includes support costs (average overhead cost by rank).