The Met's Drugs Action Plan 2024 - 2026

The Met's Drugs Action Plan 2024-2026 is part of our focus on precise community crime fighting outlined in A New Met for London.

The plan complements the Met's Serious and Organised Crime Strategy and aligns with the Government's 10 Year Drugs Strategy, the NPCC Drugs Strategy, the MOPAC Policing and Crime Plan and Dame Carol Black's Drugs Review. It takes into account feedback from Londoners through the Public Attitude Survey and supports the Government's missions on safer streets, early prevention, intervention, an improved neighbourhood response and protecting communities together.

Focusing our resources

The Action Plan steers away from specific recommendations and activity and sets out ten commitments which highlight where we believe the Met's resources are best focused.

We believe flexibility is critical as it means we can remain responsive to changes in drugs use, composition, policy and legislation, and ensures we are able to improve our response to the proposed enhanced intelligence capture, hoped for expansion in areas such as drug testing in our custody suites and new academic research.

As we adopt this plan we will be maintaining our approach of listening to and incorporating community feedback particularly from young people and those affected by drugs use.

The Drugs Action Plan emphasises collaborative working with local drugs services, partners, health agencies and criminal justice to address the supply and demand for drugs.

In summary, our commitments are:

• We will work to minimise the impact of drugs on London’s communities through focusing our local and specialist resource on those areas most affected by drugs and linked to anti-social behaviour.
• We will retain our focus on closing County and London Lines to ensure we protect Londoners from exploitation and violence.
• We will further develop our understanding of the links between drugs and violence to ensure we deploy our finite resources to achieve the maximum impact on perpetrators and keep all London’s communities safe.
• We will maintain our investigative response to ensure we bring offenders to justice efficiently and effectively. We will monitor changes in the volume of offences whilst ensuring appropriate convictions or out of court disposals are pursued.
• We will work with partners to ensure we minimise the harm associated with drugs.
• We will listen to community voices to better understand the harm caused by drugs on young people, families and communities.
• We will use available data and evidence to prioritise activity targeting those illicit drugs that cause the most harm to individuals and communities and which generate the most financial benefit to organised crime.
• We will ensure our response recognises the importance of the online and digital environment.
• We will maintain a performance framework that matches our ambition to support A New Met for London, the Met’s Serious and Organised Crime Strategy and relevant national strategies.
• We will keep our Action Plan under regular review, focused on changes within the drugs market, tactics and methodologies deployed by organised criminals.

The full plan is available to download below.