The Mayor and Met have finally decided to address the biggest problem facing policing in London.
It’s not a rising murder rate, out-of-control phone thefts or sky-high rates of shoplifting. Nor is it the falling officer numbers, huge budget gap or the impact of the next round of policing cuts.
Instead, they are laser-focused on the need to push forward with a new diversity and inclusion strategy.
Putting aside the poor prioritisation, writing an inclusion strategy for the Met’s workforce should be really easy.
We treat everyone as individuals and judge them on their merits.
Discriminating against people solely because of their race, religion or any other protected characteristic is wrong. The End. That is how inclusion is supposed to work.
Unfortunately, for the Labour-run public sector, judging people as individuals doesn’t go far enough.
Instead, the Met has a ‘commitment to Anti-Racism’ where, just like the racists of old, they are required to judge people by their religion or skin colour and will amend policy to provide extra opportunities to some groups but not others.
The report states that “Muslim applicants were twice as likely to have vetting refused than Christian or non-religious applicants”, while also acknowledging that the reasons for this disparity are “not yet fully understood”.
Yet despite admitting it does not know what factors are driving the difference, the Met has an ideological commitment to narrow the gap and is writing policy to force that through.
To achieve that, the force plans greater use of “additional fact finding where appropriate and proportionate” during the vetting process and will measure its success by whether the higher vetting refusal rate for Black and Muslim applicants falls.
The strategy is therefore focused not on understanding the disparity, but on changing the outcome.
Every applicant is supposed to be judged on their own merits. Instead, the force appears increasingly concerned with whether different groups produce similar results.
The document claims this will not lower standards, but once reducing disparities becomes the measure of success, pressure inevitably builds to deliver that result.
Police vetting is not a diversity initiative, but a safeguard designed to protect the public. The idea that vetting decisions are being viewed through the lens of race is horrifying.
Despite the Met believing fixing disproportionality is essential to their organisation, they only see to apply these principles when they believe they can engineer the most progressive outcome.
The strategy highlights an example where women are doing disproportionately well at achieving promotions.
“At Superintendent to Chief Superintendent level, women represented 30 per cent of the eligible pool in 2025 but 67 per cent of successful candidates. These findings provide strong evidence that promotion decisions are increasingly being made fairly and on merit."
This highlights the Met's inconsistency. When large-scale disproportionality falls in its favour, it celebrates these appointments as evidence that decisions are being made fairly and on merit. But when outcomes do not align with its preferences, it develops policies designed to achieve a different result.
This is not to say these women did not deserve their promotions, nor that the vetting system could not be improved. The point is that we need to return to the principle of getting the best officers into the right roles, and we do that by assessing people as individuals, not by their race or religion.
This is not just happening in the Met.
Earlier this year, MI5 announced it was limiting registrations of interest for a recruitment campaign to ethnic minority candidates because they were underrepresented in its workforce.
Across the public sector, merit is increasingly being pushed aside in favour of diversity targets and demographic box-ticking.
The Mayor needs to stop this nonsense, tell the Met to abandon these targets, and get police officers back out on the streets fighting crime.
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