Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what proportion of Metropolitan Police time was spent on the front line in each year since 2008.

The Home Office does not hold information centrally on the proportion of police time spent on the front line.

The Home Office does collect police officer functions data, which is used by HMIC to calculate the number of operational frontline police officers in each police force area. These figures (and information on visible police officers) are published from 2010 onwards as part of the ‘Valuing the Police’ inspection programme, which can be found at: http://www.hmic.gov.uk/data/valuing-the-police-data/. These figures relate to each officer’s predominant function over the year, rather than the proportion of their working time.

According to HMIC figures, as at 31 March 2015, 91% of Met police officers’ predominant function over the year was on the front line.