200 purged officers could return to duty in London. Can they be stopped?
Plus: the fight for a desk at City Hall, a decision on Grenfell Tower, and a £1,300 Stokey studio with Karl Marx above the bed
Morning — the exasperation of Sir Mark Rowley, the Met Police commissioner, was palpable yesterday, as he delivered a statement on a ruling that torpedoes his attempt to clean up London's coppers. Since he got the job in 2022, Rowley has pushed for dozens of officer dismissals, in a bid to repair the damage to public confidence in the police following the murder of Sarah Everard in Clapham. So he didn’t hold back on the steps of Scotland Yard: “Absolutely absurd,” is how he described the prospect of some 200 purged cops getting their jobs back. Why exactly they could return to duty, and whether they can be stopped, leads your round-up below.
Plus: the fight for a desk at City Hall, a decision on Grenfell Tower, and a £1,300 Stokey studio with Karl Marx above the bed.
FYI: As you can probably tell, we're experimenting with the timing of our Spy round-up email. We're trying some midweek posts, Wednesday/Thursday-ish, so we can get ahead of the biggest London stories, like today's stuff on the Met Police. That said, we don't actually know what you all prefer, so if you have a quick mo we'd be very grateful for your vote in our straw poll.
In case you missed it: From random plots on the green belt, to a derelict pub that housed a cannabis farm, on Saturday we published a guide to the strange London properties owned by the King and Prince of Wales, courtesy of writer John Lubbock.
What we've spied
👮 The ongoing purge of rogue London cops has been thrown into disarray, after a judge ruled the Met Police has been dismissing them unlawfully. On Tuesday a High Court judge upheld a challenge to the way the Met has been sacking officers accused of misconduct, in many cases sexual, in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard by serving officer Wayne Couzens and the serial offending of officer David Carrick. It's left London policing in a “hopeless position”, in the words of police chief Sir Mark Rowley, who since getting the top job had launched Operation Assure with the blessing of the mayor to root out bad apples.
Specifically, the Met has been revoking vetting clearance to dismiss officers, but a judge ruled this went beyond the force's legal powers and circumvented statutory misconduct procedures. The ruling paves the way for more than 200 purged officers to get their jobs back — the Met says that in the last 18 months, 96 officers had been sacked or resigned due to vetting removal, 29 were on special vetting leave, and over 100 more were in the early stages of vetting reviews.
The challenge had been brought by Sergeant Lino Di Maria, who was stripped of his warrant card following accusations he had raped a woman in public car parks, though he has not been charged. His case has also been supported by the Metropolitan Police Federation (MPF), the staff association that represents the Met's rank and file. This has come at the cost of criticism from some of its female members, and last week the Met’s Network of Women published an open letter criticising the MPF for “championing” the judicial review. But in a lengthy statement issued to the Spy, the MPF said it was "satisfied" with the court ruling. Matt Cane, the federation's general secretary, told us:
I remain curious as to why those in Scotland Yard thought they could operate outside of the law when it comes to police officers .... The Metropolitan Police Federation emphasises that the good, brave and hard-working colleagues we represent are the first to say that the small minority of officers who are not fit to serve should not be in the police service.
But police officers — like all people — need to be treated within the law of the land and they have the right to representation and a fair process. Would any other staff association or union sit back and allow its members to be dismissed unlawfully without challenge?
Two avenues are now available to the Met to restart its dismissal efforts. The first is to try to appeal the court ruling, which Rowley confirmed would be happening on the steps of Scotland Yard yesterday. Second, even if the force loses the appeal, it can await new regulations that effectively legalise its purge tactics. Right on cue, the Home Office promptly issued a statement after the ruling, with a spokesperson saying the department was “rapidly acting” to ensure police forces could “dismiss officers who cannot maintain vetting clearance”.
In the meantime, Habib Kadiri, the director of police accountability charity StopWatch, tells the Spy it leaves Londoners unable to tell “which officers are fit to police and which are predators and thugs in disguise”:
[Yesterday's] ruling exposes a loophole in defiance of Sir Rowley’s mission to root out the worst from his force, putting public safety in a precarious position. Significant cross-sections of the public scared of corrupt, overzealous, racist and sexist police officers remain defenceless while they await the proposed legislation to tighten vetting standards following the conclusion of the police accountability review.
As a result, no one knows which officers are fit to police and which are predators and thugs in disguise. The Met cannot credibly claim to keep Londoners safe while this is the case.
🖥️ Sir Sadiq Khan has told London businesses to think "very carefully" about reducing their office space, as he warned about the impact of WFH on the capital during a talk last Wednesday. Khan also urged employers to encourage staff back into the office, because London "cannot afford" to become a city where "the centre has been hollowed out" by the fall in commuting levels. Khan was speaking at an event hosted by consultancy firm Project Leaders alongside Claire Mann, the chief operating officer of TfL, which has been trying all sorts of schemes to get Tube ridership — and fare revenues — back to pre-pandemic levels.
Khan's anti-WFH remarks have riled some up, like urban geography professor Oli Mould, who says the mayor is "coming out to bat for the landlords and the business owners and the rentier class in central London". But it's possible the mayor was speaking from personal experience, given the troubles of his own bureaucrats following cuts to the number of desks and meeting rooms at City Hall. In 2022 Khan decided to relocate the Greater London Authority (GLA) from its base in London Bridge to a new site, known as the Crystal building, at the Royal Docks in the East End. It meant moving from an office with about 700 desks, as of 2007, to one with 215. A year into the move, the GLA oversight committee warned that some departments had only been allocated desks for 10% of the team, with the rest scrabbling for the hot desking spots. And while there have been attempts to create more working space since then, like the installation of new pods and booths, stats from 2024 show only about 50% of City Hall staff are heading into the office on any given day. Indeed, current oversight committee chair Emma Best tells the Spy that “the lack of desk space in City Hall is so egregious that some staff resort to working in corridors,” and that promised quarterly reports to the committee on desk usage haven’t materialised. What was that about thinking carefully?
🚒 The burnt-out wreckage of Grenfell Tower is to be demolished, the government has announced, resulting in a mixed reaction from bereaved families and survivors of the 2017 disaster. Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, broke the news to community groups in a private meeting last Wednesday, which was then formally announced by the government on Friday. That statement said that the 27-storey tower would be gradually dismantled, following engineering advice that found the tower to be significantly damaged: “It remains stable because of the measures put in place to protect it but even with installation of additional props, the condition of the building will continue to worsen over time”. One survivors group, Grenfell Next of Kin, came out in support of the decision, writing: “We need healing, to rest the site and our deceased. And we do not believe the pathway to that is to put others in danger”. However Grenfell United, another group, criticised a lack of consultation in a statement issued after the Wednesday meeting:
We’ve said this to every secretary of state for housing since the very beginning: consult the bereaved and survivors meaningfully before reaching a decision on the Tower. Angela Rayner could not give a reason for her decision to demolish the Tower. She refused to confirm how many bereaved and survivors had been spoken to in the recent, short four-week consultation. But judging from the room alone — the vast majority of whom were bereaved — no one supported her decision. But she claims it is based on our views.
Once Grenfell is demolished, work will begin on a permanent memorial, which is currently being selected by the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission.
🚆 Network Rail has begun to remove trains from departure boards early at busy London stations — King’s Cross and Euston — in an attempt to stop passengers from rushing. The trial of the new policy sees information deleted three minutes before services depart, and final call announcements made four minutes prior, in response to what Network Rail sees as potentially dangerous crowd crushes at stations like Euston when info appears just minutes before departure. However, some have criticised the move, describing it as “patronising”. “We would prefer you missed your train than that you rushed to catch it,” writes one user on X who posted a photo of Network Rail’s poster advertising the policy.
🏗️ PLANNING CORNER 🏗️ Hundreds gathered to protest plans for a new Chinese super-embassy in central London at the weekend. Among the attendees were Hongkongers who believe the site, planned near the Tower of London at the site of the Royal Mint, could be used to illegally detain dissenters. The protest came ahead of local inquiry hearings on the plans beginning this week — this is the second time the plans are being scrutinised, after Tower Hamlets council refused planning permission in 2022.
Elsewhere: there have been renewed calls to list the Southbank Centre, led by the Twentieth Century Society. The building was once voted the ugliest in Britain, but the Society believes there’s a greater appreciation of its brutalist architecture today. And another skyscraper has been approved for the Square Mile, this time a 33-storey tower at 70 Gracechurch Street.
🗺️ FROM THE BOROUGHS 🗺️ Parents in Westminster are questioning the council’s priorities, after it advised against plans for a new playground because it would in part “harm the view” of a nearby five-star hotel. For two years parents at St Peter’s school in Belgravia have been trying to get the playground built, but in a recent letter, a planning officer cited the impact on the Grosvenor Hotel. However, in a statement to the Guardian, Westminster council insisted: “The hotel view is not a primary concern or the reason that the council advised the proposed playground would not receive planning permission”. In cash-strapped Croydon, the council has asked the government for a £136m bailout, after revealing a £35m overspend this year. In Haringey, locals are claiming victory after the council backed down over proposals to scrap daily visit parking permits. And in Hammersmith & Fulham, the council has said it’s hit by around 20,000 attempted cyber attacks a day.
🔍 And finally, we leave you with:
A £1,300 studio with a portrait of Karl Marx above the bed in Stoke Newington (SpareRoom)
The London flat white matrix (Instagram)
A new 2,000-capacity music venue and food hall coming to Surrey Quays (Southwark News)
A new 400-capacity nightclub coming to Kensington (Time Out)
A tarot exhibition in central London (London World)
The ‘school to prison’ Tube line (TikTok)
A new London Bridge bump method (TikTok)
Getting GTA 6 before fully functioning escalators at Cutty Sark DLR station (TikTok)
How four Underground trains were put on a rooftop in Shoreditch (TikTok)
Pelted with offal, mud and dead cats: A travesty in Clerkenwell (Londonist)
The Tube station built for the 1908 Olympics – and what became of it (IanVisits)
What next for London’s eerie pedestrian tunnels under the Thames? (Times £)
Inside the £191m Barbican rebuild to restore a brutalist landmark (Times £)