Activate: Organising intensifies at the Met Police

Hundreds of PCS members in the Met Police took strike action early in 2025 to protest a forced return to offices. More recently, members walked out on Bonfire Night in a separate dispute over a refusal by management to pay civilian staff the same London allowance as their officer colleagues.

“The general feeling of being undervalued and treated as an afterthought by upper management has unified and motivated our members to collectively say, enough is enough,” PCS rep Dan tells Activate.

But how have PCS activists in the Met like Dan gone about channelling these feelings of anger, frustration and exhaustion into successful strike ballots and surging rep and advocate sign-ups?

According to David, the president of the Met Police group, basic workplace mapping has helped the group to target different work units and recruit “record numbers of reps”.

“We targeted specific work units to build a sense of personal jeopardy for members and bring home that this is happening to them, and not in the abstract,” he explains. It’s only through collective action, working through their union, that members can change things.

David points out that “persistent” and “creative” communications - offline and online – also contributed towards the recent organising successes in the Met.

Two-tier Met

Some of the effective messaging concerns the 'two-tier Met,’ a reference to the fact that civilian staff feel they are treated like second-class citizens within the organisation, compared to officers.

“It is a potent line because everyone knows the commissioner hates that title and it strikes right to the core of how all the staff feel,” says David. “We also always try to talk about ‘your’ money rather than members’ money – we make it personal and that resonates.”

In terms of organising tactics, the group tries to play to the strengths of individual activists.

“Group vice president Anna is exceptional at using Movement and speaking to members on the phone,” says David. “Group organiser Steve is very good at speaking to members in-person. I am very good at crafting a written message and make great use of emails to communicate with members.”

Taking over as one of the group’s organisers during this ballot, Brett recalls that “we were massively underperforming in terms of the ballot”. He quickly took action to drive up turnout.

“I established a list of branch advocates and contacted these people individually, trying to establish what really drives their passion,” he says. “I set up online meetings with them and found out how they would be willing to help during the ballot.”

Maximising union power

Brett also compiled lists of members who had not updated their ballot status, forwarding them to the relevant local activists so that each member could be contacted to “establish if they had posted or would be posting their ballot paper”.  

Although there have been striking successes in the Met – from successive ballot results to increased visibility and recruitment – there is still a recognition that more organising can always be done to maximise union power in Met workplaces.

“There is a disparity of organising across our group and we need to support the less organised branches to develop their structures,” admits David. “Rather than demanding they get organised, we are offering to help them and showing how it works. The more organised you get the easier member and rep recruitment becomes.”

From the perspective of Dan, another activist in the Met, future industrial successes will rely on retaining the “constant engagement with members via briefings, online meetings, and in-person meetings’, increasing the level of PCS Digital users, and using any industrial action “as a tool to recruit new members and develop new advocates and reps.”