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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
National
Milo Boyd

Met Police boss Cressida Dick will get £165,000 payout when she leaves force

Dame Cressida Dick will be paid £165,000 when she leaves the Metropolitan Police.

The capital's police commissioner's last day at work will be on April 10 after she quit last month.

As part of her remuneration package Dame Cressida will leave the job with six months’ notice plus two months’ salary.

Following her resignation last month she agreed to stay on until arrangements to find a replacement were finalised, with a successor expected to be appointed in the summer.

Deputy commissioner Sir Steve House will temporarily serve as acting commissioner while the recruitment process is ongoing, London mayor Sadiq Khan's office said.

The police chief will step down next weekend (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

The mayor will work with the Home Secretary to appoint a new commissioner "to address the deep cultural issues facing the Met Police Service", his office added.

A spokesman for Mr Khan said: "The mayor thanks Dame Cressida Dick for her decades of public service.

"The mayor has been clear that candidates for the next commissioner must have a plan to restore the trust and confidence of Londoners."

Home Secretary Priti Patel confirmed during the week that the circumstances of Dame Cressida's resignation will be reviewed by the outgoing chief inspector of constabulary Sir Tom Winsor.

The Home Office said the review, to begin on April 1 and expected to finish by the summer, will aim to:

Dame Cressida quit after Mr Khan expressed his displeasure at her handling of outrage over racist, misogynist and homophobic messages shared by a group of officers based at Charing Cross police station.

Her resignation, which came hours after she said in a media interview she had no intention of quitting, was greeted with dismay by many officers.

She had insisted that she wasn't going to quit until the last moment.

When asked by the BBC if she should step down she said: "I have absolutely no intention of going and I believe that I am and have been, actually for the last five years, leading a real transformation in the Met."

Dame Cressida will leave the force with a significant pay-out (AFP via Getty Images)

In the final years of her tenure Dame Cressida was dogged by scandals.

She has long been accused of being too close to the Government - which is currently headed by a fellow alumnus of Balliol College.

The police chief had been given a damehood on Theresa May ’s resignation honours list.

It was therefore inevitable that there would be much scrutiny aimed at how the Met reacted when news of parties at Number 10 during lockdown - potentially an offence at the time - began to break.

At first, the force's line was that fixed penalty notices for lockdown rule-breaking should not be issued so long after the event.

As the weeks rumbled on and the party allegations kept coming, this line seemed increasingly untenable.

Dame Cressida was criticised for her handling of partygate (AFP via Getty Images)

“Cress was inflexible and a bit slow-footed,” a senior colleague told the Evening Standard of her handling of the issue.

When it was announced at the end of January that the Met would be carrying out an investigation into the parties, it quickly became apparent that this would take the teeth out of the long-awaited Sue Gray report for legal reasons.

Those who suspected the police force and Government were too close then pointed to the fact that Deputy Assistant Commissioner Bas Javid, sibling of Health Secretary Sajid Javid, is a senior officer overseeing complaints about Partygate.

David Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, had stern words to say about the now-former police chief and how she handled the affair.

“Whatever sympathies I have had for Dick and her colleagues is rapidly seeping away," he wrote in a column.

"Unless the Met start to show the rational and clear leadership expected of them, heads, as in the political arena, must surely roll.”

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