Mayor Sadiq Khan has staked his reputation – and your cash – on this year’s Carnival going off without a hitch, writes James Ford 

Just how many stabbings is too many? This is not just a rhetorical question. It is a political calculation that is being run at City Hall on a regular basis. For the capital as a whole, our Mayor has yet to give a definitive answer. When it comes to the Notting Hill Carnival, however, it seems that that the answer is apparently ‘more than eight’ – because that is how many stabbings there were at the 2024 Carnival (with at least one of those stabbings being fatal). In fact, there have been 55 stabbing incidents at the Notting Hill Carnival since 2017 (a tally that is even more frightening when you factor in that there was no Carnival in 2020 or 2021 due to Covid).

More worryingly, stabbing is not the only danger that potential Carnival-goers face. There were 350 violent or sexual offences committed at Carnival in 2024. The Metropolitan Police have further warned that there is a very real prospect of a Hillsborough-like crush event.

Even if you are a police officer working at the Carnival your safety is far from guaranteed. Last year no fewer than 75 officers were injured – a number that is significantly higher than the 53 police officers injured at the Southport riots a few weeks later. (In fact, the number of officers injured policing the Carnival has increased every year since 2018).

If these appalling statistics on violence or warnings of a major casualty event do not concern you, then another fact should: as a London taxpayer, you are actually subsidising all this danger.

It’s Londoners that pay

Deploying 7,000 police officers – one fifth of the Met’s total establishment – to Notting Hill for the August bank holiday weekend cost more than £11.8m last year alone. The local council – the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (RBK&C) – fork out a further £1m for street cleaning. On top of that, City Hall is contributing nearly £2m to pay for stewarding this year. This contribution is double what City Hall paid last year and represents an increase of 1,000 per cent since Sadiq Khan took office in 2016.

Little wonder, then, that the Conservatives on the London Assembly have warned that this situation is unsustainable without major changes. They have urged the mayor to take direct control of the Carnival, move it to a more suitable location (like Hyde Park) and to reduce the burden it places on the taxpayer by attracting sponsors and charging for tickets. 

If anything, their proposals do not go far enough. Given that overtime payments (around £5.5m) accounted for more than half of last year’s policing costs, shifting the Carnival away from the Bank Holiday weekend would yield significant savings. And why should RBK&C be the only borough whose residents have to suffer the inconvenience of hosting 2m drunken revellers every year? The Mayor could make the event the ‘London Carnival’ and invite other boroughs to bid to host it each year. If no borough bids, then the capital can take a year off – just like Glastonbury has fallow years. 

According to Tory calculations, the Carnival will cost Londoners between £80m and £100m over the next five years. Neither City Hall nor London Councils can credibly plead poverty if they have millions of pounds available every year to fund a street party.

Carnival is clearly at breaking point

Nobody wants to cancel the Notting Hill Carnival entirely. But the event has clearly reached breaking point. If another major London event – like London Pride, the University Boat Race or the Lord Mayor’s Show – was dogged by levels of crime and violence like those seen in Notting Hill in recent years, I doubt it would be allowed to take place, let alone be lavished with stacks of taxpayer cash from City Hall. 

Sadiq Khan cannot ignore palpable public concern over both the increased risk of crime and fatalities at the Notting Hill Carnival any more than he can overlook the dramatic increase in how much the Carnival is costing taxpayers. The Mayor should have used the organisers’ desperate pleas for more taxpayer cash earlier this year to demand modest but long-overdue reforms to protect the person and pockets of Londoners. If the number of stabbings, arrests or injured police officers during this year’s Carnival is comparable to last year’s levels, the Mayor will have difficult questions to answer. He has not just staked more of your hard-earned taxes on a successful Carnival. He has staked his reputation too.

James Ford is a public affairs consultant. He was previously an adviser to Boris Johnson during his tenure as Mayor of London.