Waltham Forest Council is to begin contributing towards the salaries of Metropolitan Police coroner officers from 2028, after the force said it could no longer afford to fund the service across London.
The Met is dealing with a £159million shortfall in its finances, and has told boroughs it can no longer meet the cost of coroners' officers on its own.
If you have never had cause to meet one, coroners' officers are the administrative and investigative staff who work under a coroner. They deal with unexpected, violent or unnatural deaths, and they are the main point of contact for grieving families — the person on the other end of the phone in the worst week of someone's life. They also act as the go-between for the police, doctors and mortuaries.
Eleven of them cover Waltham Forest along with Barking & Dagenham, Havering, Newham and Redbridge. From 2028/29, the five boroughs will be required to start contributing towards the service's annual cost of £675,388.
The council says it spent 18 months negotiating with the Met before reaching an agreement.
"We have negotiated a tapering agreement with the Metropolitan Police that has secured funding beyond the level initially offered," a spokesperson for Waltham Forest Council said.
"This means that [the Met] will fund half the costs of the coroner service in 2028/29, and a quarter in 2029/30, before the five boroughs share the full costs of the service from 2030/31 onwards."
From 2030/31, Waltham Forest will pay around 19.6% of the overall cost, a share calculated using 2021 census data.
A spokesperson for the Met said its priority was "keeping London safe" after more than £1billion of cuts over the past decades.
"We have worked hard to protect the areas that matter most to Londoners, including neighbourhood policing, violence against women and girls, public protection and the work to improve culture and standards," they said.
"However, having already exhausted many options away from the frontline, the scale of the challenge means we are now having to consider choices that will affect the way policing is delivered."
The spokesperson said the force had "an ambitious programme to bring forward new technology to minimise the impact of these changes as much as possible", but added: "Even so we will not be able to keep doing all that we currently do and so we will need to refocus much more on core policing roles and responsibilities."
They said the Met would "be clear with the public about the decisions we are having to make and the impact they may have", while continuing to focus resources "on the issues that pose the greatest threat, harm and risk, and on tackling the most dangerous offenders".
