No one wants to cancel Notting Hill Carnival – but a blank cheque delays the inevitable

It will surprise no one to learn that large, live events are ripe for political controversy. Whilst a quarter of a million revellers gathered at Glastonbury to chant antisemitic hate slogans, the next major event controversy was already unfolding in London. In response to a begging letter from the organisers of the Notting Hill Carnival, the Mayor of London, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the City of Westminster handed over £958,000 of taxpayers' money to fund extra crowd control at this year’s festival. In doing so, City Hall has missed an opportunity to demand urgent changes to how the carnival is organised in return.

It has been clear for a long time that the Notting Hill Carnival cannot continue as it has. What started as a modest but popular community street party in 1966 has since morphed into a vastly bigger enterprise. Nowadays, the carnival attracts two million people, is staffed by 40,000 volunteers and is policed by around 9,000 officers. This growth has come at an enormous cost. No fewer than 75 police officers were injured policing the carnival in 2024. (Significantly higher than the 53 police officers who were injured fighting the Southport riots just a few weeks later.)

And it is not just the police who are increasingly in danger at the carnival. No fewer than eight people were stabbed during last year’s carnival, at least one of them fatally. These were amongst 350 violent or sexual offences recorded at the 2024 carnival. Indeed, there have been at least 47 stabbing incidents at the carnival between 2017 and 2023 (a scary tally given that the carnival did not take place in 2020 or 2021 due to Covid).

If another event – like St Patrick’s Day or Pride - attracted this kind of violence, I doubt it would continue to receive the permission to go ahead, let alone a generous subsidy from City Hall.

However, rather than scrap the Notting Hill carnival entirely, here are three simple changes that would save the Notting Hill Carnival (and people’s lives):

Move the carnival to a more suitable location

Holding the Notting Hill Carnival on the streets is part of the problem. Way back in 2004, the Carnival Review Group, set up by Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, recommended moving the carnival to a better location, such as Hyde Park. Using one of London’s large open spaces would undoubtedly give organisers better control over access and crowd numbers (reducing both crime and the risk of a ‘mass casualty event’ caused by crushing) as well as reducing the amount that RBKC has to pay in street cleaning costs (currently around £1 million a year).

Change when it is held

The carnival may have always been held over the August bank holiday weekend, but this undoubtedly increases the cost of policing the event. Of the £11.8million that it cost the Met to police the carnival in 2023, nearly half (£5.5m) of that bill came from overtime costs alone. Moving the carnival to a different weekend during the summer would undoubtedly reduce the financial burden it places on the capital’s police.

Let’s charge for entry

It may be a cliché, but everyone knows there is no such thing as a free lunch. It is certainly unrealistic to expect a free street party. Moving the carnival to a large park would allow the organisers to charge for entry. Tickets would not need to be priced as high as the £378.50 that it cost to attend Glastonbury this year, however advanced ticket sales could replace the current City Hall grant for stewards (which was already at nearly £1m before the latest bonus handout from City Hall) and maybe even start to cover some of the policing costs (in much the same way that football clubs have to pay towards the cost of policing matches).

No one but the most mean-spirited killjoy wants to see the Notting Hill Carnival cancelled forever or witness a mass casualty event unfold on the streets of West London. But some modest changes are long overdue to protect attendees, the police and taxpayers alike.

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James Ford was an adviser to Mayor of London Boris Johnson between 2010 and 2012.

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