The Notting Hill carnival must change if it is to avoid a “Hillsborough-scale tragedy”, according to a report by the London assembly that found the event has become a serious risk to public safety and is beset by rising levels of violent crime.

Organisers of the event, which draws a million-strong crowd for Europe’s biggest street party on August bank holiday weekend, must accept help and advice from the London mayor and the recommendations of a forthcoming review of crowd management, the report says.

Throughout the report by the assembly’s police and crime committee, the increased control is linked with calls for the carnival to return “to its roots”, suggesting the authors see the event being scaled down from what has in effect become a two-day street festival.

Steve O’Connell, the chair of the committee, said “alarm bells are ringing” over the carnival, which has experienced an 86% rise in violent crimes since 2010. “Coupled with the risks around crowd control, there is a very real threat of serious harm to a large number of people,” he said.

“We want carnival to succeed, but it has reached a tipping point where the status quo is not an option. The previous mayor got a grip on London’s New Year’s Eve fireworks; the current mayor now needs to do the same with Notting Hill carnival.”

Crowds fill Ladbroke Grove during Notting Hill carnival. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

From its roots as a celebration of Caribbean culture and an attempt to heal race relations in the 1960s, the Notting Hill carnival has grown into the world’s second biggest street festival, bringing together a parade with street sound systems and hundreds of food stalls.

As O’Connell notes in the report, the event, which spans the August bank holiday weekend, has become an “iconic London institution” that is “enjoyed by millions of Londoners and people from across the globe”. However, as carnival has grown, so has its costs and risks, the report says.

Last year the Metropolitan police deployed 6,000 officers on the Sunday and 7,000 on the Monday, while the British Transport police fielded an additional 1,000 officers to keep an eye on trains and tubes, at a total cost of just over £7m.

They made 450 arrests and recorded 396 crimes over the course of the weekend, which Ken Marsh, the chair of the Met police federation, claimed had become “a bank holiday battleground, and an excuse for using our members as professional punchbags”.

The number of violent crimes is rising, according to the report. In 216 there were 90 arrests for possession of weapons offences – compared with 57 in 2015 – and 15 reports of violent injuries involving a blade. Overall, there were 151 offences of violence against the person, an 86% increase on 2010.

Nevertheless, carnivalgoers have often accused Met officers of intimidation and racial profiling, and suggested that police have incited violence through their behaviour.

The report says public safety has become a huge issue, with the rise in crime compounded by overcrowding. “[T]here is a very real risk of serious harm to a large number of people,” it says. “The police warn of the risk of a Hillsborough-scale tragedy; it would be foolish to ignore these voices.”

It quotes the Met police commander Dave Musker, in charge of policing the event, as saying: “Each year, and last year was no exception, we came exceptionally close to a major catastrophic failure of public safety where members of the public would face serious injury.”

Part of the problem, the report says, is that the London Notting Hill Carnival Enterprises Trust, the volunteer-run group that organises the event, lacks “the support and capacity” it needs to deliver it safely.

The report recommends that LNHCET should accept “advice and guidance” from the mayor’s office to help it find a “more formal and financially sustainable footing”. It also says the mayor should lead a strategic review of public safety.

It adds: “We have heard of a number of possible changes to carnival which could both help return it to its roots as a celebration of Caribbean culture and enhance public safety. Organisers need to give serious consideration to any changes, big or small, that will improve both safety and the overall carnival experience.”

The race relations activist Lee Jasper, who took years of experience as a chief steward for the popular All Saints area of the carnival into office as director of policing and equalities for the former London mayor Ken Livingstone, said part of the problem was that carnival was a “world-class event that receives parish pump funding”.



Jasper, who undertook an in-depth review of carnival in 2004, said the most recent report had simply reaffirmed the existence of problems he had previously identified, of which overcrowding was the most crucial. Echoing the report, Jasper said an event of the carnival’s size was simply too big for a volunteer-run organisation to put together.



He backed calls for the event to go “back to its roots”, saying the proliferation of sound systems on the site had diluted the original carnival culture, although he admitted that some, like People’s Sound, were part of the fabric of the event.



He said of the report: “I’m kind of underwhelmed by their recommendations. It’s tokenistic, I think it lacks insight. I think they haven’t done their homework, I think they don’t understand Notting Hill carnival. And if you meddle with Notting Hill carnival and you don’t understand it, trust me, there’ll be huge repercussions. It’s not something which you can get wrong.”



The Guardian has contacted LNHCET and others for comment.