All this is likely to provide the first big test of the relationship between the Commissioner and the Mayor. Say what you like about the old Police Authority (and plenty of us did), it did exercise proper and intrusive oversight of the budget. It had independently minded members who understood the concept of profit and loss, and did not mind pointing this out. The Met is funded by a number of different grants, some of which, such as the one for counter-terrorism and security, cannot be touched when it comes to calculating these reductions. One therefore has to wonder how the new relationship is going to work, when these cuts are going to come from the main central grant and thus hit hardest and disproportionately the very areas that the Mayor will have wanted to avoid — local policing delivered by uniformed and detective officers.