thumb|right|Mounted Met police officer outside [[Buckingham Palace.]]
The Metropolitan Police Mounted Branch is the mounted police branch of London's Metropolitan Police. It is part of Met Operations.
History
The Bow Street Horse Patrol was formed in 1763, but ceased after eighteen months when funding ran out. Revived in 1805, it was attached to the new Metropolitan Police in 1836 and formally merged into it three years later via Chapter VI of that year's Metropolitan Police Act. Mounted patrols from the Metropolitan Police's stations continued, but the modern Mounted Branch was only formalised in 1918 by Percy Laurie, a retired British Army officer.
Operations
thumb|Senior mounted officers on duty at the Queen's Birthday Parade.
Figures released by the Met under a Freedom of Information Act request showed that the annual number of police horses in the MPS Mounted Branch Unit in calendar years 2009 to 2018 ranged from a low of 100 to a high of 116. As of 2016, the annual average cost incurred by the police force was £5,558 per horse, not including stabling, and there were 142 police officers qualified to ride. The total budget for the mounted unit was £9,969,736 in 2018. A 2014 RAND Europe/University of Oxford Centre for Criminology study found: "While mounted police in the UK are traditionally thought of as public-order policing resources, deployment data show that they spend between 60-70 per cent of their time in local area patrols, and 10-20 per cent of their time in public order work, with the remainder spent in activities such as ceremonial deployments." Hyde Park, Great Scotland Yard,