The police team investigating phone hacking allegations will be the size of “eight murder squads”, it has been claimed to the Leveson Inquiry.Deputy London mayor for policing Kit Malthouse said the number of staff working on Operation Weeting and other relevant investigations was expected to rise to 200 next year. He told the inquiry the total amount spend would reach £40 million, compared to the £36 million spent on preventing child abuse in the capitol this year.Malthouse, former chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority, said he had continually questioned the drain on resources caused by the investigation, and was keen to make sure officers were not “overplaying it”.He said: “I was keen to ensure that they were not undertaking this investigation to the detriment of, for instance, rape victims... I don’t think at any stage I indicated that I thought they shouldn’t be investigation. It was just a matter of speed and resources.”Earlier this month acting deputy commissioner Cressida Dick told the inquiry she had reminded Malthouse it was up to her to make decisions on the investigation, as the police are operationally independent.The deputy mayor said he remembered how former assistant commissioner John Yates, responsible for a review into the original 2006 hacking investigation, would “throw in” references to the investigation at the end of briefings on terrorist threats, usually as a response to further allegations in the media.He referred to a letter from Yates in 2009, which reassured executives he did not believe there was any new evidence to reopen the investigation.He added: “In essence, to summarise the conversations it would be ‘there's been something in the newspaper, you might wonder why we're not reopening the investigation and this is why, because we’re satisfied there's no new evidence’.“I suppose it all came to a head in the July following the revisions abut the Chamy Media [company of former News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis] contract but the whole thing then kind of snapped into place, if you like, in the public perception, and the rest is history.”As Malthouse gave evidence, it was announced that Dick Fedorcio, head of Press at the Met, had resigned over allegations of an improper relationship with Wallis. Fedorcio was responsible for hiring Chamy Media to work with the directorate of public affairs after his deputy fell ill, and resigned after the Met began proceedings against him for gross misconduct.Malthouse told the inquiry he was “deliberately boring” in his engagement with the press, to prevent them contacting him for information.He added: “My strategy generally was to accept, be boring, or largely talk about them... and therefore not give the impression that I was a useful source of information."He said he accepted Sir Paul Stephenson’s premise that he needed to engage with the media as commissioner, but said he was concerned over dinner meetings with News International.He said: “My concern would be that it was fine to meet in the office over a cup of coffee at that stage, but whether it was appropriate to have dinner would be a matter of his judgment.”The inquiry heard the MPA questioned acting commissioner Tim Godwin over other senior officers meeting with News International employees.Malthouse added: “My judgment was that while it wasn’t necessarily the way I would have operated, Sir Paul Stephenson was a man of great integrity, the most senior police officer in the land. If I’d for one moment lost any trust in him then we had a fairly major problem and as I said earlier, our relationship had to be based on a very high degree of trust.”Catherine Crawford, chief executive of the Mayor’s Office for Police and Crime and former head of the MPA, said Operation Weeting had to be balanced against a “whole range of activities that need to be pursued”, but said she had never witnessed any improper pressure on the Met to follow a particular line by the MPA or force commissioners.She stressed the need for simple and easily understood policies on police and press relationships.She said: “I have heard evidence before this inquiry which suggests that the more that you try to define and set down rules and hamper discretion, the less likely you are to change a culture in a way that accepts a standard of behavior as appropriate, rather than a rigid adherence to rules which can never define or set out every single possible contingency that you might come across.”