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The Met should hand over its national counter-terrorism duties to the new National Crime Agency, in place by the end of 2013, according to a group of MPs.
The House of Commons home affairs committee said Scotland Yard should not be given any additional national policing functions in the wake of the upheaval caused by the phone hacking scandal.
The MPs said that following the phone-hacking scandal, Scotland Yard should not be asked to step in the breach and take over any of these functions.
While a home still needs to be found for critical national services such as the DNA database, the Police National Database, and the Police National Missing Persons Bureau, giving them to the Metropolitan Police was not the answer, they said.
The MPs said that following the Olympics, the Home Office should hand over the Met’s responsibility of counter-terrorism to the New National Crime Agency (NCA).
The report also warned that government plans to reform the police service should be delayed for six months as ministers have “failed” to make a series of key decision, it said it was "extremely unhelpful" that the proposals were still so unclear.
Home secretary Theresa May was attempting to achieve too much and too fast, creating a "climate of uncertainty" inn which no-one could perform at their best, the MPs said.
In its report, the cross-party group of MPs said it was "unacceptable" that a year after announcing the closure of the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA), it is still unclear how many of its functions are to be carried out.
It called for the closure of the NPIA to be delayed until the end of 2012.
The report criticised the IT systems across the police service, and said the are "not fit for purpose, to the detriment of the police’s ability to fulfil their basic mission of preventing crime and disorder".
Committee chair Keith Vaz said: said: "The government's changes are the most far-reaching that have been proposed since the 1960s and among the most significant that have been proposed since Sir Robert Peel laid the foundations for modern policing nearly 200 years ago.
"We are deeply concerned that more than a year after the publication of the consultation paper, many of the details of the government's proposals are still unclear.
"This is extremely unhelpful, both for the police service itself and for the other bodies involved in the criminal justice landscape."
He added: "The police perform a difficult and dangerous task on behalf of the public and the continuing uncertainty about the future of many of the bodies involved in policing has the potential to be very damaging."
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