Mayor’s budget confirms additional £27m for policing in London

The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan will today confirm that he is increasing his funding of policing by £27.8m this year, to a total of £621.6m. The Mayor will make the announcement as his first budget is considered for approval by the London Assembly.

This additional £27.8m funding follows warnings by outgoing Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, that proposed Government cuts, on top of the £600m of savings that have already been found since 2013, with a further £400m still to be found, may mean that the Met will have to introduce NHS-style “rationing” of its services to Londoners and cut thousands of police officers.

Since 2010, the government has systematically cut police budgets in London. The Home Office is now preparing plans to change the way the overall police budget is divided between different forces across the country, and there is a real risk that they will seek to move police funding away from London and give it to other forces instead.

When they considered similar changes in late 2015, the Met stood to lose between £184m and £700m. Ministers are expected to make a decision on the final figure later this year.

In December 2016, the Government set out that Met Police funding next year would be £17.4m lower than in 2015-16, because the previous Mayor, Boris Johnson, cut the police precept last year - the same year as the Mayoral election. This was despite a Government warning that if he did not provide additional funding from council tax, it would result in a future cash cut to police funding.

Speaking at today’s annual budget meeting of the London Assembly, Sadiq Khan is expected to say: “My first priority is keeping Londoners safe and that means keeping police officer numbers as high as possible. I’ve done everything possible to protect police numbers in this budget – the Government must now do its part too.”

The Mayor will also announce today that he is committing an extra £250,000 for a major new anti-knife-crime campaign. A further £122,000 will fund a new programme to tackle air quality and Sadiq also intends to fund one new musical scholarship in every London borough.

The Mayor’s budget supports Sadiq’s record-breaking £3.15bn investment to deliver affordable housing, doubling the amount spent on tackling London’s poor air quality and freezing all Transport for London fares for four years.

The budget covers the entire Greater London Authority Group – including Transport for London, the London Legacy Development Corporation, the Metropolitan Police Service and the London Fire Brigade.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, will say: “This budget lays out my plans to ensure that all Londoners get the opportunities that our city gave to me - and to deliver on my promise to be a Mayor for all Londoners. This is a budget specifically designed to deliver real results for Londoners and fast.”

The Mayor’s budget also confirms plans announced in December to increase his policing share of council tax bills by an average of 8p a week from April 2017 in order to help maintain police officer numbers across London.

This increase will see the Mayor’s share of council tax bills rise from £276 a year to £280.02 for Band D taxpayers, from April 2017.

The Mayor’s budget will deliver:

• A record-breaking £3.15 billion in new genuinely affordable homes over the next five years – the first step on the long road to fixing London’s housing crisis.
• Making commuting in London more affordable by freezing all TfL fares for four years and continuing with the new Hopper bus fare.
• It sets out the Mayor’s intention to do everything possible to maintain the strategic target of 32,000 police officers across London and to improve neighbourhood policing – in the face of significant Government cuts.
• Ambitious plans to tackle air pollution in London - doubling the amount spent on improving air quality to £875 million.
• Significant investment in modernising our transport infrastructure - with the biggest growth in Tube capacity that London has ever seen.‎

Additional commitment of £4 million for culture, plans for a new Skills for Londoners taskforce, ambitious plans to make walking and cycling easier and safer, and a new target for a fire engine to reach any incident within 10 minutes, 90 per cent of the time.