• Money will protect policing budgets from a Government-proposed change to the way Mayor receives business rates
• Cash is in addition to £95m announced in December
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan has announced plans to invest an additional £234m in policing and tackling violent crime in the capital.
This includes an additional £119 million from London’s business rates to support policing numbers in future years. This will help to protect existing officer numbers from proposed technical future Government changes to the business rates system.
Sadiq’s Budget also proposes to commit £20.4 million to take further measures to tackle violence. This will support additional moves against serious violence, including tackling gangs and enhanced provision youth workers at hospital Accident and Emergency units.
Keeping Londoners safe is the Mayor’s top priority and he is investing record amounts in the Metropolitan Police in the face of huge Government cuts to policing. Ministers have already forced the Met to make £850m of cuts, and the force still has to make cuts of £263m by 2022-23.
Publishing his final Budget papers today, the Mayor has confirmed that he intends to increase his share of council tax by an average of 50p a week from April, just below nine per cent overall. This is the maximum allowed by the Government and most of the proceeds will directly fund the Metropolitan Police.
The investment announced today is on top of the additional £95m that the Mayor has previously committed in his budget, mostly from council tax. The £95m includes:
• £84.8m for the Met raised almost entirely from an 11 per cent increase to the Mayor’s council tax policing precept. This is the equivalent of 46p a week and will be split between a number of crime fighting measures, including new officers, specialist investigators to disrupt gang violence and new state-of-the-art equipment.
• £6.8m from council tax and business rates to fund the Mayor’s new Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) as part of his public health approach to tackling all forms of violence in the capital.
• £3.5m to be spent on other anti-violence initiatives, for example making permanent the successful ‘Information Sharing to Tackle Violence’ pilot that develops more effective data sharing between Community Safety Partnerships, health services and other violence reduction partners.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “Keeping Londoners safe is my number-one priority and I am determined to do everything in my power to support the Met Police and tackle the complex causes of crime. The government has forced the Met to make £850m of cuts, resulting in officer numbers dropping to a dangerous 15-year low of less than 30,000.
“Despite warm words from Ministers, they have repeatedly refused to reverse the huge cuts imposed on the Met and have instead shifted the burden of police funding on to the council tax payer, which we know hits the poorest hardest.
“The Government has clearly abdicated its responsibility to keep Londoners safe, leaving me to take the difficult decision to raise council tax and divert business rates for a second year in a row to invest in the police and our long-term public health approach.”
The 2019/2020 budget covers the entire Greater London Authority Group – including Transport for London, the London Legacy Development Corporation, Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation, the Metropolitan Police service and the London Fire Brigade.
The draft budget also takes into account the delay to the opening of Crossrail and that the Mayor has found additional funding to complete the project. Its plans include:
• Pushing ahead with the Mayor’s ambitious proposals to make London a cleaner, safer, healthier city through investment to improve London’s streets and create better and more accessible public transport – at the same time as continuing to freeze TfL fares;
• The introduction of the Ultra Low Emission Zone in central London in April 2019;
• Continuing to tackle London’s housing crisis by supporting thousands of new homes for social rent as part of City Hall’s commitment to start at least 116,000 new genuinely affordable homes by 2022;
• Increasing funding to the London Fire Brigade in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire to ensure fire engines arrive at emergency incidents within targets.
The Mayor’s final Budget is due to go before a meeting of the London Assembly on February 25.
Notes to editors
The Mayor has been advised that there is a strong possibility that a technical change will be made to the business rates retention system from 2020-21 onwards which will result in a two-year time lag in the receipt of business rates growth.
In last year’s budget the Mayor agreed to fund 1,000 more officers than would otherwise be affordable, using £59.3 million from growth in business rates income
Given the Government’s proposed change and in order to secure the Mayor’s commitment on 1,000 more officers, he is earmarking £118.6m in 2019-20 from business rates growth in that year to MOPAC to secure the extra officers for 2020-21 and 2021-22, covering this time-lag.
The GLA is to pay TfL up to £1.4 billion for Crossrail. TfL also have access to a further borrowing facility to cover any further costs and separately have to manage the revenue shortfall from the delay to Crossrail fares income of £600m over the next three years.
The Mayor’s council tax proposals include an overall 8.9 per cent increase to his total precept. All of the additional income raised as a result of this increase will go to policing and the London Fire Brigade.
The Mayor of London’s 2019-20 draft Council Tax requirement is £960.6m – this being the total sum forecast to be collected from Londoners to fund GLA services. Under the proposal the total GLA precept will be increased from £294.23 to £320.51 a year (Band D household) for residents of the 32 boroughs – an overall increase of £26.28. All of this increase will be provided to policing and the London Fire Brigade.
This equates to a Policing Precept increase from £218.13 to £242.13 and a non-Policing Precept from £76.10 to £78.38 a year.
Of the non-Policing precept, 2.99 per cent of the increase will go to London Fire Brigade but effectively one per cent will go to anti-violence measures by a reallocation of business rates from the Fire Brigade.
The Mayor’s proposed council tax precept comprises £725m to support the Metropolitan Police service, £159m for the London Fire Brigade and £77m for other services such as transport and the GLA itself.
The Mayor’s Budget consists of allocations for - the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Metropolitan Police), Transport for London, the London Fire Commissioner (London Fire Brigade), the London Legacy Development Company (Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park), the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation, the core Greater London Authority and the London Assembly.
The total budget for the GLA Group for 2018-19 is £18.3bn. This comprises a revenue budget of £12bn and a draft capital spending plan of £6.3bn.