Sadiq Khan challenges Home Secretary to honour pledge to secure police funding now – before it’s too late

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has challenged the new Home Secretary to back up his public pledge to the police service by securing extra funding now - warning that waiting for the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review next year is too late.  

The Mayor is today due to meet Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, at a meeting of the Serious Violence Taskforce to talk for the first time since his appointment six weeks ago about the rise in violent crime in London and across the UK.  

Delivering his first major speech as the new Home Secretary at the Police Federation conference last month, Sajid Javid pledged he would prioritise police funding and admitted that a lack of resources does have an impact on the police’s battle to fight crime. He said: “If you’re going to fight crime and do it properly, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got all the right resources and that includes police numbers. If you haven’t got resources then clearly that has an impact.”

The current government has imposed damaging cuts of £1bn on the Metropolitan Police, stretching the thin blue line almost to breaking point. It’s risked sending police numbers to historically low levels with the number of officers now falling below 30,000 for the first time since 2003.

The Mayor has stepped up and showed leadership in London by using the full range of his powers to make unprecedented investments into policing in the capital, with an additional £110m for the Met to put an additional 1,000 officers on the streets than would otherwise be possible. This is to be paid for through raising Council Tax and diverting Business Rates receipts. This is on top of the £28.8m the Mayor invested in the Met Police last year by raising Council Tax to the maximum allowed by the Government. 

But Sadiq has been clear with Ministers that government cuts have consequences and have contributed to the increases in knife and violent crime not just in London, but across the country. He has accused the Prime Minister and former Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, of failing in their basic duty of keeping people safe, and refusing to the heed the warnings by the police and even the Home Office’s own evidence linking cuts to an increase in violent crime. 

The Mayor has welcomed Sajid Javid’s appointment and warm words about a commitment to prioritise funding, and to ensure the police have the proper powers and resources to do their jobs and bring crime down, but will today warn the Home Secretary that waiting until next year’s Comprehensive Spending Review will be a case of too little, too late.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “It’s good to hear a senior government Minister echo what we have all been saying, and that’s cuts to the police service really does have consequences. This government had stripped funding back to the bare bones and it should be of no surprise to Ministers that is having an impact with violent crime up across England and Wales.

“I welcome the new Home Secretary’s pledge to prioritise police funding. It’s about time the government woke up to the stark reality of the cuts they have imposed, but waiting to the Spending Review next year is far too late. We have seen police officer numbers drop below 30,000 in London for the first time in 15 years and it’s not sustainable. The new Home Secretary must show he really understands the issues facing the police by giving them proper funding and powers now before it’s too late.”

The Mayor is doing everything in his power to tackle violent crime in London, including delivering a knife crime strategy, backed up with significant funding to help the Met and preventative services. He is also investing an additional £15m in the Met, through the new Violent Crime Task Force which is proactively targeting offenders and removing weapons, drugs and illicit money from the streets of the capital.

Sadiq has also allocated £45m through the Mayor’s Young Londoners Fund to support community groups across the capital, helping young people away from a life of crime by giving them skills and opportunities

Notes to editors:

• The Mayor has invested an additional £110m in the Met in 2018-19 compared to the previous year in order to reduce the impact of the Government’s massive cuts to policing budgets. This includes £15m specifically to help tackle knife crime. This takes his investment in the Met to £138.8m since Sadiq became Mayor.
• The Mayor has created the Young Londoners Fund  – a brand-new £45million fund for local communities and charities to help young people fulfil their potential particularly those who are at risk of getting caught up in crime.
• Every single London borough now has a bespoke knife crime action plan created in partnership with the Met police.
• Every school and college in London can now receive a knife wand, to help keep young people safe and prevent knife crime at school. 200 schools in London have taken up the Mayor's offer of a knife wand and the Deputy for Policing and Crime, Sophie Linden, wrote again to schools reminding them of how they can obtain a wand if they would like one.
• In October, the Mayor hosted a Knife Crime Education Summit which brought together education providers, education leaders, Principals, Academy Trust Chairs, board members and Governmental bodies to better understand their needs and agree a plan of action to help tackle knife crime. As a result, Ofsted have agreed to deliver a thematic inspection on knife crime and safeguarding in London schools.
• The Mayor is working to increase the number of Safer Schools Officers across the capital, to engage with pupils and drive down crime in schools.
• The Mayor’s first anti-knife crime media campaign, ‘London Needs You Alive’, launched in November. The campaign brings together role models and social media youth ‘influencers’ to encourage young people away from carrying a knife, focusing on their talent and worth to the capital. With hundreds of thousands of social media followers between them, leading grime artist Yungen, MC Bossman Birdie, photographer Tom Sloan and urban poet Hussain Manawer are among those supporting it.
• The Mayor confirmed he is investing £1.4m to continue to provide youth workers in Major Trauma Centres, and place more youth workers to hospital A&E departments, to help steer young Londoners who have been involved in knife crime away from violence in the future.
• In November, MOPAC and the Met hosted a retailers’ workshop to discuss what more the business community can do to reduce knife crime. Attendees included representatives from Business Crime Reduction Partnerships, Business Improvement Districts, Trading Standards, Local Police, national retailers, independent retailers, the British Retail Consortium and British Independent Retailer Association.
• MOPAC has created the Weapon Enabled Crime Dashboard which is publicly available. This will be one of a number of dashboards that the public and stakeholders can use access and interpret data on a number of types of crime.
• The Mayor has dedicated £7m to projects to help tackle youth violence, including: Gang Exit (£500,000), Major Trauma Centres (£444,615), Information Sharing to Tackle Violence (£168,000), Victim Support Children & Young people (£360,861), and youth projects under the London Crime Prevention Fund (£5,295,717).
• MOPAC and the Met continue work to collaborate and learn from other forces and partners on tackling knife crime and violence. Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime Sophie Linden and Met Commissioner Cressida Dick met Police Scotland in Glasgow in February.
• Prevention is more effective than enforcement, but the fact remains that after years of Government underfunding and cuts, the Met police is significantly underfunded causing a huge drain on resources and officer numbers are falling. Time and again, we have called on the Government, who are responsible for more than 70 per cent of the Met police budget, to do the right thing and give our police the funds they need to keep us safe. But they have refused. We will continue to work tirelessly to help keep our young Londoners safe.
• The Met is taking this issue incredibly seriously. As part of their work in tackling knife crime they are running targeted interventions, such as Operation Sceptre and Operation Winter Nights, to target offenders and take weapons off our streets.
• This work also includes telling Londoners that they can expect to see an increase in the use of targeted, intelligence-led stop and search.