Mayor’s Budget confirms record investment for policing and tackling crime

• Additional £234m from council tax increase and business rates

• New spending boost to fight air pollution

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, will commit today to investing record amounts to support policing and to tackle crime. The Mayor will confirm this investment as his Budget is considered for approval by the London Assembly.

Keeping Londoners safe is the Mayor’s top priority. The Government has already forced the Met to make £850m of cuts and the force still has to make cuts of £263m by 2022-23.

The Mayor’s Budget today contains an additional £234m for policing and tackling crime. This includes:

• £95m announced earlier in the budget process, funded mostly from an 11 per cent increase to the Mayor’s council tax policing precept - the equivalent of 46p a week. This will be split between a number of crime-fighting measures, including new officers, specialist investigators to disrupt gang violence and the Mayor’s new Violence Reduction Unit.
• An extra £118.6 million from business rates to support police officer numbers in future years.

• An additional £20.4 million to support additional initiatives against serious violence, including tackling gangs and providing more youth workers at hospital Accident and Emergency units.

Sadiq’s budget will also deliver record investment to tackle air pollution, with the Central London Ultra-Low Emission Zone being introduced in April. Additional investment included in today’s Budget includes: 

• £25 million for a diesel scrappage scheme to support low-income households. This is on top of the £23 million scrappage scheme to support micro-businesses and charities launched last week.

• £24 million to support black cab drivers to transition to less polluting vehicles.

The Mayor is also investing an additional £7m into a range of services and projects tackling rough sleeping in the capital. Building on the £8.5m from City Hall already funding pan-London rough sleeping services each year, this will provide both immediate and long-term support for rough sleepers, and improved winter provision.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “This budget has been put together under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. These include the Government’s failed austerity agenda, with huge cuts to the Met Police, TfL and other public services – and the threat of a no-deal Brexit.

“However - despite these challenges - this budget will quickly deliver tangible results to Londoners’ lives.  In the face of crippling Government cuts to the Met police and key preventative services, my budget invests record amounts to support policing and to tackle crime. It will also deliver record investment to tackle air pollution.” 

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. It includes:

• 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 invest in new equipment and ensure fire engines continue to arrive at emergency incidents within targets.

• Ends -

NOTES TO EDITORS:

The Mayor’s council tax proposals include an overall 8.9 per cent increase to his total precept, the equivalent of 50p a week for a Band D taxpayer. 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 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 prudently assumed revenue shortfall from the delay to Crossrail fares income of £600m over the next three years.

The total budget for the GLA Group for 2018-19 is £18.4bn. This comprises a revenue budget of £12.2bn and a capital spending plan of £6.2bn.