Sadiq Khan has further increased the funding he will provide for policing and crime prevention in the coming financial year to take the total to £1.148 billion of his 2024/25 draft budget.
City Hall is pointing out that this will be £151 million more for those areas of expenditure than the Mayor allocated in 2023/24. It will include a £6.5 million top-up for the Violence Reduction Unit to cover a two-year period.
The proportion of the Metropolitan Police budget to be provided by Mayor Khan under the plan is set to rise to 27 per cent, continuing a long-term shift in the balance between government funding for the Met and what City Hall contributes.
Overall, close to £5 billion of the Mayor’s budget, which includes government grants, will be allocated to crime and policing matters out of a total of £21 billion.
Crime in London and the ability of the city’s mayors to influence its levels already features strongly in election campaigning, with Khan’s Conservative challenger Susan Hall previously claiming she has found £200 million of mayoral budget funds that could be spent on policing instead of other things. In a rightwing newspaper she has claimed that Khan has “starved the police of resources”.
Liberal Democrat candidate Rob Blackie has said that if elected he would do away with most of Khan’s forthcoming public transport fares freeze and divert cash from the mayoral budget away from TfL and into the Met instead.
Khan says the resources he has earmarked for 2024/25 will be “more than double” the amount he inherited from the Conservative Boris Johnson on becoming Mayor in 2016. He claims: “The reality is the government continues to chronically underfund policing in London so I’m having to step in and use all the levers at my disposal to provide the urgent additional funding needed.”
The additional funding is supported in part by an increase in the Mayor’s council tax precept paid by London households. The detail of the draft budget lists the “council tax requirement” for the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, whose duties include setting the Met’s budget, at around £1 billion.
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As usual Khan is blaming everyone else for his failings on crime as he does on every failing he oversees. He’s had eight years to get this right and it’s getting worse due to him. Not fit for purpose. We need rid of. Print that!