London Mayor proposes to invest millions for police

Sadiq Khan has announced his intention to invest a further £30 million to ensure that more than a thousand Metropolitan police officers funded by City Hall will continue to patrol the streets of the capital for the next four years.

City Hall says that the Mayor of London’s funding over the last three years alone has enabled the Met to recruit an additional 1,300 police officers to tackle crime. The Mayor is now proposing to invest a further new £30 million annual cash injection to protect 1,000 of those officers who were put at risk by the impact of coronavirus on business rates income – ensuring they will continue to be funded from City Hall to police our city for the next four years.

On top of this, Sadiq Khan proposes to invest a further £8 million of new council tax funding in additional violence prevention programmes – as part of a package that is both tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. To be delivered through London’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), the new prevention investment will fund a range of projects to reduce violence, such as expanding GPS tagging of violent offenders after prison release and extending the funding for youth work services for young victims of violence seen in London’s Major Trauma Centres and A&Es.

Khan said: “Violent crime had been increasing across the country and in London since 2014, while serious youth violence had been going up since 2013. We’ve worked hard to tackle violence in our city, and it started to fall well before the pandemic hit and has continued to do so. But I am not content or complacent, we still have a long way to go.

“If we are to see the long-term reductions in violence that we all want to see in our city, we must continue to tackle the underlying causes of crime, such as poverty, deprivation and lack of opportunities for young Londoners.

“I’m doing everything I can from City Hall to reduce violence, but it’s clear we still have huge financial challenges ahead because the government has implemented a new era of austerity on public services in London. Ministers must now match my commitment to tackling this issue and fully refund City Hall and the Met for all the lost income and money spent tackling the pandemic.”  

Since he became Mayor in May 2016, Khan has invested £1.08 billion in the Met Police – more than any other Mayor of London.