OPINION
Sadiq Khan is spending more on Net Zero than his Met Police investment (Image: Lucy North/PA Wire)
Yesterday saw London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan present his final budget to the London Assembly for the next financial year.
It included a “record-breaking” ￡1.16bn investment in the Metropolitan Police and, after a series of drafts, his final budget now includes a much-heralded “additional ￡83m investment”.
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At first glance, this looks as if the Mayor may have been listening to me when I urged him at last month’s initial budget meeting to slash his bloated mayoral bureaucracy and put more police officers on the street.
But of the additional ￡83m, ￡73m has been provided by central Government. Only ￡10m has come from the Mayor’s own budget and of that only ￡4.4m from his vast payroll budget which, at ￡117.4m, is almost three times higher in real terms than that of Boris Johnson when he left office in 2016.
￡1.16bn sounds like a lot of money and yet our capital city remains chronically under-policed with, according to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, a likely four-figure reduction in police officers in the coming year. As Rowley has pointed out, we are simply not funding policing in London to the same extent as other comparable cities.
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Police funding in New York and Sydney is 50% higher per capita than in London.
Londoners feel this. Mayor Khan began his budget process with a consultation, inviting Londoners to give their views on his first draft. One telling respondent said that London felt lawless.
Is it any wonder that London feels lawless with knife crime at record levels, with only 2% of domestic burglaries in outer London resulting in a charge or summons, with shoplifting being practically decriminalised, with a phone being stolen every five minutes?
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The Mayor argues that nothing is more important to him than keeping Londoners safe and yet when you delve into the detail of the budget, it becomes clear that when he says this, he is gaslighting Londoners.
The one figure the Mayor has not mentioned and which you will not find on any press releases or indeed on any budget documentation is the ￡1.4bn budget for Net Zero in 2025/26.
While the Mayor proclaims policing profligacy, his spend on Net Zero is hidden in a spreadsheet appended to the published documents. The ￡1.4bn includes such items as ￡162m in the next year alone to be spent on cycle lanes, low traffic neighbourhoods and 20 mph zones, something already paid for by London Borough councils. It includes ￡104m on a zero emission fleet for Transport for London.
Should reducing CO2 emissions from buses really come at the cost of inadequate policing for crime-plagued Londoners?
More widely on the Assembly, I was met with the customary pearl-clutching from the other parties. Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and of course the Conservatives all support the Mayor’s Net Zero plans in which he has set a date of 2030 for London against a UK target of 2050.
I’ve written formally to the Mayor to demand a figure for the additional cost of the vanity project he calls the Accelerated Green Pathway but, disgustingly, he is unable to tell me.
In answer to my question he wrote: “This comparative information is not available as we do not track what would be spent if London had an alternative target. Changing London’s net zero target is not an option under consideration.”
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The Mayor’s emphasis on Net Zero over policing is not surprising. But what has taken me by surprise since being elected in May last year is the willingness of the Conservatives to go along with it.
Take one Conservative Assembly Member as an example. Thomas Turrell has asked 164 questions in that time of which 58 were Net Zero related. But he hasn’t challenged the Mayor on Net Zero, only pressed him on why he’s behind on his targets.
The fact is that the Conservatives can’t bring themselves to oppose Net Zero. Only Susan Hall stood up and said that she agreed with me about it. Liz Truss recently observed that “quite a few” of the Parliamentary party are behind it.
Kemi Badenoch has spoken up against pursuing Net Zero without a plan but, unlike Reform UK, she has no plans to cancel it.
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To those pact-hungry Conservatives arguing that they want the same thing as Reform, I urge them to watch their colleagues in the London Assembly in yesterday’s meeting. Net Zero is making Londoners poorer and colder while the number of police officers in our crime-ridden capital continues to decline in spite of the Mayor’s claims.
Only Reform genuinely prioritises policing and is unique among political parties in calling time on Britain’s Net Zero lunacy.