Sadiq Khan announced around £50m of extra funding for the Metropolitan Police on Wednesday as he unveiled the final details of City Hall’s annual budget.
The Mayor said the financial support the Greater London Authority would give to the Metropolitan Underground from April – the bulk of which was already announced last month – would be £151m more than this year.
But that amount will go towards increasing security in the area in light of Baroness Casey’s damning report and funding a ‘New Metropolitan for London’ plan to tackle racism and misogyny. It is not enough to cover the full £76m sought by the Lord Chancellor, Sir Mark Rowley.
Overall, around £5bn of the Mayor’s £21bn annual budget will be spent on policing and crime-fighting, with £11bn going to fund Transport for London.
As previously announced, Mr Khan’s share of council tax will increase by 8.6%, adding £37.26 to his baseline Band D tax bill, meaning the average London household will be paying less to council tax from April. You will pay £471.40 per year.
Mr Khan said that since he became mayor in 2016, the amount of funding City Hall has provided to the Metropolitan Police has doubled and now accounts for 27 per cent of the Metropolitan Police’s total spending.
The government previously provided the majority of the Met’s funding, but that amount has fallen by more than £1 billion in real terms since 2010, City Hall said.
Mr Khan said keeping Londoners safe was his “top priority”. He had originally announced an extra £88m for the Met, but this was increased by £48.9m, with additional cash to replace the Violence Reduction Unit’s anti-gang work and the Covid-19 grant. Added. He said the additional cash was due to “prudent financial planning” and income from business rates that were higher than expected.
“This means more than doubling the funding for police and crime prevention compared to when I first became mayor,” Khan said.
“The reality is that the Government continues to chronically underfund policing in London, so I must step in and do everything at our disposal to urgently provide the additional funding that is needed. ”
But Conservative mayoral candidate Susan Hall said: “This is too little, too late. Sadiq Khan has been extorting money for eight years for pre-election schemes, while our police and crime victims are suffering.”
There have been more than 1,000 murders in London since Mr Khan became mayor. Furthermore, figures released by the Office for National Statistics last month revealed that knife crime in London has increased by more than a fifth since last year, to almost 40 a day.
Police recorded 14,000 knife crimes in the year to September last year, an increase of 2,531 on the 11,469 in the previous 12 months.
This is the second highest annual number of knife crimes in the capital in 10 years, and 54% higher than the 9,086 annual knife crimes recorded in March 2016, just before Mr Khan took office.
The extra spending on the Metropolitan Police is the latest example of Mr Khan enjoying a pre-election “windfall” last summer when he recouped more council tax and business rates revenue than City Hall finance chiefs expected.
Last month it was revealed he had £503m more available than expected. This has been used to implement initiatives such as freezing pay-as-you-go tube and bus fares until March 2025 and continuing a free tuition program for all primary school students in London into term two. The mayoral election will be held on May 2nd.
Asked whether Sir Mark would receive all the funding he had asked for to support the Met’s cultural transformation, a spokesperson for the Mayor said: “This support…will enable us to increase investment in London’s New Metropolitan Museum, but the Secretary will not receive the full amount of funding he originally requested.” It is possible. ”