The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has today announced his intention to invest an additional £151m in policing and crime prevention as he confirms his final draft
budget for 2024-25. This means the Mayor has now more than doubled the annual support for policing and crime prevention since he came to office in 2016. By comparison, the previous Mayor cut the police budget in real terms by 28 per cent in the previous eight years, and over the last 14 years the Government has reduced the Met police budget in real terms by 32 per cent.
Keeping Londoners safe is the Mayor’s top priority. He has had to repeatedly step in with additional funding for the police to fill the gaps left by massive Government cuts and an ongoing lack of national investment in policing and crime prevention.
Sadiq initially announced in January that he would provide an extra £88m to fund the Met in this year’s budget. But he’s now able to propose even more funding for the police from City Hall due to prudent financial planning and higher income from local authority business rates.
The Mayor has earmarked:
An additional £48.9m, in addition to the £88.4 million he announced last month, plus £7.2m following the end of COVID-19 funding repayments, to support the Met police in 2024-25.
An additional £6.5m to support the Mayor’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) across the next two years.
The extra investment in the VRU will help to boost community-led projects to tackle violence in neighbourhoods and estates and to fund a programme of street-based youth workers to divert young Londoners away from robbery and violence after school.
Publishing his final draft budget for the GLA Group today, the Mayor is proposing to invest £1.148bn in total in the Met for 2024-25 – a 103 per cent increase compared to the previous Mayor.
The proportion of the Met police budget provided by City Hall has now increased from 19 per cent in 2016 to 27 per cent in the proposed budget for 2024-25, showing the extent to which the Government has refused to properly fund the police in London, and the increased investment from City Hall.
Analysis shows that compared to 2010-11, Government funding for the Met has only increased by 2 per cent in cash terms. In real terms, that's a funding cut of over £1 billion, or a 32.4 per cent real terms reduction using December 2023 inflation figures. Continuing inflation means that the real-terms reduction will be a third in 2024-25.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “Bearing down on crime and keeping Londoners safe is my top priority as Mayor. That’s why I’m proud to be announcing that we’ll be investing a record £1.148bn in policing this year from City Hall. This means we will be providing more than double the amount of funding for the police and crime prevention compared to when I first became Mayor.
“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.
“As well as more money for the police, I’m also announcing an additional £6.5m for London’s Violence Reduction Unit so we can take more action to help divert young Londoners away from gangs and crime. This is part of my approach of being both tough on crime and tough on the complex cause of crime as we work to build a safer London for everyone.” Photo by Dani_7C3, Wikimedia commons.