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How I would cut crime and make London safer
Brian Paddick14 Jan 2008
Last week we heard a telling commentary on Ken Livingstone's time as London's Mayor - from the man himself. At his annual London Government speech at the Mansion House, Ken admitted he was powerless to halt violence among teenagers.
Yet this is the Mayor who also claims that crime in London is down. It isn't - despite Ken raising his part of the council tax by 150 per cent, three quarters of which has gone on police.
It's a similar story on so many of the issues that Londoners care about. Ken, the man who employs more press officers than No 10, has increased the number of buses - but at a cost of an additional £600 million a year in subsidies. The Tube is still a national disgrace, endured by millions daily - yet Ken has ensured that people at the over-staffed Transport for London headquarters are paid an average salary of £60,000 a year.
Above all, it's a question of delivery. Eight years have proved that whatever his spin, Ken does not deliver.
I was a police officer in London for more than 30 years. When I was the police chief in the London boroughs of Merton and Lambeth, I delivered better results than anywhere else in London. I reduced crime, I made Londoners in those boroughs feel safer - and I improved my officers' morale, too.
I will do the same if elected Mayor. I can make complex organisations deliver tangible results - results that make our streets feel different.
Crime isn't the only issue facing London, but it's key. And it's typical of Livingstone's term as Mayor. He may have some good ideas, like community policing, but he never seems to deliver real change - or value for money.
Today I am launching my mayoral campaign, as it turns out, yards from the site of the latest murder of a young Londoner: Khalil Nasseri was stabbed to death on Atlantic Road on Saturday night. Yet Ken says there is nothing we can do about such violence. He's wrong. The latest published Home Office figures show that just two per cent of the Met's stop-and-search operations in London were directed at finding knives. Of course changing the culture that feeds violence will take longer but in the meantime, police could and should be putting more effort into taking the knives and guns off the streets.
But community policing is about more than that. It's a question of restoring the relationship between police and the public, so that, for instance, local people tell police whom to go after and who's carrying knives. Restoring that trust should be at the heart of the Safer Neighbourhoods scheme - yet the Mayor's own Community Safety Quarterly publication shows that on almost all counts, it's failing.
That is the Met's own assessment too; figures show that London is the only place in the entire country where people have more confidence in the force as a whole than they do in their neighbourhood police. Where Safer Neighbourhoods works, it's down to an excellent sergeant commanding the team - yet they are usually promoted up within a year or so and that local connection is lost. We need to ensure that the teams keep working to restore trust locally and that they focus on the problems local people want them to.
Since Ken first became Mayor of London, police-recorded crime has gone down by 12 per cent - as he is always eager to remind us. So why do Londoners find this hard to believe? Since 2002 the proportion of Londoners who say they feel unsafe has remained the same. The British Crime Survey shows why. It's a piece of scientific research where 3,500 Londoners each year are asked whether they have been the victim of crime in the previous year. This is a far more accurate measure of crime trends over time than recorded crime. And it shows that the proportion of Londoners who have been victims of crime has changed little since 2002. Londoners do not feel any safer because they aren't any safer.
The powers of the Mayor over policing have changed, and I will exploit that. If elected Mayor, I will chair the Metropolitan Police Authority. I will take personal responsibility for policing. I know the inside track and I know how to deliver results. My pledge is that each year I will deliver a real five per cent reduction in crime; voters will be able to hold me personally to account, as Mayor, for making London safer. And while my former boss Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair and I have had our differences over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, on the fundamentals of improving policing in London, I am confident we will be able to work together constructively to make London safer.
I will take the same direct no-nonsense approach elsewhere, too. In eight years as Mayor, Ken has failed to provide reliable buses - all change please! There are now so many buses that bus jams have replaced car jams, those at the front packed and the following ones empty. And despite all the hype, buses are unreliable, with long waits in between in most parts of London.
The technology already exists to monitor where buses are along the route and to make sure they arrive at regular intervals. By making bus routes shorter, the amount of delay they pick up can be reduced and we can make them far more reliable. Instead of paying each time you get on a bus, we could change the Oyster card to enable you to make as many journeys as you like within an hour without paying more than once.
But the Tube is worse, despite billions of pounds of investment. The disastrous Public Private Partnership plan, forced on London by Ken's Labour party, has resulted in Tube contractor Metronet going bust. As a result, TfL is massively scaling back on proposed improvements but still has no idea how it is going to resolve the situation.
As Mayor I would follow the example of the Docklands Light Railway. It is run on the basis of one company providing the whole service, trains, tracks and signals, for a fixed fee and in return, TfL takes the money collected in fares. There is no reason why the two-thirds of the track that was maintained by Metronet cannot now be run on the same basis, with the future of the remainder of the network up for negotiation with the other contractor, Tube Lines, from 2010. And the number of staff needed at TfL could be cut to reduce bureaucracy.
Livingstone had has eight years to sort out all these problems - and he has wasted millions of pounds in London council-tax payers' money failing to do so. Last time around, he promised to cut crime in London by 50 per cent - he has failed spectacularly but he still wants to be re-elected.
That kind of chutzpah is not in my nature: if I fail to deliver on my promises when I am elected Mayor, I will not stand again. But I am confident I can: I have delivered before and I will deliver again for a safer, greener and a fairer London.
