Sadiq Khan on Wednesday announced almost £50m of additional funding for the Met police as he set out final details of his annual City Hall budget.
The mayor said the financial support given by the Greater London Authority to the Met from April – much of it already announced last month - would be £151m higher than for the current year.
However the amount is not enough to provide all of the £76m sought by Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley to fund his “New Met for London” plan to boost community policing and tackle racism and misogyny in light of the damning Baroness Casey report.
Overall, about £5bn of the mayor’s £21bn annual budget will be spent on policing and fighting crime, while £11bn will be used to fund Transport for London.
As previously announced, Mr Khan’s share of council tax bills will rise by 8.6 per cent – adding £37.26 to benchmark Band D bills and meaning the average London household will pay £471.40 a year to City Hall from April.
Mr Khan said the amount of funding provided by City Hall for the Met police had doubled since he became mayor in 2016, and now accounts for 27 per cent of the Met’s total expenditure.
Previously, the Government had provided a bigger proportion of the Met’s funds, but this had now fallen by more than £1bn in real terms since 2010, City Hall said.
Mr Khan said keeping Londoners safe was his “top priority”. He had initially announced an additional £88m for the Met but has increased this by £48.9m, plus extra cash for the anti-gang work of his violence reduction unit and to replace covid grants. He said the extra cash came from “prudent financial planning” and higher than expected income from business rates.
Mr Khan said: “This means we will be providing more than double the amount of funding for the police and crime prevention compared to when I first become 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.”
But Tory mayoral candidate Susan Hall said: “This is too little, too late. Sadiq Khan has been squirrelling money away for eight years for his pre-election gimmicks, while our police force and victims of crime have suffered.”
There have been more than 1,000 homicides in London since Mr Khan became mayor. In addition, figures from the Office for National Statistics last month revealed that knife crime offences in London had increased by more than a fifth in the last year to almost 40 a day.
Police recorded 14,000 knife crime offences in the year to last September - 2,531 higher than the equivalent figure of 11,469 for the previous 12 months.
It is the second highest annual tally for knife crime in the capital over the past decade and 54 per cent higher than the annual figure of 9,086 recorded in March 2016, shortly before Mr Khan became mayor.
The extra spending on the Met police is the latest example of Mr Khan enjoying a pre-election “windfall” after recouping more council tax and business rates revenue than City Hall finance chiefs predicted last summer.
Last month it emerged he had £503m more to spend than expected. This has been used to freeze pay-as-you-go Tube and bus fares until March 2025 and to continue the programme of free school means for all London primary school children for a second term, among other initiatives. The mayoral elections will be held on May 2.
Asked whether Sir Mark would receive all the funding he sought to help transform the Met’s culture, a spokesman for the mayor said: “This support… will enable increased investment in the New Met for London, however not all of the Commissioner’s initial request for funding can be delivered as the Government’s increase in funding doesn’t even meet the cost of inflation.”
