Shaun Bailey has unveiled his “Fresh Start Plan” for London and has pledged to put 8,000 new police officers on the streets if he becomes mayor.
The Conservative candidate told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that making people feel safe is “the first step to reclaiming the streets of London” and that tackling and preventing crime will “100 per cent” be a priority.
In his ten-point plan, Mr Bailey outlines how he intends to put 8,000 new police officers on the streets and reopen 38 police front counters by the end of his first term as mayor by using City Hall savings, funds from the Home Office and money from a mayoral infrastructure levy on developers.
The former youth worker also revealed plans to open a youth centre in every London borough and hire 4,000 new youth workers to help provide opportunities to young people and stop them getting involved in crime.
Mr Bailey said: “There’s two ends of this, isn’t there? One is the enforcement piece: 8,000 extra officers, the technology to do stop and search and the emotional backing of the police to do their job. Then the other end of course is community work because we can’t arrest our way out of this problem. We have to bolster communities.
“So when I talk about 4,000 youth workers, that’s what they will do. When I talk about reopening police counters, that’s about giving people access to their local police service face to face, not through a form on the internet.
“Sadiq Khan talked about how much youth work has gone away, well why didn’t he fund it? He’s given funds to lots of small organisations, one-off funds. What he should have been doing is giving funds multi-year. How youth work works – and this is the bit he absolutely does not get – is by long term intervention for an organisation, particularly a small one.”
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Mr Bailey said that providing 4,000 new workers to youth organisations would “take away one of their biggest costs” and that longer-term investment is “how you get tough on the causes of crime in London” and “give young people hope”.
In addition to policing and crime, Shaun Bailey’s ‘Fresh Start Plan’ also outlines plans to introduce corporate sponsorship on the Tube to raise funds for TfL, get Londoners on the property ladder through shared ownership schemes and scrap a planned increase in council tax.
Current London Mayor Sadiq Khan has also revealed plans for policing in the capital and has announced an additional £30 million of funding for the Metropolitan Police to protect the jobs of 1,000 officers that were at risk due to the impact of Covid-19 on City Hall funding.
Mr Khan also announced an £8 million investment in prevention programmes that will be delivered through the Violence Reduction Unit and Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, with the money to come from council tax.
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