--- election_year: 2012 party_id: labour party_name: Labour Party party_leader: Ken Livingstone political_spectrum: centre-left victory: false government_outcome: opposition sections: - economy - taxation - health - education - housing - immigration - foreign-policy - environment - transport - law-and-order - welfare - democracy-and-constitution - agriculture - energy - devolution - science-and-technology - local-government --- # Labour Party London Mayoral Manifesto 2012 ## Contents * 05 Foreword – Ken Livingstone * 07 Lower fares, better transport * 21 More local police to make London safer * 35 Lower rents, better homes * 41 Lower energy bills and a greener future * 51 A more prosperous London * 61 Defending the NHS, speaking up for patients * 69 A great place to go out * 77 Smart city London * 81 Valuing Older Londoners * 85 Young Londoners * 91 Tackling inequality to improve everyone’s quality of life * 99 An open, accountable Mayor ## Better off with Labour At a time when people are being squeezed by higher fares, rents, and heating bills, Londoners need a Mayor who is in touch and understand the pressures that they face every day.They need a Mayor who will make them better off. The first items on my agenda every day as Mayor will be to reduce the cost of living for ordinary Londoners, and make our streets safer. My manifesto sets out how Labour will: * Cut fares – saving the average fare-payer £1,000 over four years off their bus, Tube, DLR, Overground and tram fares * Crack down on crime by reversing the Tory Mayor’s police cuts * Help reduce rents with a London non-profit lettings agency * Cut heating bills – cutting out the rip-off energy utilities to offer Londoners up to £120 off their energy bills, plus free home insulation for those in fuel poverty, including pensioners * Establish a London-wide Education Maintenance Allowance of up to £30 a week to help young people stay in education * Support childcare with grants and interest-free loans I have also promised to freeze both the Mayor’s share of Council Tax and the Congestion Charge for four years. And we will invest in improving transport services, build new homes, and cut pollution to make London more sustainable. The Tories have copied my campaign slogan, ‘Better Off With Ken’, with their ‘Better Off With Boris’. That would suggest we both agree that the key election issue is whether a Labour or a Tory Mayor will make Londoners better off. In reality, the Tories want to talk about anything else because they know that while Boris Johnson is out of touch, putting up fares and cutting police, a Labour Mayor really would make Londoners better off. You can find out how much better off you will be with a Labour Mayor by using the ‘Better Off With Ken’ calculator on my website: betteroffcalculator.com Ken Livingstone “ Ken’s Fare Deal: Compared with Boris Johnson’s pledge to keep raising fares two percent above inflation each year, the average London fare-payer will be £1,000 better off by the end of my four year term as Mayor ” ## Lower fares, better transport I will cut fares by 7% this year and freeze them throughout 2013. Oyster single bus fares will be reduced from £1.35 to £1.20. From 2014 fares will not rise above inflation. I make no apology for the fact that the focus of my transport policy today is to make it cheaper, easier, and less polluting for Londoners to get around. Under my Fare Deal the average fare payer will save £1,000 over the four year mayoral term. As Mayor from 2000 to 2008 I kept fares down while delivering a massive investment programme, including the congestion charge, new buses, running more frequently and reliably on every route in London, the Oyster card, making roads safer, creating the London Overground, starting a cycling revolution, and beginning long-term transport improvements such as Crossrail. Boris Johnson’s massive annual fares hikes have taken money out of people’s pockets at a time they can least afford it. Worse, Johnson’s fares cash-pile has not been used to build new services - as every year TfL has under-spent its investment budget while he has been Mayor. With a Tory Mayor, London has had the worst of both worlds – a Mayor too out of touch to notice how most people are struggling with rising costs, but not sufficiently focused on the job to plan for our future transport needs. ### My plan for transport in London is simple: 1. **Cut fares and keep them down** 2. **Make it easier for everyone to get around while cutting pollution, with better public transport, less congestion, and safer streets for pedestrians and cyclists** 3. **Plan now for the transport system that London will need tomorrow** ## Fare Deal - saving average fare-payers £1,000 over four years Every year since he became Mayor, Boris Johnson has imposed eye-watering rises in bus, Overground, tram and Tube fares. His business plan means if he is re-elected he is committed to keep raising fares every year by two percent above inflation. Mayor Johnson may not have noticed how expensive getting the Tube or a bus has become, but most Londoners do. more to its coffers this year. Yet Johnson promises even higher fares to come. **I will** reverse Johnson’s latest fares rise, cutting bus, Tube, tram, DLR and Overground fares by seven percent in October this year and freezing them until 2014. Oyster single bus fares will be reduced from £1.35 to £1.20. From 2014 fares will not rise above inflation. These fares hikes are totally unnecessary - Transport for London banked £727 million in ‘operating surplus’ (profits) last year and is set to add nearly £400 million. Compared with Boris Johnson’s pledge to keep raising fares by two percent above inflation each year, the average public transport fare-payer will be £1,000 better off at the end of my 4-year mayoral term. I am utterly determined to do this and TfL has the surpluses to afford my fares cut without affecting investment. ### Fare Deal Savings Across the Main Fares Menu over 4 Years | | Fare Deal saving over 4 Years | |---|---| | Weekly Bus and tram pass | £620.80 | ### Weekly Travelcard Zones | Weekly Travelcard Zones | Fare Deal saving over 4 Years | |---|---| | 1 to 2 | £964.20 | | 1 to 3 | £1,129.30 | | 1 to 4 | £1,380.20 | | 1 to 5 | £1,644.40 | | 1 to 6 | £1,763.30 | Londoners are struggling with the effects of the recession and need a Mayor who will stand up for them. I make this pledge: if I have not delivered a 7% fares cut by 7 October 2012 then I will resign as Mayor. ### The Tory fare rip-off The table opposite shows how much Londoners will save on a range of bus and Tube tickets if I am elected Mayor, rather than Boris Johnson on 3 May. ### Monthly Travelcard Zones | Monthly Travelcard Zones | Fare Deal saving over 4 Years | |---|---| | 1 to 2 | £855 | | 1 to 3 | £1001.30 | | 1 to 4 | £1,223.80 | | 1 to 5 | £1,457.70 | | 1 to 6 | £1,562.90 | Ken’s Fare Deal: Compared with Boris Johnson’s pledge to keep raising fares two percent above inflation each year, the average London fare-payer will be £1,000 better off by the end of my four year term as Mayor. ## Guarantee to protect the Freedom Pass The dignity of free-travel given to older and disabled Londoners by the Freedom Pass is under threat from a Tory Mayor whose annual above inflation fares rises are making the scheme unaffordable. My fares cuts will reduce by over £22m per year the price that the borough councils have to pay to Transport for London to keep the Freedom Pass going. I will work with the borough councils to agree a four year funding deal so that older and disabled Londoners can be assured that the Freedom Pass is absolutely safe as long as I am Mayor. I will return the age of eligibility for the Freedom Pass to 60. The Tory Mayor stood by and did nothing for four years while it was increased from 60 to 66. Suddenly, with opinion polls turning against him in the run up to the election, he announced he would cut the age of eligibility back to 60. I am pleased that he has confirmed that the money is available in Transport for London for me to deliver it. ## HOW I WILL PAY FOR MY FARES CUT The total ‘cost’ of my entire fares cut will be just under **£270 million in the full first year.** This will be paid for out of a portion of the huge unplanned ‘operating surpluses’ (profits) Transport for London (TfL) has been running up. According to TfL’s published accounts, last year it had a surplus of £727 million and in the first 9 months alone of this year it is £310 million. Put simply, this means that TfL is raising hundreds of millions of pounds more in fares and other income than it needs to run Tube and bus services, or had budgeted for. This is not surprising: in 4 years the Tory Mayor has increased average fares by a quarter, which is nearly double the rate of inflation. He increased the single bus fare by half as much again. You can now take a round-the-world trip for less than the cost of most annual Travelcards. Johnson can’t work out how to pretend that my fares cut is not affordable. First he said there were no surpluses. Then he claimed they were being used for investment or even paying for existing services. Finally, he argued that surpluses were needed to pay off debt. The reality is that the money is there. The Mayor has no business stockpiling massive profits from a public service like transport, especially at a time when money is tight for most people. But it is not true either that Boris Johnson has been using his fares cash-pile to fund investment in new services. In fact his investment budget has been under-spent by a massive £1.25bn over four years. My fares cut will be funded entirely from TfL’s operating surplus, leaving the investment budget untouched. Indeed, as I will be rigorous in making sure transport plans are delivered, it is possible to both cut fares and increase investment in the network. I will take the money Boris Johnson squeezed out of public transport users and put it back into the pockets and purses of ordinary Londoners by cutting fares. ## Better buses - going where you need them Almost all of us (89% of Londoners) use the bus at some point during the year. A good bus service needs constant improvement to respond to people’s changing needs – especially while London’s population continues to grow. Between 2000 and 2008 we greatly improved the bus service, providing more buses at greater frequency and reliability right across London. Passengers flocked back to the bus as a result. Under Boris Johnson that progress is grinding to a halt. I have visited every borough in London in the last year and the message is the same: people need a better service to get to the places they need to go to locally, like the hospital, their children’s school, or a local shopping centre rather than just routes into central London. They don’t think this out of touch Tory Mayor is listening when they ask for improvements. I will * Provide bus services that reflect passengers’ demands for easier travel in the suburbs. * Offer new ways for bus users to report problems by phone, text and smart-phone, and display them online along with TfL’s responses. * Deal with the roadworks and accidents that cause the majority of bus delays. * Work with borough councils to identify the main congestion points and bring forward bus priority measures to speed up bus passengers’ journeys. * Bring forward plans to make all bus-stops accessible – there is no point having ramps on all buses if they can’t be used at some bus-stops. * Improve training for bus drivers to provide passengers with a more comfortable journey – particularly ensuring all older passengers are seated before the bus moves off. * Save tens of millions of pounds by cancelling the Tory Mayor’s vanity project ‘new bus for London’. Johnson’s bus must be the most expensive in the world. At more than £2 million each they cost ten times the price of a normal double-decker. He claims he will deliver another six hundred, in which case hundreds of millions of pounds of fare-payers money could be wasted. Each will have a conductor, costing over £43 million per year in total, even though virtually no-one pays cash fares anymore. At the same time the out of touch Tory Mayor keeps putting up fares and says my fares cut is unaffordable. I will stop wasting money on this vanity project, keeping only those buses that have already been built. ## Get a grip of improving the Tube Londoners should not have had to suffer so much over the last four years under the Tube upgrade programme. As a London Assembly report showed, delays on the Tube increased by twenty per cent between 2009/10 and 2010/11. Passengers wasted an extra six and a half million hours down in the Tube tunnels as a result. Increasing the time that journeys are scheduled to take, so that many delayed journeys no longer appear in the statistics doesn’t fool anyone who uses the Tube every day like hundreds of thousands of Londoners. As a Tube user myself I experience the problems and poor communication first-hand. Boris Johnson has reneged on a whole raft of promises he made to sort out the Tube when he wanted Londoners to vote for him in 2008, including: * Keeping the “**Tube open for one hour later on Friday and Saturday nights, so Londoners can get home safely late at night**”. He hasn’t. * “**Negotiating a no-strike deal, in good faith, with the Tube unions**”. There have been more days lost to strikes in four years of Boris Johnson than the whole eight years when I was Mayor. He hasn’t even bothered to meet the Tube unions. * “**I will stop the planned ticket office closures**”. He didn’t. * As Mayor he promised weekend closures on the Jubilee Line would end in ‘spring 2011’, then “June 2011” and then “July 2011”. Even now there are weekend closures because of works on other lines. Running a complex transport system is a tough job and a part-time Mayor like Boris Johnson just can’t get on top of the key problems. I will: * Appoint Val Shawcross, my Deputy Mayor, as Chair of Transport for London, and work tirelessly with transport bosses to ensure that passengers come first and the Tube upgrade programme is carried out with the minimum of disruption to people’s busy lives * Bear down on Monday morning over-runs * Deliver Tube improvements more quickly by ensuring that TfL spends the capital funds allocated to it – under Boris Johnson over £900m of funds allocated for investment in the Tube went unspent, at the same time that he was hiking up fares. **Reinstate the Zones 2-6 one day Travelcard** If I am elected I will cut the fares and introduce a one day 2-6 ZoneSaver card, saving fare-payers in outer London hundreds of pounds a year. Boris Johnson abolished it in January 2011. I will reintroduce it by October next year. I will also ensure that more of the Tube is made accessible to everyone, from people struggling with luggage, to older and disabled Londoners. It is a scandal that while TfL’s investment budget has been under-spent by over £1bn, the Tory Mayor has curtailed the step-free station programme. My step-free programme will make at least a third of all Tube stations accessible by 2016. ## A modern metro service for rail passengers ### The London Overground service I introduced, taking over the old North London Line, has proved a great success. The London Overground service I introduced, taking over the old North London Line, has proved a great success. I want to deliver the same improvements to the rest of the struggling suburban rail system, with more frequent services, safer and more welcoming stations, and higher standards of passenger care. Under the Tory mayor, London’s long-suffering rail passengers have been ignored as fares have risen and services declined. Before leaving office in 2008 I had already agreed with the Secretary of State for Transport to start transferring responsibility for suburban rail services to the Mayor. Boris Johnson did nothing for three and a half years, while passengers suffered. I will make the case for Transport for London to run the capital’s suburban rail services, so that we put ordinary Londoners before the profits of rail companies. Transport professionals are confident that there will be considerable financial savings from the change in contracts, so that there will be money to pay for necessary improvements without additional cost to passengers. Indeed, I will be able to offer many suburban rail passengers lower fares, as they benefit from my ‘Fare Deal’ the same as Tube and bus users. ## Courtesy on public transport I will ask Transport for London to revive public information campaigns to encourage courtesy and good behavior on public transport, in particular informing visitors to London about things like Tube etiquette – waiting for passengers to get off the train before getting on, and standing on the right on the escalator. There is a perception that Boris Johnson’s Conservative administration is out of touch with public transport users. From fiddling the figures on Tube delays, to poor communication across the system, transport users feel let down. Likewise, work to discourage loud music, smelly food, bad behaviour and rudeness across the transport network has been neglected. I want to humanize the system and make the experience of passengers much more central to how buses, Tube, Overground, tram and trains are run. That means courtesy between transport users, making sure the basic rules of travel are adhered to, and an active leadership that’s encouraging the best possible experience. I will make Transport for London a body that’s active in pursuit of courtesy on the transport system: * A campaign to remind transport users of the basic ‘rules of travel’ * give up your seat for people who need it more than you; let passengers off before you get on; stand on the right and walk on the left; no music played out loud; move down the carriage or bus to let people on; all those small things that make a difference * Too many people complain of people putting dirty shoes up on the seat. We will trial ‘keep your feet off’ designs on seats to discourage this on buses and train carriages where there are facing seats, and as seats are repaired so as to avoid prohibitive costs. * We will run a campaign to encourage Londoners to help commuters struggling with buggies or wheelchairs * Young people will be encouraged to give up their seats for their elders * We will promote orderly queuing at bus stops – and actively discourage queue jumping * The alcohol ban – which is in fact poorly enforced– will remain * We will keep the ‘Earn Your Travel Back’ scheme for young travel users introduced by the Conservative Mayor but look at ways to improve it – so far only small numbers of people have completed the scheme In addition, in summer months, during the height of the tourist peak, to help tourists and regular commuters alike, we will trial ‘rules of travel’ public address announcements in foreign languages so tourists know the basics – not standing on the left on the escalator, letting people off before you get on, and so on – and we will develop phone apps and information in tourist guides to encourage this as a way to keep the system moving smoothly in these busy times. Public transport is a collective enterprise. I will make sure it is a better one. ## A Better Deal for Motorists Boris Johnson promised to be the motorists’ friend, yet London now has slower traffic speeds in 2010 than in 2008 despite falling traffic levels in the recession. Mayor Johnson has invented a new sound-bite transport policy – “smoothing traffic flow” – but he hasn’t focused on the things that really cause congestion and disruption to motorists’ journeys: roadworks and traffic collisions. He promised to “re-instate the tidal flow in the Blackwall tunnel at the earliest opportunity” when he needed votes in 2008, but abandoned the pledge once elected. **I will** * **Cut congestion through SMART parking** Learning from San Francisco’s SF Park experiment, I will make it easier and quicker for drivers to find a parking space in London. Working with Councils, sensors in parking bays will provide data on when a space is available. This data will be made freely available. If the Shoreditch app firms are as quick off the mark as their counterparts in Silicon Valley, then very quickly Londoners will be able to get information to their smart phones alerting them when they are near an available parking spot. As, particularly at peak times, a significant portion of traffic is simply circling to find a parking space, this smart initiative could help cut congestion as well as reducing the frustration levels of drivers and their passengers. * **Focus on roadworks** In his 2008 manifesto Boris Johnson observed that ‘[most Londoners agree that there is nothing more frustrating that driving past a hole in the road with no obvious sign of work taking place. Or seeing the same roads dug up time and again”.Sound familiar? He promised to get the power to fine utility companies who cause delay through badly planned roadworks. Four years later he is still promising. Meanwhile on Johnson’s watch London has seen the worst traffic disruption in living memory due to the failure to monitor conditions on the Hammersmith Flyover and its subsequent forced closure. When laws finally come in to place later in the year we will ensure that essential roadworks are co-ordinated so as to minimise disruption, and utility companies and others that break the rules are swiftly prosecuted. on at the Olympics will be ferried along special lanes in a fleet of imported BMWs when London has the finest taxi service in the world. Athletes and their team need special treatment to ensure they get to their events on time. Corporate sponsors do not. If it is not too late by May I will negotiate with the International Olympic Committee to ensure the maximum possible access for black cabs to the Olympic Route Network. * **I will** support mini-cab drivers in seeking to end the practice of some mini-cab firms, whereby drivers are treated as self-employed and therefore not entitled to holiday or sick pay, but are nevertheless required to commit 60-70 hours of work per week to an individual operator. * **I will** continue the Safer Travel at Night campaigns, that support licensed mini-cabs and taxis and warn Londoners not to risk taking an illegal mini-cab tout. ### Enable more Londoners to have access to car clubs We will help Londoners to cut the cost of travel and reduce congestion and pollution by supporting the faster spread of car clubs. Car clubs are commercially operated services, which give people access to a car on a pay-as-you-go basis. The biggest obstacle to the expansion of car clubs is lack of available parking spaces. A small amount of public investment leverages much bigger private investment, so I will ask TfL to work with boroughs to create more car club parking bays in the places which will attract new members. We will also look to enable car club membership to be integrated into the Oyster card, so that Londoners can have just one smart card for all their travel needs. There are now over 130,000 car club members in London. According to the industry, car club members make savings of up to £2,000 per year through avoided insurance, car tax, maintenance and other costs of owning a car. Compared to the average motorist, car club members reduce the miles they drive by up to 62 per cent, reducing traffic and parking congestion and pollution. ### Faster, greener, more efficient freight I will ask TfL to look seriously at the possibility of more freight consolidation centres for London. This would mean deliveries are taken to hubs and aggregated together before being taken into central London, saving on costs and cutting traffic. ### Keep the Congestion Charge Zone To keep traffic moving in Central London I will keep the Central London Congestion Charge Zone. Boris Johnson was wrong to scrap the Western Extension, but now the cameras have all been ripped out it is too expensive to bring back, or to introduce the gas guzzler charge. I will freeze the congestion charge for four years. ### World-class taxi and private hire services London’s taxi and mini-cab services are world class and we need to keep them that way. Johnson has been trying to privatise the section of TfL that regulates private hire and taxi drivers. It’s most important function is to carry out criminal record checks into prospective drivers, and to administer the Knowledge which maintains the high standards that make London’s black cabs the envy of the world. In the interests of passengers, I will put a stop to talk of privatised taxi and private hire regulator and will rule out any tampering with the Knowledge. Cab sharing has worked well at Paddington and I will work with the cab trade to find other stations where it can be applied, saving passengers money and cutting waiting times. Rickshaws are dangerous to their passengers and pedestrians. I will campaign for them to be banned. It is ridiculous that corporate hangers- ## Safer cycling Ten years ago we started a cycling revolution in London and riding a bike has become fashionable with a new generation. But we have barely begun to develop the potential of this quick, healthy and zero-pollution way of getting around. Many people want to cycle more but fear that the roads are dangerous. Four out of ten Londoners have access to a bike but only two in one hundred journeys are cycled. Boris Johnson’s cavalier attitude to cycle safety means the Mayor has put ‘smoothing traffic flow’ before making streets safer. It shouldn’t have taken a rising death toll among cyclists to get the Mayor to recognise the problem. My number one priority for improving cycling will be to improve road safety. * **Safer junctions** Over half of all cyclists killed on London’s roads are hit by lorries turning left at junctions. Along with a comprehensive safety review of all major junctions, we will trial a cyclists-only green traffic light phase. This would give cyclists a vital few seconds to get away before the motorised traffic starts moving. * **Safer Cycle Superhighways** We will redesign Cycle Superhighways with safe junctions, continuous routes, better segregation and proper maintenance. Mayor Johnson avoided dealing with the real challenges in favour of a quick headline and splash of blue paint on the road. Sadly two cyclists have died this year on dangerous Cycle Superhighway junctions. * **Suburban Greenways** To encourage more people than just young men to feel safe cycling, we will expand the ‘Greenways’ network of easy to access, green, traffic-free cycle routes connecting London’s suburbs. * **Safe routes to outer London town centres** Provide safe routes to town centres on quiet roads, with better signage, increased secure cycle parking, and proper enforcement of cycle lanes. Over half of all potentially cyclable trips are in outer London- most of which are less than 10 minutes by bike. * **Listen to cyclists about where secure parking is needed** Work with Network Rail and others to provide Dutch-style cycle parking hubs, and create a web-based tool for cyclists to say where more facilities are needed. * **Extend the freedom pass to cover free cycle hire membership.** * **A consistent cycle network across London** Boris Johnson abandoned the comprehensive London Cycle Network to focus £100m on cycle hire in Zone 1. I will work with the boroughs to deliver common high standards of cycle lanes, traffic calming, decluttering, and cycle parking so cyclists feel confident and safe wherever they are in London. I will support the London Cycling Campaign’s ‘Go Dutch’ approach. * **Get a grip of Cycle Hire** It is fantastic to see cycle hire bikes stationed across central London, but the scheme is far too expensive to run (Barclays sponsorship covers only a fraction of the £140m costs, the rest of which are paid by Londoners, despite Johnson promising that there would be “no cost to the taxpayer”). It is also under-used, appealing primarily to a narrow group of well-off young men working in the city. I will order a comprehensive review of the scheme’s contract and require a plan for how cycle hire can be made attractive to a wider range of Londoners. I want to offer cycle hire across London, particularly south of the river, but not at rip-off costs. ## Safer streets - 20’s plenty We will cut road deaths and injuries by supporting borough councils who want to make 20mph the default speed on residential streets or where children go to school, and on a case-by-case basis, dangerous high streets. 20mph zones in London have been shown to prevent four out of ten road deaths and serious injuries. --- ## Pleasant pedestrian networks We will create an uninterrupted pedestrian network in central London, that links up the many already pedestrianised areas along the Thames, Trafalgar Square, Soho and Covent Garden, so that people can walk in a safe and pleasant environment from the South Bank to Oxford Street. I will support boroughs which want to employ similar policies locally, including expanding the roll out of the successful ‘Legible London’ way- finding maps. --- ## Improving door to door and community transport Many older and disabled Londoners rely on door-to-door transport services like Dial-a-Ride, Taxicard, and a myriad of local community transport schemes. Boris Johnson’s decision to cap funding for Taxicard has affected provision and means that some users are unable to travel outside of their own local area. Many people who rely on Dial-a-Ride that I meet around London say it still doesn’t provide the service they need. I will ask older and disabled Londoners for their views on how the services that TfL funds can be improved. And I will bring together community transport organisations and local authorities to consider how best to protect services against Tory government cuts, including through integrating existing services. --- ## Develop river services and canals I will work to develop more passenger and frieght services on the Thames and with the change to British waterways, provide support to protect and enhance London’s network of canals ## Investing in London's future In 2007 London had 7.6m people and 4.7m jobs generating 24m trips a day. In 2031 it is estimated that there will be another 1.25m people and an extra 750,000 jobs, generating an additional 3 million trips a day. Unless we invest today in improving our transport network we will store up congestion and pollution problems for future years. As Mayor from 2000 to 2008 I delivered a massive investment programme to increase London's transport capacity, including starting the East London Line extension and Crossrail, increasing services on the Jubilee Line and on bus services all across London, bringing in the Oyster card and starting the Tube improvement programme. I had the support of a government that understood the importance of investment, while the current Tory-led administration is focused on cuts, so we have to ensure that those resources which are available are used as effectively as possible. That is why it is such a scandal that under the Tory Mayor's lacklustre administration TfL's investment budget has been under-spent by an incredible £1.25bn. This is money that could have been used to improve the transport services on which Londoners rely, but has instead been piling up in the Mayor's coffers. I will be a full-time Mayor and I pledge to Londoners that I will fight for every penny that can be made available to improve London's transport system. As soon as I am elected I will start to build the case for the essential new infrastructure of the future, including an extension of Crossrail 1 to Ebbsfleet, Crossrail 2 (previously known as the Chelsea to Hackney line), Crossrail 3 (Euston to Waterloo), the Cross River Tram, the DLR extension to Dagenham Dock, the South London Line into Victoria, and the Croydon Tramlink extension to Crystal Palace. I will campaign against the proposed route of Highspeed Two, and for a route that doesn't demolish hundreds of London homes. > I will Crack down on > crime by reversing > the Tory Mayor’s cut > of 1700 Metropolitan > Police officers ## More local police to make London safer Along with cutting fares, making London safer is my top priority. Every budgetary and mayoral decision will be taken with these two priorities in mind. Most importantly, I will reverse Boris Johnson’s cuts to police numbers. I will do this because I know from experience that getting more police on the beat cuts crime and keeps the police and residents in touch with each other. And because everywhere I go Londoners tell me that is what they want in order to feel safe. Overall crime was cut significantly when I was Mayor and continues to fall. But the rate of decline has slowed to just one per cent, and Metropolitan Police statistics show that serious crimes such as robbery, residential burglary and rape are all rising. Indeed, in every year for the last three years: * Knife crime among young people has increased * Knife crime more generally has increased * Robberies have increased Perhaps under the radar of key crime statistics, anti-social behaviour blights many neighbourhoods. Women, in particular, can be threatened by aggressive harassment on the street. It is scandalous that in the face of this crime wave the Tory Mayor cut the number of police. My approach to tackling crime is straightforward: I will get police numbers back up to the level needed to make London safe, with a focus on local neighbourhood policing by a force that looks like the community it represents- Londoners in all their diversity. And, as the other sections of my manifesto set out, I will work to make the majority of Londoners better off, addressing the inequality and despair from which crimes grows. A vital job of the Mayor is to show leadership in the event of a crisis. Fortunately, there hasn’t been another terrorist attack like 7 July 2005 while Boris Johnson has been Mayor. But when the dreadful riots were tearing London apart last summer, it took four days for the Conservative Mayor to be persuaded to come back to London. And when he did return, his flippant remarks and broom-waving antics demonstrated that he was too out of touch to understand how most Londoners felt about the riots. I will be a Mayor for all London, not just the privileged few, and will always put Londoners first particularly in times of crisis. ## More police on the beat, fighting crime My central pledge to tackle crime is to reverse Boris Johnson’s cut in police numbers. Before I became Mayor in 2000 London was in the grip of a very serious crime wave following years of under-funding of the Met. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner told me bluntly that he could not protect London properly with the existing number of officers. I put an additional 6,000 police officers on the streets by 2008, with 1,000 more ready to start after the election. That took the total number of officers to over 32,000 by 2009. Thanks to additional funding in advance of the Olympics, that number rose to just over 33,000 by 2010. But the Tory Government has since imposed swingeing cuts on the police budget. A mayor who stood up for London would have publicly resisted those cuts, prioritised police numbers and strained every sinew to find new money. But instead Boris Johnson stood idly by and hundreds of police officers were to be taken off London’s streets. After months of denial, Nick Ferrari finally got him to admit this on his radio show in January that one thousand seven hundred police had been cut. Latest figures from the Met show that the true figure is even worse – a cut of two thousand one hundred officers. Having been caught out, he is now desperately trying to row back and pledges to reverse part of that cut. But he is too out of touch to understand Londoners’ real concerns. His new promise is still that there will be one thousand fewer officers when he leaves office than in 2010. To make our streets safer, I pledge to reverse the Tory Mayor’s cuts and get London’s police force back up to the peak number of officers we had in March 2010. ## HOW KEN WILL FUND REVERSING BORIS JOHNSON’S POLICE CUT I will play my part by cutting £2.7 million next year at the new Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPC), the bill for which has risen to £16.6 million despite having fewer costs than the Metropolitan Police Authority it replaces. ### I will pay for more police on the street by: * **Bringing in new money** Ensure that Transport for London pays the full cost of the Safer Transport Command (£80 million over the Mayoral term) and scrutinise every third-party relationship to see where we can bring in further new money. * **Efficiency savings** Work with the Commissioner to ensure that all possible efficiencies are found at Scotland Yard, including non-essential spending on such things as chauffeur driven cars and first-class travel. * Stand up for London against Tory government cuts in future policing settlements, instead of rolling over as Boris Johnson has done * With the initial new funds it will be possible to expand officer numbers. This will allow the new Commissioner to bear down on overtime and free up further resources to increase the number of frontline officers. ## My 999 pledge for safer neighbourhoods One of the achievements of which I am most proud is the creation of Safer Neighbourhood police teams, meaning that each one of London’s six hundred and twenty four council wards had a team of a minimum of six locally-based officers whom the community can get to know and trust. The Tory Mayor’s cuts mean that at least three hundred of the sergeants who led those local teams have been removed. I will bring them back. Over time we have seen that Safer Neighbourhood Teams need to be available later in the evening than is typically the case, as this is when people are most in need of a police presence on the street to make them feel safe. That is hard to achieve with six officers. My 999 pledge will mean more of the Safer Neighbourhood Teams will be beefed up to nine officers, all with a sergeant to lead them, and with a presence on the streets from nine in the morning until nine o’clock at night: nine officers working from 9am to 9pm where people need them most. ## BORIS JOHNSON FORCED TO ADMIT HE CUT POLICE NUMBERS After months of denial, Boris Johnson was forced to admit on Nick Ferrari’s LBC radio show that he has cut police numbers. This is the exchange: **Nick Ferrari:** “You’re down 1,700 in the last two years?” **Boris Johnson:** “Numbers go up and down they naturally fluctuate as officers retire.” **Nick Ferrari:** “By 1,700? **Boris Johnson:** “Yes, but as I’ve said to you many times now we will have more police on the beat at the end of this four year term than there were at the beginning.” The Met employed 33,260 police officers in March 2010. That number had fallen to 31,128 by January 2012. Despite his cleverly phrased answer above, there will be only 32,000 officers when Johnson leaves office in May 2012. Source: www.lbc.co.uk/boris-admits-1700-police-jobs-lost-in-two-years ## Taking back our streets - addressing anti-social behavior For many people, their top local priority is to tackle anti-social behavior and street crime. Police figures show why people are concerned – there were 3,245 more muggings last year than in the previous year. The Tory Mayor, like the Tory-led government, is taking too many risks with crime and anti-social behaviour and local communities will pay the price. It’s not just the cuts to police officers, but they are also tying the hands of the police and local communities who want to put a stop to anti-social behaviour in their area. Interim ASBOs mean the police can act fast to stop harassment in serious cases, but the government wants to ditch them altogether. And their plans to replace other ASBOs with much weaker civil injunctions means that persistent offenders won’t face the force of the criminal courts. Government cuts are reducing youth services across London with the result that young people have fewer things to do after school. When I talk to victims, residents, the police, or community representatives no one ever calls for fewer police, weaker powers or less youth services. The Tory Mayor is completely out of touch on crime and anti-social behaviour. I will join with the Yvette Cooper and the Labour team to campaign for the Government to reverse its plans and in London I will: * **Support Facewatch** I will support Facewatch, a business-led initiative to tackle crime which enables local firms to file reports with witness statements and CCTV footage directly to the police. Where it has been introduced it is already leading to more arrests and cutting costs. The Met estimates that, on average, the use of Facewatch has led to a seventy-two per cent increase in detection rates and a two week reduction in the average speed of solving a crime. I will ensure that all borough commanders work with Facewatch to introduce a scheme in their area. * **Support Street Watch** Street Watch encourages residents to adopt a new working partnership with police in providing ‘civilian patrols’ of their own communities. There are currently Street Watch schemes within sixteen police force areas, including Greater Manchester and the West Midlands. Early evaluations of the scheme suggest it can dramatically reduce the fear of and perception of crime. From the budget savings identified above I will provide funding for a Street Watch patrol in every ward in London. * **Support ‘City Safe Havens’** London Citizens’ City Safe Havens campaign provides young people with places they can go for protection if they feel threatened on the streets. I will work with business groups and London Citizens to offer to sign up more shops and other enterprises to support this scheme, strengthening links between businesses and the police. I will ensure that the Met offer participating businesses a service agreement, including a named liaison officer and regular visits from the Safer Neighbourhood Team. * **Continue Community Payback** I will continue to support the Met and the London Probation Trust’s ‘community payback’ scheme, which requires convicted offenders serving community orders to carry out unpaid work to bring derelict areas and buildings back into public use, making the local community that has been blighted by their crime a safer and more pleasant place to live. * **Police stations on the High Street** Many businesses are facing increased crime as a result of the recession. As High Streets become increasingly vacant the air of dilapidation increases and with it the likelihood of crime. I will work with the Met, landlords and local councils to enable local police teams to temporarily take up vacant space on the High Street. This will improve police visibility to businesses and the public and help to lower crime. ## Working with local communities to tackle youth and gang crime Despite putting knife crime and serious youth violence at the centre of his last election campaign, Boris Johnson has failed on both. The images of the riots and looting on London’s streets during August stunned the entire nation and made headlines across the world. While the vast majority of young men and women are law abiding, far too many of their lives are blighted by a dangerous and immoral gang culture that pervades certain areas in London. ‘Postcode’ conflicts create invisible but dangerous barriers which destroy young lives. The number of young victims of knife crime has risen every year for the last 3 years. Last year there were over one thousand more young victims of knife crime than in 2008/9. As Mayor, Boris Johnson has concentrated on eye-catching, made for media schemes rather than making any serious attempt to tackle the problem. As his own advisory group stated last year, ‘there has been no political champion…Much of the public sector “top down” provision is devoid of an clear understanding or description of the problem of serious youth violence that takes place in local neighbourhoods throughout the capital.’ Reducing knife and gang crime will not be easy, but instead of gimmicks I will focus on what works – helping local communities to change their own neighbourhoods. Learning from the community-led commissioning approach that is being pioneered in Lambeth, I will: * **Put communities in charge of the purse-strings** Provide funding for twenty pilot projects that use the ‘Turning Point’ model to put residents in control, mobilising and building community resources in the fight against serious violent crime. In Lambeth, this is already beginning to happen. A group of researchers, drawn from the community, are talking to local people to understand what they feel will make a difference for young people in their area. These responses will be used to determine what support to provide. Some may decide to bring in outside professionals to intervene. Others may establish a peer mentoring scheme, or develop diversionary activities such as a football team. The point of the approach will be to trust local residents to decide what will work in their area, and to allow them to develop the response. Work around serious youth violence across London has for too long focused almost solely on boys, both as perpetrators and victims. I will ensure that all programmes targeted at gangs and youth violence will have to address the specific experience of women and girls as a condition of being funded by the Mayor. At least one of the pilots will be specifically targeted at preventing violence against young women and the involvement of young women in serious youth violence and gangs. * **A police officer in every school that wants one** Through Safer School Partnerships and Safer Neighbourhood Teams, many schools have become safer, better places for pupils to learn and develop. There are currently four hundred and thirty state funded secondary schools in London. As part of my overall offer on police numbers, I will ensure that every school that wants a local police officer assigned to it will be able to have one. On the ground evidence shows that having a police officer on site provides intelligence that makes the police more effective in tackling incidents of youth crime, as well as building trust and relationships between young people and the police. These officers will be available from 8am to 6 pm during term time – patrolling before school, during lunchtime and in the hours after school when young people most need to be kept safe. * **Learn from successful gang mediation projects** I will work with the Met to learn from successful initiatives elsewhere, where trained anti-gang co-ordinators work in ‘at risk’ neighbourhoods’. They have developed ‘mediation projects’ to de-escalate conflicts within and between neighbourhoods, and better management of the secondary school transfer process to achieve early identification of those most at risk of gang activity. We will conduct serious research into why some young people join gangs. ## Community-led policing and a force that looks like London London is an incredibly diverse city with many different communities. Historically, the lack of representation of many of London’s Black and Asian communities in the police has been a cause of tension and reduced the Met’s ability to police effectively, as good policing depends on co-operation from citizens. I will work with the Police Commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, to continue his good work and that of his predecessors in creating a police force that looks more like London and is open to all of the Capital’s talents. In the aftermath of the long-overdue conviction of two of Stephen Lawrence’s murderers we can reflect that policing has come a long way since the MacPherson report identified institutionalised racism. But as Doreen Lawrence observed after the trial: “The fact is that racism and racist attacks are still happening in this country and the police should not use my son’s name to say that we can move on”. That is why I particularly welcome the review into stop-and-search announced by the Commissioner. Current practice is wasteful and counterproductive, with an arrest rate of only six in one hundred people stopped, and an even lower conviction rate. It has disproportionately targeted young Black and Asian men, most of whom were not engaged in criminal activity and, therefore, risked alienating entire communities. We also need an urgent review of custody arrangements. The sharp rise in deaths after contact with the police is extremely disturbing, as is the fact that nearly half of those who died were Black or Asian. A review needs to address the rise in deaths, prevent them and to rebuild the necessary trust between the police and all Londoners. ## Women’s safety London has high rates of violence against women, with more than 3,000 rapes and 45,000 incidents of domestic violence reported to the police last year. As Mayor, I made tackling violence against women a priority – launching the first pan-London Domestic Violence Strategy. Sadly, Boris Johnson cut funding and posts to tackle domestic violence, sending a signal that it is not a priority. I will introduce a programme of cross-agency co-operation. It is particularly disturbing that reported incidents of rape appear to be rising year on year, while the proportions of detections which lead to charges or another resolution are falling. The four million women and girls who live in London have the right to feel and be safe – and it is the duty of the police to make it happen. On entering office I will immediately initiate a summit with the Metropolitan Police and sexual violence specialists to improve sanction detection rates for rape. I will also examine how we can ensure that more victims of sexual crime are able to report to a specialist agency rather than the police directly, something which victims of sexual violence often prefer to do. I will ensure that the Metropolitan Police continues to prioritise violence against women, working to ensure that all boroughs across London have a consistent and high quality response to domestic and sexual violence. I will continue to fund all four Rape Crisis centres in London for all four years of my mayoralty. Harassment while simply walking down the street or on the transport system is a problem for too many women and girls across London. We will put more police on the street to deter this sort of aggressive behaviour and to make women feel safer. I will ensure that every station under TfL control is staffed with a visible presence, so that everyone can feel safe and incidents of abuse and harassment can be reported. I will train transport staff to identify sexual harassment and to intervene and stop it. We will launch a high-profile publicity campaign setting out that sexual harassment of any kind will not be tolerated anywhere in London. ## Tackling repeat offending Repeat offending is costing London too much. In London, there are around five thousand people who are in frequent contact with the criminal justice system and have multiple unmet needs, including for example addition and mental health problems. They are repeatedly arrested, and are often charged and sentenced to short sentences in prison. Their crime and anti-social behaviour puts daily pressure on our police, our communities, businesses and the public purse. I will create a small intelligence-led unit within the Metropolitan Police to identify repeat offenders and the services that can support them. I will also establish a working group composed of senior representatives from the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, the Metropolitan Police, London Probation, health services, local authorities and voluntary sector representatives to guide their work. ## Unite London against terrorism Those of us who lived through the terrible events of 7 July 2005 will never forget the incredible way that Londoners responded to an act of terror designed to intimidate and divide us. Instead Londoners refused to be scared and stayed united. As we said at the time there are ‘seven million Londoners – but one London’. Two things above all else are needed to protect us from terrorist attacks: the superb professionalism of the anti-terror units at the Met, and good community relations so that the police retain a good supply of intelligence. I will ensure that the police have the resources they need to continue to protect Londoners and that we engage with all of London’s communities to prevent future terrorist attacks. ## Action to tackle Hate Crime All London’s residents have the right to live free of the fear of hate crime – whether due to their race, faith or sexual orientation. Racist street crime – from verbal abuse to violence – against black, Asian, Jewish, Muslim and other ethnic minority people remains a serious problem for the communities affected. The last few years have seen marked increases in hate mail, threats and even physical attacks on Mosques and Muslim communities in particular. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGB&T) Londoners continue to suffer abuse. Bullying at school can be a problem for young LGB&T Londoners who are open about their sexual orientation and gender identity. Cowardly bullying and attacks against disabled people persist. I will ensure the police prioritise responding to hate crimes, including racist and anti-semitic attacks on communities, individuals, businesses and places of worship. With the Metropolitan Police Commissioner I will look at how the police are logging and reporting crime due to race or faith. Anti-semitic and Islamophobic hate crime must be specifically monitored, alongside other hate crimes which are already specifically logged, and annual figures must be made public alongside those for other crimes. ## More support for victims of crime I will appoint a Victims’ Commissioner to offer an advisory and support service to victims of crime, providing a central resource for anyone who does not feel they have received the necessary support locally. Too often, victims of crime are left in the dark about the progress of their cases. Learning from the Track My Crime Service that has been pioneered in Avon and Somerset, I will introduce an online service that allows victims of crime to access the progress of the investigation of their crime as well as contact the officer leading the investigation ## Stop privatisation of the police Elsewhere in the country police forces have resorted to contracting private companies to provide front-line services. It has been reported that this might include management of high-risk individuals, patrolling public places or pursuing criminal investigations. These are jobs for trained police officers not private sector contractors. There will be no privatisation of the Metropolitan Police on my watch. ## The Mayor’s New Powers – MOPC This year the Mayor became responsible for supervising the Met Police, replacing the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) with the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPC). Boris Johnson had used the existing powers of the Mayor irresponsibly, with a revolving door operating at the highest levels of the Met. We have had three Commissioners in four years when, on top of the day-to-day problems of crime in the capital, the Met has been preparing for two massive events – the Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee. Of particular concern has been the attempt by Boris Johnson’s administration to interfere politically in the investigation into phone hacking. Johnson himself set the tone by calling the investigation ‘codswallop cooked up by the Labour Party’. More seriously, former Met Commissioner Paul Stephenson revealed at the Levenson Inquiry that Deputy Mayor for Policing, Kit Malthouse, had on more than one occasion challenged the Met for wasting too many resources on what has proved to be an extremely serious criminal investigation. I will use the new powers of the MOPC more responsibly. The role of the Mayor is to provide oversight and scrutiny, as well as fighting the Met’s corner to ensure it receives necessary funding from government. “ I will work with the Police Commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, to continue his good work and that of his predecessors in creating a police force that looks more like London and is open to all of the Capital’s talents. ” “ We will bin the Tory plans to privatize the Fire Service control centre ” ## Backing the Fire Service to save lives London’s Fire and Emergency Planning Service saves lives on a daily basis. Fire services need to be protected against government cuts. Fire officers are trusted public servants who can play an increased role in making London a better place to live. **I will:** * Guarantee no Fire Station closures * Guarantee a 24 hour blue light service from every fire station * Discuss with the Fire Commissioner providing a ‘handy van’ service in every borough for the vulnerable elderly, working in partnership with local charities an councils to fit smoke alarms and check electric blankets and do any small necessary jobs the vulnerable elderly can’t manage. * Set up a charitable organisation to assist the victims of fire with immediate help, loans, and advice on dealing with insurance etc. There are a growing number of people who are uninsured. Assistance is usually needed immediately but in reality can often take some days to mobilise. * Establish a Fire Cadets scheme for young Londoners to support the Fire Service in their community fire safety education work and to provide a follow-on involvement for young people who have taken part in the ‘life’ youth training programme. This is a practice that is well established in some other fire brigades After four years of conflict and poor governance with Tory Assembly Member, Brian Coleman, as Chair of the Authority we will bin his plans to privatise the fire service control centre. > I will establish an all-London non-profit making lettings agency which, by cutting out Estate Agents’ profit, will help reduce rents and provide secure tenancies, and I will campaign for a London Living Rent - no Londoner should pay more than a third of their income in rent. ## Lower rents, better homes Good quality housing is central to our quality of life and the rising cost of housing is one of Londoners’ top concerns. Average rents in the private sector rose by twelve percent in the past year, more than four times the rate of inflation. Social housing rents increased eight per cent. The huge deposits now needed to get on the housing ladder are beyond most first time buyers. The supply of new affordable housing has all but dried up. In the last six months for which figures are available, just fifty-six new affordable homes started construction in London. Three hundred and sixty thousand Londoners are on social housing waiting lists and the effect of welfare cuts is likely to make inner London the preserve of the better-off, forcing thousands of less well-off families into cheaper suburbs and beyond. Business leaders believe that the lack of affordable housing is a serious constraint on growth. Bad housing is a major cause of health inequalities; overcrowding damages family life and makes it harder for young people to succeed. This is Boris Johnson and the Tory-led government’s housing legacy to London. My focus will be two-fold. First, to drive down costs and drive up standards across all housing tenures including those who rent from private landlords, those who rent from social landlords and those who own, or are buying, their own homes. As a priority, I will help reduce the price and improve standards of private rented accommodation by establishing a not-for-profit lettings agency that saves tenants and landlords money by avoiding rip-off estate agents’ fees, and creating a Tenants’ Charter that sets minimum standards for rented accommodation. No-one should have to spend more than a third of their earnings on rent and we will develop the case for a London Living Rent. Second, to address the long-term housing crisis we simply have to build more new homes and they need to be affordable to ordinary Londoners to rent or buy. That means making maximum use of land controlled by the Mayor for housing development, and enforcing tough planning regulations so that private developments reflect the needs of all Londoners, not just the very wealthy. ## Lower rents, better rented homes and tenants’ rights About a quarter of Londoners now have a private landlord. In more than half of London boroughs the rent for a two-bedroom privately rented home is more than half the average salary. More generally, the high cost of housing is a major problem for hundreds of thousands of Londoners. London needs a thriving and successful private rented sector and most landlords try to provide decent homes on fair terms. I want to support them. But there are too many rogue landlords and rip-off lettings agents. Unlike Boris Johnson I will not wash my hands of the needs of 850,000 London households on the ideological basis that it is wrong to ‘interfere in the market’. Londoners have a right to expect the Mayor to do something about the private rented housing crisis. ### I will: * **Encourage fairer rents and better tenancy agreements through a London Lettings Agency** Building on good initiatives by some London boroughs, we will establish a London Lettings Agency. This will free good landlords from estate agents who can charge up to ten per cent of annual rental income for marketing properties, which in turn pushes up rents. Tenants will enjoy a one-stop-shop where they can go to find good quality accommodation at fair rents. The National Landlords’ Association has welcomed our proposal. * **Establish a Tenants’ Charter** I will establish a Tenants’ Charter, setting out what private tenants can expect from their landlords. This will include a series of standards including: protection for tenants’ deposits; a commitment to make reasonable repairs when required; good standards of energy efficiency. I will encourage councils, housing associations and private landlords to sign up. Only landlords that do so, and abide by its terms, will be eligible to be listed via the new London Lettings Agency. * **Set up a London-wide landlord registration scheme** I will push for a mandatory landlord registration scheme similar to the model operating in Scotland. Tenants should at least be entitled to know who their landlord is and landlords should have to demonstrate that they are ‘fit and proper’ persons offering decent standards of accommodation. * **Campaign for a ‘London Living Rent’** No Londoner should have to pay more than one-third of their income on rent, so we will research and set a benchmark for assessing the reasonableness of rents being charged. The Mayor does not have powers to regulate rents, but I will campaign for legislation for a fairer system of controlling rent increases based on successful schemes in other countries. * **Lobby for better regulation of the private rented sector** I will lobby government and, if necessary use the Mayor’s powers to promote parliamentary legislation, to tackle rogue landlords, protect good landlords, provide increased security of tenure for tenants and raise standards across the private rented sector. * **Improve home insulation** I will lead efforts to secure London’s fair share of national energy efficiency funding to massively expand a programme of better insulation (see the environment section of this manifesto). We will also work with borough councils to use their existing powers to ensure private landlords achieve high standards of energy efficiency and London takes a lead in operating Energy Performance Certificates. ## Protect social tenants’ rights and homes Tory Hammersmith and Fulham is the policy template for the Tory Mayor. They have stopped building genuinely affordable homes and are selling council estates to private developers over the heads of tenants and leaseholders. The Tory Government has launched an all-out attack on social rented housing (owned by councils and housing associations). Homes are being sold off and not replaced. New so-called ‘affordable’ homes are only available at much higher rents. To make money, existing housing association homes are often being re-let at these much higher rents. New social tenants often do not have security of tenure. Social tenants with a spare bedroom will have to pay a punitive ‘bedroom tax’. And some boroughs want to sell-off whole estates. properties and see housing benefit fall further. In the first instance this will only be applied to working age households, but many older people are worried it will eventually force them out of the home many have occupied for most of their adult lives. The Tory government is reducing housing benefit without doing anything to address the housing shortages that have pushed up rents. Large numbers of people on low-incomes require housing benefit support. Disabled Londoners are four times as likely as non-disabled people to be in receipt of housing benefit and so are likely to be particularly savagely hit. Many thousands of Londoners will also be branded as living in ‘under-occupied’ ### I will: * **Campaign against government cuts** which will see families, and particularly disabled people, forced to move out of inner London because housing benefit will no longer cover their rent. * **Use the Mayor’s planning powers to block developments** which involve the loss of social rented or other affordable housing without replacement that meets local housing needs. * **Campaign against any attempts to force older people to move away from their homes against their wishes.** Older people who need to move into sheltered accommodation should be able to stay in their own neighbourhoods if they wish. ## Support for home owners and people wishing to get on the housing ladder More than half of householders in London own their own home outright or are buying it with a mortgage. The proportion of owner occupiers has decreased due to high housing costs, but many people still aspire to own their own home. As Mayor, I introduced a statutory target that fifteen per cent of all new homes should be for ‘intermediate’ affordable housing for people on modest incomes. This resulted in thousands of people being able to get on the property ladder with a part-buy/part rent, or shared ownership home. Boris Johnson has abandoned this target. I will: * Seek to maximise the number of new homes built to take pressure off the housing market (see below). * Improve access to home insulation to cut the cost of heating bills for owner occupiers (see environment section). * Change the London Plan to ensure that a proportion of new affordable homes are available for people who wish to purchase equity shares as well as providing new affordable homes to rent. * Support community land trusts and housing co-operatives, which can help to make low cost home ownership a reality. * Investigate providing mortgage deposit guarantees for people who are able to service a mortgage, but not able to access the large deposit needed to get on the housing ladder. ## Increasing new housing supply TheTories’ decision to stop new council house building still haunts the capital. For thirty years not enough homes have been built. One of the main reasons that house prices and rents are so ridiculously high is simply because there isn’t enough housing to meet demand. London needs to build around 35,000 new homes a year. In 2006/07, when I was Mayor, we reached 32,000 homes started, within touching distance of what was needed. Since then, construction has fallen through the floor. The Tory Mayor has relaxed planning rules that I brought in to stop boroughs and developers from mainly building luxury flats and to ensure that half of new homes are affordable to people on average incomes. Building more homes creates jobs in construction and the supply chain – people who pay taxes and come off benefits. London needs a Mayor who understands the housing pressures facing ordinary people and will get something done to increase housing supply. I will: * **Maximise the use of Greater London Authority land to build new homes** As Mayor I created a large ‘land bank’ so that new homes could be built. Boris Johnson made great claims about building on this GLA land - he said he would ‘put his land where his mouth is’ - but he has completely failed to deliver. I will release GLA land on a long term equity share basis (so London taxpayers get their money back) to housing associations and other developers but on condition that they commit to a clear timetable for getting homes built and occupied. * **Support boroughs to build new council houses** Some London boroughs have started building council houses again, and more could do so, using council-owned land. I will work with boroughs to increase the number being built as an excellent way of meeting housing needs. * **Investigate new options for financing affordable homes** As development picks up I will expect private developers to contribute to the provision of affordable as well as market homes. I will work closely with them to remove the barriers to development that hinder them. I will work with pension funds to encourage them to invest in affordable homes- which produce excellent long-term returns benefiting pensioners better than an over-reliance on volatile stocks and shares. * **Support other initiatives that will help produce more affordable housing** There are ideas around that have potential to help us produce more and better homes and I will promote such schemes. In particular, I will encourage * ∙ Community Land Trusts and other forms of co-operative and mutual housing, and * ∙ Fast assembly eco-housing: environmentally high-performing modular homes that can be assembled in just six weeks. * **Re-establish affordable home targets** No borough should be able to get away with failing to build affordable homes for its residents. I will again expect 50% of homes built in London to be affordable and will move as rapidly as possible towards ensuring that at least one third of new homes are for social rent. I will also set an ambitious target for family homes. * **Launch a London-wide empty homes strategy** Nothing annoys Londoners more than the sight of empty homes when there is so much housing need. Some borough councils have done excellent work but struggle to deal with large landlords who operate in several boroughs. I will support the boroughs with a London-wide strategy to take more dynamic action to bring empty homes back into use. * **Support the London Accessible Housing Register and Lifetime Homes** I will encourage all London boroughs to sign up to the London Accessible Housing Register, that addresses the housing needs of the estimated 30,000 Londoners with an unmet need for wheelchair accessible housing. I will require all new homes to be built to ‘Lifetime Homes’ standards and 10% of all new homes to be suitable for wheelchair users. ### Help rough sleepers find a home Under a Tory Mayor the number of people sleeping rough in London has gone up by over twenty per cent. The Tory Government’s failed economic policy and assault on those on the lowest incomes through changes to the benefits system look set to drive many more vulnerable people on to the streets. I will: * **Launch a new drive to end homelessness** in all its forms using all the Mayor’s powers and responsibilities (across housing, skills and training, health, and policing) and co-ordinating with other agencies. * **Make the case that the bulk of central Government funding for tackling homelessness in London should** be disbursed via the GLA to ensure that we get pan-London solutions to what is a pan-London problem. * **Use the Mayor’s new health powers to make sure that no-one with a mental illness has to sleep rough.** * **Work with the NHS to tackle Hepatitis C** among homeless people – a serious but treatable infectious disease which with the right focus we could now eradicate in London. > "I will bring in a bulk > purchasing deal to > cut Londoners’ home > energy bills by up to > £120 a year" ## Lower energy bills and a greener future I will enable London households to save over £150 a year on energy bills through taking up money from energy companies for better insulation, which Boris Johnson has failed to do - losing London £400m - and bring in bulk purchasing deals to cut the price paid by Londoners for electricity and gas. Nearly nine out of ten people say the big energy companies are charging more than they should and are taking advantage of the public, according to YouGov. Our bills go up every time the price of oil and gas increases, but customers rarely benefit when fuel prices fall. In a modern, developed city like London it is unacceptable that thousands of children, families and pensioners suffer each winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes. Equally scandalous is the Conservative Mayor’s inaction. Over the last four years London has lost out on over £400m of national funding that could have been used to cut hard-pressed families’ energy bills. And as a third of energy use takes places in homes, the task of tackling climate change has been set-back. Londoners’ water bills are set to rise in April by an inflation-busting 6.7% to an average of £339 a year per, just as the hosepipe ban starts. Yet the programme to repair leaking water mains is stalled. Mayor Johnson has done nothing. Mayor Johnson is too out of touch to notice that ordinary Londoners are struggling with energy and water bills. The Tories in City Hall are simply uninterested in broader environmental problems, except when it can win them an easy media opportunity. As a result, the Tory Mayor has invested only half the budget he himself allocated to environmental policies - itself a cut on my plans. I will again put creating a cleaner, greener city and tackling the big long-term issues like climate change at the centre of my policies for London. And I will take personal charge of a drive to save Londoners hundreds of pounds through better home insulation and fairer energy prices by setting up a London Energy Co-operative. My goal is to help Londoners’ living standards to rise, while the amount of the earth’s resources we waste falls. Nurturing a better environment is not a side-show, it is central to enabling a better quality of life for everyone. I will restore the targets we set for cutting carbon emissions – a sixty per cent cut by 2025 – as a practical aim of my administration, rather than an empty promise under Boris Johnson. ## Lower energy bills for Londoners and less climate pollution The Citizens’ Advice Bureau reports that forty-five per cent of Londoners are worried that they will not be able to pay their next heating and electricity bills. People are right to be concerned: the average cost of keeping a home warm and the lights on has risen by over £300 a year since 2008. Yet because most of our homes remain poorly insulated, Londoners are forced to pay for far more energy than should be necessary, wasting money and adding to carbon emissions. London is the worst performing region in England for improving home insulation. The Tory Mayor pledged that his stuttering ‘RE:NEW’ home energy efficiency programme would retrofit 200,000 homes by May 2012, but by January he had only managed 40,000 households. I will: * **Ensure London gets a fair share of national home insulation funding** Under the Tory Mayor, London has lost out on £400m of national energy efficiency funding. I will call an Energy Summit of the main energy suppliers to ensure that London gains our fair share of the £1.3bn per year energy companies are required to spend on home insulation from 2013. That would be £160m per year for London. With this funding we could provide free loft and wall insulation to 400,000 homes in four year, eight times the number Mayor Johnson has managed. We will focus on households in fuel poverty. On average, a household that installs proper insulation will save £150 off their heating and electricity bills per year. This will be our minimum target. If we can negotiate an improved Green Deal (see below) my aim will be that at least one million homes will have proper insulation by 2016 – not just the ‘easy measures’ like draught proofing that the Tory Mayor counts to cover up his lack of progress. If, as it should, the government is persuaded to allow social housing organisations to be funded through the Energy Company Obligation, then we will work with social housing landlords to ensure that all of their homes are properly insulated. * **Establish a London Energy Co-operative to help Londoners save money on fuel bills** Households pay a much higher rate than large industrial and commercial users for each unit of energy they use. By harnessing the buying power of Transport for London (the biggest purchaser of electricity in London) and the rest of the GLA Group, the London Energy Co-operative will be able to purchase energy on wholesale markets, giving Londoners a cheaper alternative to rip-off energy suppliers. Experience of similar schemes run by churches and community groups in the USA and trade unions in Belgium suggests households could save five to ten per cent off their bills – up to £120 per year on average. The London Energy Co-operative will be run as a not-for-profit organisation and will buy from suppliers which generate higher than average proportions of energy from renewable sources, and invest in new renewable energy itself. * **A real Green Deal for London** We could do a lot more to cut Londoners’ bills with the right support nationally. Unfortunately on the Tory government’s own figures, its misconceived ‘Green Deal’ will cause a fall in the number of homes being insulated. The principle of offering home-owners mortgage-style loans to improve insulation, with costs repaid out of future energy savings is a sensible one. It could work for people on good, secure incomes who are confident about investing now to save money in the future. But even this section of the population won’t take up the Green Deal at the rip-off interest rates suggested. I will lobby the government to improve the Green Deal so that it addresses the majority of people’s needs. We will work with borough councils and others to create a seamless offer to Londoners that combines Green Deal loans and grant funding from energy companies (see above), with a whole-house retrofit approach so that people get a co-ordinated offer to make improvements to their home. * **Take personal charge of the drive to improve energy efficiency and cut Londoners’ heating bills** I will require a weekly progress report from City Hall officers and chair a ‘Lower Energy Bills’ task force to drive the agenda through. ## Cutting public sector costs through energy efficiency It’s not just households that could save money through better energy efficiency. The public building retrofit scheme we started in 2007 has successfully ‘retrofitted’ forty-two buildings owned by the Greater London Authority (GLA) group, saving £1million a year off energy bills. However, the programme has stalled under the Conservative Mayor. None of the other eight hundred buildings owned by the GLA Group have been added to the scheme. The Mayor needs to lead by example. Forty per cent of London’s carbon emissions come from workplaces. If the Mayor doesn’t make the effort to improve the buildings under his or her own control it will be hard to persuade others to do so. I will set building managers the target of retrofitting all the buildings within the GLA Group by the end of my mayoral term. We will reinvigorate RE:FIT, which has many merits, so that hundreds more public sector organisations take advantage of its energy performance contracting framework to cut bills and carbon emissions. After four wasted years, the Tory Mayor recently announced that more public sector organisations would join the scheme ‘in the next twelve months’, but as in so many other areas is it too little, too late, and done only to look better for the election. ## Securing London’s long-term low-carbon energy supply When we published the first London Climate Change Action Plan in 2007, setting a target for London to cut its carbon emissions by sixty per cent in twenty years and generate a quarter of heat and electricity needs within London, it was seen by some as too extreme. A similar carbon target is now enshrined in UK law, and energy efficiency is core business for big city Mayors around the world, partly thanks to the ‘C40’ city group which we founded with Bill Clinton. The present Conservative administration adopted my targets after the Mayor’s self-proclaimed ‘Damascene conversion’ from climate change denial. Sadly, he hasn’t made much progress on fulfilling them. In fact, according to the latest available figures London had slightly less low carbon energy capacity by the end of 2010 than it had when the Tory Mayor was elected in 2008. I will focus the Mayor’s limited resources on projects which actually lead to new energy infrastructure, including: * **Capturing the big opportunities for renewable heat** District heating, which captures heat created during electricity generation or from waste treatment, can be up to one third more efficient than using gas from the grid to heat buildings. Several tremendous opportunities for supplying low cost, low carbon heat which we had started by 2008 have either stalled or ceased development altogether under Mayor Johnson. We will lead efforts to resurrect them, including seeking commercial deals to capture the huge volumes of heat currently being wasted at Barking Power Station, plus the SELCHP, and Belvedere incinerators, and using it to heat homes and other buildings. Together, these schemes could supply one hundred and eighty thousand homes with cheap, low-carbon heat. * **Provide a guaranteed customer through the London Energy Co-op** Often the main obstacle to individual low-carbon projects attracting investment is locating guaranteed long-term customers at the right price. The new London Energy Cooperative will encourage low carbon energy in London by entering into agreements with generators, providing guaranteed custom, and in time potentially procuring its own generation plant. * **Protecting and improving existing communal heating systems** Many existing community heating systems are currently underused, poorly performing, or have been ripped out. I will work with councils, Government and the Carbon Trust to identify these sites and make funding available to encourage their retention, extension and decarbonisation. ## Cut water bills and build resilience to drought Londoners’ water bills are set to rise by an inflation-busting 6.7% next month, to an average of £339 a year per household. This will be yet another unwelcome financial blow to families who are struggling to get by. And a hosepipe ban will also start in April, following the driest twenty-four month period in one hundred and twenty eight years of records. The Conservatives are too out of touch to notice, let alone do anything to help. Climate change means that droughts are likely to become more frequent. We need to take measures now to prevent problems, and higher costs in the future. **I will:** * **Help Londoners cut water bills** Londoners use more water than the rest of the UK. Cutting out wasteful use of water to get to the national average would save families nearly £50 per year. We will work with water utilities and use our home retrofit programme to ensure that every home has access to water saving devices and smart water meters. * **Lobby water companies and the government to complete the replacement of London’s leaking, one hundred and fifty year old water pipes.** We still lose a quarter of our expensively purified water through leaks. The repair programme should be paid out of water utilities’ profits and general taxation, not Londoners’ wallets and purses. Water bills are a blunt instrument and disproportionately hit poorer families. * **Require dual potable and grey water recycling systems in all new buildings and redevelopments** One third of purified water is flushed down the toilet. Grey-water recycling can reduce this waste. ## Reduce noise pollution Seven hundred thousand people are affected by noise from Heathrow. But many more suffer from other noise pollution - mostly traffic. I will renew a strategic plan to set consistant noise mitigation targets across London. ## Cleaner streets, less waste Litter, abandoned mattresses, and vandalism blight too many of our neighbourhoods. Nearly half of our municipal waste is buried in landfills, causing toxic chemicals to seep into the earth and methane (a contributor to global warming) to rise into the atmosphere. It costs council tax payers over £250 million a year and rising to manage waste in this way, and that is before we are hit by hundreds of millions of pounds of European Union waste disposal fines. While I was Mayor we improved the amount of waste that is recycled from eight to twenty-five percent. With a Conservative Mayor that total has crawled on to just twenty-seven percent. Leading cities like Stockholm and San Francisco recycle over seventy percent of their waste. London requires investment of over £800 million to build modern, low carbon waste treatment facilities. The Mayor’s Waste and Recycling Board has singularly failed to deliver and the present Mayor reneged on his promise to chair the Board after just eighteen months in charge. We need to treat waste as a resource that can be re-used, not a problem to be disposed of. **I will:** * **Clean up abandoned mattresses** Create a competition for entrepreneurs to develop cost-effective mattress recycling, creating a market for old beds and so helping councils to tackle the plague of abandoned mattresses that blight many neighbourhoods by being dumped in front gardens or on the streets. * **Agree a pan-London minimum standard for recycling** Make it easier for people to recycle by agreeing a pan-London minimum standard for what local councils will collect for recycling. Wherever you go in London is should be possible to recycle at least the basic paper, cans, bottles and plastics. * **Generate energy from food** A third of household waste is food. If it is collected separately it can very efficiently be turned into energy. We will support councils to develop at least one anaerobic-digestion plant in every borough to turn left-over meals into renewable gas. * **Set up a recycling in flats challenge fund** To support schemes which encourage recycling where it is often difficult to provide recycling bins. * **Send zero waste to landfill by 2025** Creating local jobs with new recycling, reuse, and renewable energy plants. * **Stop new incinerators** I will oppose any new incinerators or extensions of existing incinerators in London, including the planned South London incinerator in Beddington. They crowd out recycling and cause harmful air pollution. ## Protecting and improving natural London for everyone to enjoy One of the main reasons why London is such a great place to live is because of its tremendous range of parks and open spaces, rivers and canals, home to a remarkable diversity of plants and animals that manage to survive in our densely urbanised city. Green space connects us to the natural world and provides opportunities to enjoy sport and exercise, at a time when London has the highest levels of child obesity in England. I’ve been lucky enough to have a lifetime of exploring natural London and one of the greatest thrills of being a father is to see my children enjoying visiting the same parks, zoos and natural habitats that I enjoyed as a kid. I have also been fortunate to be able to use public office to support green London, including backing the London Wildlife Trust at the GLC, creating the East London Green Grid, and providing free entry to London Zoo for school children. We can’t take London’s wildlife for granted. It needs protection and support, and in many cases relies on the hard work of thousands of unpaid volunteers. **I will:** * **Designate a network of wild flower corridors** Learning from the success of the innovative wild flower meadows around the Olympic site we will transform the verges of roads, footpaths, cycleways and railways owned by Transport for London and other agencies into refuges for nature as well as beautiful places to enjoy. We will work with and support the hundreds of community groups, charities and other volunteers who clean up our green spaces and waterways. * **Back the Bees** The decline in global bee population is a threat to the pollination of the five-a-day fruit and vegetables that we need for a healthy diet. We will designate bee keeping areas around London, creating a small fund to support training and start-up costs for voluntary groups willing to provide homes for new bee hives. Our new wild flower corridors (above) will be attractive to bees. * **Rigorously enforce planning guidelines** to protect green and open spaces, the Green Belt, and home gardens from development * **Back the London Wildlife Trusts’ ‘Garden for a Living London’ programme** As a keen gardener myself I want to help to turn the city’s three million home gardens into thriving natural habitats. ## Support local, organic food Thousands of Londoners are now lucky enough to be able to buy local, organic produce from farmers markets – or have even taken up growing their own food. We will support this vibrant new market in low carbon, healthy produce by backing the creation of new allotments on vacant land, helping the development of new wholesale food markets and publicising farmers’ markets. ## Support Londoners to create better neighbourhoods and greener communities The Tories new ‘neighbourhood planning’ scheme is a cheap and easy route to unconstrained development. It is sham localism. I want to empower local communities to revitalise their own neighbourhoods, creating co-operative energy supply, improving the street environment with tree planting, LED lighting, and safe cycle routes and pedestrian crossings, and encouraging car clubs wherever local people want them. We will help communities to access the government’s neighbourhood plan funds and supplement this with small grants of up to £5,000 for local transport and environmental improvements. "We don’t need a new hub airport – we need to manage existing airports more efficiently" ## Oppose Johnson’s Thames Estuary hub airport Boris Johnson’s proposal for a massive new airport in the Thames Estuary is just another vanity project. It would destroy important habitats, require huge expenditure on otherwise unnecessary new roads and rail links. London doesn’t need another hub airport, nor do we need a third runway at Heathrow. We need instead to manage existing airports more efficiently and enable many short-haul trips to transfer to rail. ## Looking after the long term – adapting to climate change Given the woeful failure of the world’s major polluters to make a new international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions, we have to prepare for the worsening impact of climate change. London is increasingly vulnerable to flooding and excessively hot summer days and nights. As a wealthy, sophisticated city we have a greater chance than most of becoming resilient to climate change. However, we cannot be complacent. I will: * **Plan how to improve resilience** Convene a regular meeting of borough councils, the Environment Agency, government and the utilities to plan how to improve resilience. Becoming more resilient to climate related disasters is as much about how institutionally and individually we are prepared to react, as it is about adapting infrastructure. * **Map London’s flood risk** Complete the ‘Drain London’ programme to map flood risk and focus on protecting the most vulnerable communities. * **Introduce ‘green streets’ policies** Integrate rain-water management into the built environment, including through the introduction of planters, street valleys and vegetated areas into streets, and require that all new streets and hard surfaces are permeable. * **Learn from cities like Chicago and support green roofs, to absorb rainfall and cool down buildings to protect against rising summer temperatures.** > "Five of my six core pledges are designed to make Londoners financially better off." Five of my six core pledges in this election are designed to make Londoners financially better off. My view is that it is the duty of the Mayor to do everything possible to protect Londoners from the effects of the economic downturn. And if ordinary people have a bit more money in their pockets that will stimulate demand and growth in the economy as a whole. London’s economy has been hit harder than other parts of the country by a financial crisis which has its roots in irresponsibility and greed by banks. But instead of concentrating on protecting Londoners against the effects of this crisis, the Conservative Mayor has chosen to defend the bankers who got us into the mess. Since Boris Johnson became mayor the number of unemployed people in London has increased by 169,000 and there is a rising trend. Rather than using all the powers of the Mayor to lessen the impact of the economic downturn ## A more prosperous London I will do everything possible to protect Londoners from the effects of the immediate economic crisis, while also helping prepare London to meet the future challenges of a changing world economy. on Londoners, Boris Johnson has pushed through repeated above-inflation fares rises, while simultaneously leading calls to abolish the 50p rate of tax on the extremely highly paid. This ended up with millions of Londoners paying more to travel to work, and a pensioners tax grab to pay for a tax cut for the very rich. The Tory Mayor has also cut back on investment – which hurts growth and jobs in the long term. For example, under Boris Johnson Transport for London’s capital budget (the money used to invest in new services or upgrade existing infrastructure) has been under-spent by a massive £1.25 billion. The cuts to London’s tourism budgets are much smaller, but spending less on promoting London in the year that the Olympics are held here is an extraordinary decision. As Mayor from 2000-2008, I secured large scale new investment for London - Crossrail, the East London Line, DLR extensions and the developments associated with the Olympic Games. The Tory Mayor has failed to secure anything like this for London. He has met with transport ministers just fourteen times in four years, despite finding time to fit in over one hundred meetings with bankers. To do everything possible to return London’s economy to sustainable growth, from day one I will reverse the Tory Mayor’s order of priorities and concentrate on three objectives, working with business, government and the trade unions to: * Put money back in Londoners’ pockets to increase demand and protect those on average and low incomes from the impact of the downturn. * Invest in infrastructure: properly prepare the long-term investment projects which London needs to be competitive in the future. * Invest in Londoners: make sure that all Londoners benefit from growth and reduce inequality, through investment in education, skills and training ## Put money back in Londoners’ pockets to increase demand The powers of the Mayor alone are insufficient to radically raise demand and boost growth in London’s economy. For that, Tory-led government policies need to be reversed. But my policies will put hundreds of pounds back in Londoners’ pockets, particularly through five of my key pledges: * Cut fares * Restore the Education Maintenance Allowance * Reduce energy bills * Enable lower rents * Provide financial support for childcare This will help increase spending in London’s shops, restaurants and other businesses and boost employment. In contrast, the Tory Mayor’s fare hike will take over £1bn out of the economy, damaging economic recovery and making Londoners worse off. All of our policies are designed to ensure that the burden of the downturn does not, as under the Tories, fall on those on average and low incomes, who are least able to bear it. That is why I have campaigned against the Tory government scrapping the 50p tax rate on income over £150,000 a year, and removing tax relief for many pensioners. now unemployed. London is extremely unequal in terms of incomes. Women in London, as in the rest of the UK, continue to be paid less than men on average for the same work. The last Labour government established a young person’s ‘entitlement’, guaranteeing young people the chance to stay in education and training until the age of eighteen, delivering an expansion of education and training. The Tory-led government has been dismantling this legacy, replacing real apprenticeships with the scandal of free labour for major corporations. As in so many other areas, Boris Johnson has largely stood by and done nothing. Working with employers and trade unions to help create the skilled labour force that a growing London economy requires, I will: * **Champion equal pay for women** I will reinstate work to address women’s economic needs and work with the best employers to demonstrate how to challenge discrimination and deliver equal pay for women across London. * **Extend London Apprenticeships** I strongly support the integration of training and work and will work with London’s companies to extend the number of genuine apprenticeships. The aim will be to create enough places for all 16-18 years olds who wish to take up an apprenticeship. We will ensure that all apprenticeships deliver nationally recognised qualifications and provide at least two hundred and eighty hours of training per year. We will require that firms that win contracts worth over £1 million per year with the GLA Group offer apprenticeships. * **Pilot a pre-apprenticeship course** Too many young people still leave school under qualified to take up a job or an apprenticeship. We will pilot a pre-apprenticeship course, which will support one thousand young people to develop the literary, numerical and personal skills required to successfully apply for an apprenticeship place. * **Support the London Living Wage** I will use all available levers to encourage every employer in London to adopt the London Living Wage (which I introduced in 2005), so that it becomes the norm rather than the exception. It will be a condition of any major procurement for firms seeking to provide goods or services to the GLA group. I will encourage every London borough council to support the London Living Wage. Labour Islington and Lewisham are the latest to do so, but not a single Tory controlled council has currently signed up and the Tory Mayor has done nothing to try and persuade them. * **Restore a London-wide Education Maintenance Allowance** To provide 16-18 year olds with up to £30 a week to help them to go to college I will restore a London-wide EMA (see ‘A Great Place to Be Young’ section of the manifesto) * **Oppose restrictive practices on attracting skilled workers** A city competing in a competitive global market, London has to attract the best skills from around the world. London’s openness and diversity has been critical to its success. I will support London’s businesses in their opposition to restrictive policies on their ability to attract highly skilled workers from abroad. ## Invest in Londoners The Mayor does not have the powers to create jobs on any significant scale, other than through direct investment and employment. At a time when the economy is struggling this is, however, more important than usual. The Mayor’s greatest ability to create jobs through investment is via Transport for London. Under Boris Johnson, TfL has under-spent its investment budget by £1.25 billion. The Tory Mayor boasts that he will “create 200,000 jobs”, is mostly from major transport projects like Crossrail. But without a Mayor who can get things done, the jobs won’t be created. My programme of home insulation and a focus on getting house-building going again will also create new jobs and help provide a much needed stimulus to the construction sector. London will never be able to, nor should it, compete with China, India and other emerging economies on the basis of cheap wages. London’s competitiveness depends on maintaining a high and increasing level of productivity, which requires a highly skilled workforce and continuous investment in skills. For London’s economy to be successful, and for all Londoners to benefit from economic growth, we cannot afford to have sections of society that are marginalised. Yet one in four young people in our city are ## Invest in infrastructure Alongside immediate measures to protect Londoners from the effects of the financial crisis must go a major effort to increase investment in infrastructure. We need to raise productivity and competitiveness and accommodate a population that is expected to grow by over one million in twenty years. London must prepare for the challenges and opportunities from competition not only in Europe and the US but also in rapidly growing economies of Asia, Brazil and, above all, China and India. Major infrastructure projects, such as Crossrail 2 and 3 require government funding, but Boris Johnson’s administration has not even done the preparatory work to make the case and mobilise support for such projects. During my eight years as Mayor London secured major investment to help it grow, in particular Crossrail and the Olympic Games. These are not only vital for future competitiveness, but the jobs they created have helped London during the economic downturn. Boris Johnson’s part-time leadership has secured no such new major infrastructure investment for London. Equally shockingly, he has under-spent the investment budget allocated to Transport for London by £1.2 billion. The Tories are simply scaremongering when they say my fares cut will lead to lower investment. It will be entirely financed out of TfL’s operating surplus and will not affect its capital budget all. I will work flat out to bring in new investment to London and will ensure that the sums already allocated to investment at Transport for London are fully used in a productive way. ### Key specific new investments that I will champion include: * **Further extending London Overground into a modern suburban metro service** I will make the case for London government to run all the capital’s suburban rail services, following the success of London Overground, created during my previous term as Mayor. * **Crossrail extension to Ebbsfleet** I will ask Transport for London to examine and prepare the business case for the extension of Crossrail line 1 to Ebbsfleet, the route of which is already safeguarded. This would deliver significant regeneration benefits to the northern part of Bexley and give Crossrail a connection to High Speed One at Ebbsfleet. * **Chelsea-Hackney-Stansted (Crossrail 2)** One of the most important achievements of my first two terms of office was to end the decades-long logjam to secure financing for Crossrail 1. I will apply the same approach and determination to generate support for Crossrail 2, the core of which will be a line from Chelsea to Hackney. * **Waterloo to Euston (Crossrail 3)** I will set about legally safeguarding the route for Crossrail 3 between Euston and Waterloo. ### I will also take steps to enhance and protect existing critical infrastructure, including: * **Protect London’s hub airport at Heathrow** In an attempt to mask his lack of an infrastructure strategy, Boris Johnson has pursued the fantasy project of a new hub airport in the Thames estuary. Not only would this cost tens of billions of pounds to build, but it is grossly irresponsible from the point of view of the economy of West London and the 114,000 jobs that depend upon Heathrow. It is not possible to have two London hub airports and so the creation of a Thames Estuary airport would ultimately close Heathrow. I will not waste any more of Londoner’s money and will scrap this plan. * **Invest in London’s digital future** Being at the front of the next wave of development in the digital technology will be central to London’s future economic success. London has more software and Information Communication Technology (ICT) companies (over 23,000) than any other city in Europe. One in four British jobs in ICT and twenty-two percent of British telecommunications jobs are based in London. London has become a centre for the computer games industry. Investment in the ICT sector is high – London attracted a higher number of digital related Foreign Direct Investment projects than any other European city during 2010-11. Boris Johnson has completely failed to grasp the opportunities of the digital age. In a widely criticised Daily Telegraph column of 6 February 2012 he said Britain would never create a “Facebook” and admitted he did not: “pretend to grasp the economics of the web, which seems to me to be a colossal destroyer of value” He has mishandled the planned roll out of wi-fi across the Tube network, with access now only being provided at one hundred and twenty street-level stations, rather than the original aim of all station platforms and trains by the Olympics. ### To support London’s technology and creative industries I will: * **Secure the super-fast broadband investment London needs** London’s digital and creative industries rely on good broadband access, but in the latest broadband quality survey London scored lower than Frankfurt, Paris, New York and Tokyo for broadband speed, and way behind the leader, Seoul. In a recent survey by London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, eighty-three per cent of businesses said improved broadband provision should be a key pledge for the next Mayoral term.I will work with business organizations to vigorously lobby the government and telecoms providers to get high speed broadband and 4G phone coverage to every part of London by 2016. * **Support Tech City** I will put the planning, economic development and promotional strength of the GLA behind the further development of Tech City around Hoxton, Shoreditch and the City Fringe, and identify opportunities to provide low cost, flexible accommodation for digital SMEs to keep Tech City growing. * **Make the most of dot.london** We will use the new dot.london domain to promote London content, to identify London as a global centre for technology, and to raise funds to help support Tech City. ## Support London’s small businesses There are 748,000 companies based in the capital – more than any other region of the UK. Of these ninety-nine per cent are small businesses. The Tory-led Government’s cuts have seen a massive reduction in business support services, and Boris Johnson’s administration has exacerbated this by winding down the London Development Agency and withdrawing funding from dozens of innovative business support projects. As well as promoting and supporting economic development generally, the Mayor can do more to help small and medium-sized business in London compete for the £3.4bn a year the GLA Group spends on goods and services, of which only thirteen per cent currently goes to SMEs. **To support small businesses I will:** * Support Labour’s plan for a national insurance tax break for small businesses to hire extra workers * Strengthen small businesses’ chance to bid for GLA group contracts There should be a level playing field for companies competing for public sector contracts. The ‘CompeteFor’ portal we established when I was Mayor will be maintained and strengthened, reducing the amount of paperwork it takes to get on the system, and that all contracts from the GLA bodies are on the system. I will argue for other public sector agencies within London including central and local government to put their contracts on CompeteFor too. We will review how to enabling a wider range of small businesses to compete for contracts, for example by breaking them up into smaller parcels where possible, and I will encourage SMEs to work together in consortia or strategic alliances to compete for bigger jobs. We will operate a ‘prompt payment’ policy on all GLA Group contracts with SMEs to support their cashflow. * Collaborate to develop a new, high quality business support service across London Provide world-class content, events and support, based on web technology by working with the business stakeholders like the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Federation of Small Business, Department for Business, City of London and with London’s Higher Education Sector. * Develop an Annual Business Summit Host an annual small business summit, working with the same stakeholders, to showcase the best of London’s small businesses, entrepreneurs and selfemployed people and to share best practice. ## Support London’s co-operatives and community finance Throughout my manifesto I have committed to tackling Londoners being ripped-off – whether it is fees for lettings agencies or sky high energy bills propping up shareholder profits. Cooperatives do not rip off their customers or staff, because they are owned and democratically controlled by them. That’s why I will support co-operatives and mutual finance to build a fairer economy in London. I will support the growth and development of credit unions by making sure that everyone who works for the GLA and Mayoral bodies (such as TfL) can save with a local credit union through payroll deduction facilities. I will support the development of London’s co-operative economy by appointing a London Co-operative Champion to co-ordinate City Hall resources in support of co-operatives ## Support London’s banking and financial services sector The City is the world’s leading global financial centre employing hundreds of thousands of Londoners. While people are rightly angry at the role played by some bankers in creating the financial crisis and economic downturn, London needs a successful properly regulated banking sector which makes a positive contribution to prosperity, along with the City’s other hugely productive sectors, like insurance and professional services. I will work with City businesses and the Corporation of London to support a vibrant banking and financial services sector which supports economic growth and brings investment to the wider London economy. ## Support London’s creative industries London’s strength in the creative industries is a key motor of the city’s economy. It is one of the top three or four film cities in the world, with $1bn a year being spent by international film companies in London, because of the skills, world class studios and appropriate tax breaks available here. Several of the world’s largest advertising agencies are based in London. Companies from Japan, South Korea and even the US base their international design headquarters here. Our digital industries provide content for companies across the globe. The present administration has done little or nothing to promote or support London’s creative industries. We will maintain and if possible expand the existing support to Film London and London Fashion Weeks. We will look at ways to use ERDF funding to develop projects that help develop a new generation of digital, SFX and production companies. We will develop a programme to promote London’s strength in the creative and gaming industries into China in particular, which is prioritizing developing its manufacturing to a higher level through bringing in the type of creative skills in which London excels, but also into India, Brazil and other growing markets. ## Promote London abroad The world economy is undergoing rapid change. The most rapid growth is in Asian markets where what London has to offer is not so well-known as in its traditional markets in the US and Europe, but the opportunities for London to export goods and services are huge. Similarly, the tourism industry generates billions of pounds for London companies and sustains tens of thousands of jobs. Foreign students studying at London’s universities and colleges bring in many hundreds of millions of pounds. Attracting inward investment into London is also vital for creating economic growth and new jobs. * **Be a champion for London** I will actively assist the work of London’s overseas promotional bodies in securing individual significant investors, engaging with new markets, and securing major conventions and other projects. * **Support London’s tourism industry in calling for a sensible approach to visas** Too many non-EU tourists are put off from coming to London because of the additional cost and bureaucracy of obtaining a visa here, compared with EU cities like Paris or Berlin. We are missing out on the massive new Chinese market in particular – where it is estimated that there will be up to two hundred million additional people wealthy enough to take foreign holidays by the next decade. I will support London’s tourism industry by lobbying the government to remove unnecessary red-tape Despite huge opposition from London’s businesses, Boris Johnson has allowed London’s promotional office in India to close, and only a skeleton presence to remain in rapidly growing China. He has shown no understanding of the importance of promoting London in overseas markets. ### I will: * **Rebuild an effective overseas marketing operation for London** London needs efficient marketing to strengthen its position in the overseas markets on which many tens of thousands of Londoners jobs depend. ## Backing manufacturing to create green growth While London is never going to be a major industrial-scale manufacturing centre again, it is home to many very successful high-tech, green and niche manufacturing businesses. There is strong potential for growth, which I will encourage by: * **Creating a ‘Productive Industries Commission’** to analyse the potential for growth in manufacturing and advise on how the Mayor can support it * **Lobby government on behalf of London’s manufacturing enterprises** to ensure that they are able to access national investment support * **Support the creation of new green jobs and industries** There are 150,000 “green” jobs in London with significant potential for growth and attracting direct investment. I will use positive regulation and GLA procurement to ensure London is at the forefront of creating new markets for green-tech. The GLA Group will act as an innovative user of the latest green technology, reviewing and reporting back on how effective it has been, to set an example and create critical mass for the rest of the public sector. In particular, we will look to support new opportunities in high-end waste management, through our ambitious target that zero waste should go to landfill by 2025. Already London has a plastics recycling factory (with a second is currently being built in Enfield), but there is scope for more as well as for paper, board plants, high quality composting, and electronic and white goods repair and disassembly. I will ask the London Waste and Recycling Board to support this development as well as working with universities and scientific institutions to support the development of new businesses that create technologies to reuse of recovered materials. ## Defending the NHS, speaking up for patients, I will vigorously defend the NHS and the principle of universal access to free health care and will appoint a London Health Commissioner to help co-ordinate services, protect against health service closures, and tackle air pollution. I haven’t met a single Londoner who tells me that they support the government’s plans to slowly privatise the NHS. Londoners rely on the free health service and know that the NHS will never be the same again if the Tories get their way. They are deliberately causing chaos, and preventing co-ordination across London to make it easier for piecemeal privatisation. The Tory health minister, Andrew Lansley, has already announced the abolition of NHS London in 2013, which will leave the capital without a strategic authority to co-ordinate health care provision and make it easier to break up and sell off bit-by-bit. > I will vigorously defend the NHS and the principle of free health care. I will join ordinary Londoners, the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nurses, the Royal College of Midwives, and trade unions representing tens of thousands of NHS workers to defend health services, and oppose the government’s proposals to undermine free health care and run health services for a profit. In the 2008 mayoral election Boris Johnson promised to “support local health services by campaigning against closures and fighting to save local GP services”. I have visited every single borough in London in the last year and everywhere people tell me the same thing: whenever Boris Johnson is actually asked to defend a hospital or other health service against closure he refuses because it is ‘not his responsibility’. Labour’s proudest achievement is the creation of the NHS and it can never be safe when the Tories are in power. Labour will put the NHS back in safe hands – a health service for all, free at the point of need. As Mayor I will act to safeguard London’s health service until it is back in safe hands with a Labour government. The Mayor has a legal duty to improve the health of Londoners and will control a small public health budget of about £15 million. I will appoint a London Health Commissioner to work with all the professionals who recognise the need to co-ordinate services across the capital, defend NHS services against privatisation, and to lead major public health initiatives such as reducing air pollution. That is true, but neither is it the Mayor’s responsibility to set income tax policy. Yet the Tory Mayor has repeatedly campaigned to scrap the 50p rate of tax on incomes over £150,000 per year. He thinks it is the Mayor’s responsibility to defend the very richest people in London, but not to stand up for the majority of Londoners on the NHS. As a Labour Mayor, I will be a champion of the NHS in London. Re-organisations are sometimes necessary to improve services, as has happened successfully with stroke services, but any changes should be dictated by the need to improve health outcomes for patients, not to aid privatisation and the pursuit of profits. I will oppose any closures or changes to NHS services that will not result in better health provision. ## Co-ordinating London’s health services The NHS is the most popular institution in Britain and Londoners, like people in the rest of the country, want it to stay in public control. Boris Johnson’s Tory Party colleagues insist they don’t plan to privatise the NHS. But that’s exactly what’s happening on the ground. If they are not trying to privatise the NHS, why has the Government been in talks with international health corporations about taking over twenty more hospitals. The Government’s NHS Bill turns the NHS into a full-blown commercial market, putting competition before patient care. It allows private companies to cherry-pick quick profits, potentially forcing local hospitals to go bust. Hospitals could even be fined for working together. For London, the government’s plans are proving particularly damaging. Our health service consists of a huge number of interlocking institutions – from major teaching hospitals to local GP surgeries. The NHS works best for patients when all the available services work together around the individual patient’s needs. This requires clear co-ordination and management. In a big city like London, we also need city-wide services like the highly successful specialist stroke units, which cannot be provided at an individual borough or hospital level. The co-ordinated system of the NHS is being replaced by a free-for-all with GPs competing with hospitals for patients, community NHS services competing with the charity sector and the private sector competing with everyone for the most profitable bits of the NHS. This is a recipe for disaster. It will be patients who suffer, and virtually no-one working in the health service wants these changes. Only the big private health companies are licking their lips. **I will:** - Vigorously defend the NHS and the principle of universal access to free health care and keeping the NHS in public ownership. - Invite the most senior, experienced health service leaders from around the world and across London to apply to become the Health Commissioner for London - Ask the Health Commissioner and the London Health Improvement Board to work with NHS partners across the city to defend the NHS and support the co-ordinated planning of vital city-wide services. ## Putting Londoners in control of their health and the services that support them Decisions about changes to health services sometimes look like they are made for the convenience of health service professionals, not patients. The present Mayor has abolished or ignored the city-wide mechanisms that had begun to give a voice to patients, carers and representatives of health service users. The ‘Well London’ programme has shown how small amounts of money put in the hands of local people, with structured support, can change people’s health and neighbourhoods for the better. Comprehensive locally-led action on health brings wider benefits – children do better in school, anti social behaviour goes down, civility and mutual respect rises. **I will:** - Launch a city-wide community health improvement programme, delivered in partnership with borough public health teams and with the voluntary and community sector, but led by local people. In the first year it will aim to work in 20 of London’s most deprived neighbourhoods, and by year four it will be active in at least 80 neighbourhoods across the city where health need is greatest. - Challenge the Government to properly fund the new ‘Health Watch’ organisations that are supposed to give patients a voice in the NHS. ## Dignity, respect and compassion in health care and the services that support them There have been far too many scandals about poor quality or degrading treatment of patients, particularly older people, in care homes or hospitals, and of appalling pay and conditions for staff. The collapse of Southern Cross shows what can happen when an unregulated private sector is encouraged to make money out of caring for people. **I will:** - Appoint an older person in every London borough to be a local Dignity Champion. The champions will visit care homes and hospitals, talk to patients and families, and to older peoples’ groups, to both share examples of the highest quality care, and raise an early alarm wherever care falls below standards of basic human decency. - Work with care providers and the trade unions to ensure care workers are valued, supported and trained to give the best quality care. ## Standing up for health services for the most vulnerable and excluded There is widespread concern that specialist health services, or support for especially vulnerable groups, will lose out under the government’s new local commissioning approach. London is now the TB capital of Europe with rates in some parts higher than sub-Saharan Africa. **I will:** * Work with NHS commissioners and the London boroughs to agree a clear set of priorities where city-wide health service planning makes sense * Work with everyone in the confused new NHS structures to make sure that the vital services that protect Londoners health are sustained and improved. * Review the impact of NHS structural changes on services for disabled people and give disabled people a real voice in health service commissioning * Challenge the NHS to respond to the worrying return of diseases of poverty (like Tuberculosis) to our city. ## Focus on health inequalities across London There are huge differences in life expectancy across London – if you are born in Tottenham Green your life expectancy is around seventy-one. In Queen’s Gate ward in Kensington it is eighty-eight, a seventeen year gap. Poor health inhibits people’s chances of getting and staying in work and puts stresses and strains on family life. Young people find themselves trapped as carers. Isolated older people struggle alone. Research has shown these stark health inequalities are related to the social and economic fairness (or unfairness) of our city. A fairer, more equal society, underpinned by health and other services that support everyone but target those most in need, will be a healthier society for everyone. **I will:** * Instruct the new London Health Commissioner to work with the Equalities Trust and others to better understand the levels of health inequality in London and to co-ordinate resources to focus on the neighbourhoods that are in most need. ## Mental health, mental illness and wellbeing One in four Londoners will experience a mental health problem in their life, with unemployment and recession likely to be a major trigger at present. And yet mental illness is still stigmatised and ignored. Mental health services seem to be bearing a disproportionate burden of the cuts now taking place across the NHS. I will ask the London Health Commissioner to: * Work with mental health charities to raise the profile of common conditions like depression and challenge the stigma that too many people still attach to mental illness. * Develop a new plan for high quality, co-ordinated mental health services across London. ## Reducing obesity and increasing access to healthy food London now leads the UK in levels of childhood obesity – storing up huge future burdens of illness, health cost and low self-esteem. The Tory Government has cut a number of programmes that were beginning to make a difference and has handed control of UK food policy over to big business. **I will:** * Launch a new programme working with corner shops and local food retailers to get more fresh fruit and vegetables onto Londoners plates, at the same time as challenging fast food outlets to cook healthier food. * Re-energise London’s Food Board – supporting the Healthy Schools programmes, local food growing projects, the successful ‘Good Food on the Public Plate’ programme and expand efforts to change our fast food culture. * Work with the London boroughs and London’s sports community and schools to drive up participation in sport, through practical local programmes supporting coaches, clubs and protecting playing fields and sports facilities. * Put walking and cycling at the heart of my transport policies # Taking air pollution seriously Over four thousand people die prematurely in London each year due to poor air quality – similar to the number of deaths we thought occurred during the Great Smog in 1952. Only smoking causes more premature deaths. Hundreds of thousands more of us struggle with asthma and breathing difficulties. Air pollution levels are twice health-based legal standards near our busiest roads. The biggest cause of air pollutant emissions is road traffic. Yet Boris Johnson’s response has been to delay vital measures like the third phase of the Low Emission Zone, to scrap the Western Extension of the congestion charge, while allocating £1 million to the spraying of ‘de-icer’ on the roads around air pollution monitoring sites to reduce the pollution readings. The independent Clean Air London campaign has condemned Johnson’s actions “public health fraud”. **I will stop wasting money on gimmicks and instead:** * Meet with the EU Environment Commissioner to agree a plan for how London can meet European air quality standards And seek EU funding to support this. * Invest in a new fleet of electric buses and support the development of electric taxis Buses are responsible for 5% and taxis 20% of emissions of dangerous ‘fine particle’ pollution in central London – the most polluted part of the city. Buses are also responsible for a quarter of nitrous oxide emissions in central London. Rather than wasting millions of pounds on a vanity project ‘new bus for London’, we will trial induction-charged electric buses, which promise to cost no more than a conventional diesel bus and yet produce zero air pollution (see more detail in the SMART city section of my manifesto). * Create ‘Clean Air Zones’ around schools Over 1,100 London schools are within 150 metres of roads where pollution safety limits are routinely broken. Exposure to this level of pollution has been shown to cause up to a third of all new cases of asthma in children. Air pollution may also reduce children’s lung capacity by ten per cent or more. Clean Air Zones around schools suffering from high pollution will include engagement with parents to reduce car travel to schools, 20pmh zones (as slower cars emit less pollution) and enforcement against engine idling. * Issue smog alerts to protect vulnerable Londoners On days where there is severe smog, people with existing breathing or heart conditions can be at enhanced risk if they go outdoors. They need a smog warning so they can make that judgement. Boris Johnson has refused to do this. I will make issuing smog alerts standard practice. * Stop all new waste incinerators in London Burning waste pumps dangerous toxins into the air. I will refuse planning permission to any new incineration plants in London and instead focus on reducing and re-using waste, and recycling or converting to energy that which is left (using non-incineration methods like biological treatments). “I will invest in a new fleet of electric buses and support the development of electric taxis” > " > I’d love to say ‘Vote > Ken for a pound off > your pint!’ But we > will fight to save the > local pub. > " ## A great place to go out I will work with the music industry, from informal clubs to record companies and existing events like Camden Crawl, to develop a ‘SouthXSouthWest’ style music festival in London. London’s cinemas, galleries, open spaces, festivals, museums, theatres, music venues and the whole incredible range of cultural life is one of the things that makes our wonderful city so attractive not only for Londoners, but for those who are not lucky enough to live here. Access to culture and entertainment improves the quality of people’s lives. That is why it is so important that we have a breadth to our culture and leisure facilities that can meet the interests and needs of all Londoners, whatever their age, tastes, physical abilities or background. The arts, culture and sport also make a vital economic contribution. At a national level it is estimated culture adds around £7.7 billion per year to the economy, and a large share of this is contributed in London. Boris Johnson has instead championed a self-proclaimed ‘cultural elitism’, focused on promoting the teaching of Greek and Latin, heritage, and singling out classical music above other art forms. What gives London the edge on other places is our stunning combination of history and diversity. London is truly the world in one city. You don’t have to jump on an aeroplane to experience the rich and varied cultures of continents and countries, it’s all here in one place blended with London’s own long history. My approach will be broader and more inclusive, developing the whole latitude of London’s culture, old and new: gigs in pubs as well as symphony orchestras; Tate Modern as well as Hampton Court; digital arts as well as the Classics. ## Culture for all Promoting London’s commercial arts and leisure, its theatre, music venues and attractions is a key role of the Mayor. But maintaining the breadth and diversity of London’s arts and culture – let alone keeping things free or at a price that is within the reach of ordinary Londoners – depends critically upon national government funding support. Cultural and arts institutions in London, as in the rest of the country, are currently struggling with the impact of the Tory-led government’s huge funding cuts. I will: * **Support proper funding for the arts** Campaign to maintain levels of funding necessary to keep arts and cultural offerings accessible to all, and for funding to expand as the economic climate improves. I will work with business to improve sponsorship of the arts and culture. We will play our part in London government by ensuring that there is a combined effort to promote London’s arts, culture and leisure sector. Unsold advertising capacity on the transport system will be used for promotions that support the culture and arts sector. * **Oppose any proposals to reinstate entry charges for our national museums and galleries.** Not all London’s arts and culture can be free, but enough of it must be so that all Londoners can share in it. The return to free entry to museums and galleries under the last Labour government meant that children and families could use the museums as an educational and leisure resource without having to count the cost. Footfall increased enormously. I will resist any attempt to undermine the unifying equality of free entry to museums and galleries. * **Maintain and expand the free festivals supported by the Greater London Authority** The free festivals currently supported by the Greater London Authority – like St George’s Day, Chinese New Year, St Patrick’s Day, Simcha on the Square, Diwali, Vaisakhi, Christmas Carols on the Square and Eid – are another way of ensuring all Londoners have access to our city’s culture. They also promote social cohesion by presenting an opportunity for us all to become familiar with aspects of the huge diversity of cultures that make up this great city. I will improve their profile and promotion, and actively seek opportunities to expand their range and number in partnership with business and and other sponsors, to include Latin American, Portuguese and other cultures. We will reinstate the free Rise festival, working with UpRise, who kept a version of the festival going after it was abolished by the current Mayor, as a city-wide celebration of the city’s diversity through the popular music of all types and origins that is heard every day in our city. ## London’s vibrant West End London’s West End theatres are a world-wide success and are at the centre of London’s cultural profile. There is a close relationship between publicly funded and commercial theatre. The global success of the latter is based on the skills, expertise and experience developed through publicly funded theatre. Many of our most successful commercial directors - Danny Boyle, Stephen Daldry, Sam Mendes - started in subsidised theatre. The same applies to our actors. Global block-buster film, War Horse, started as a play in subsidised theatre. Our publicly supported theatre is the envy of the world, with London shows regularly transferring to Broadway, going global, or crossing over to film. That is one reason why I will always campaign to maintain public funding theatre, to maintain its risky, ground-breaking and innovative work. Commercial theatre revenues have held up under pressure since the financial crisis. That is why the night-time parking restrictions proposed by the Tories in Westminster were not only unnecessary but a slap in the face to the West End. I will promote and support London’s theatre, putting it at the heart of my tourism strategy. I will continue to provide Trafalgar Square for West End Live – the annual summer promotion of London’s shows. I will support and promote excellent initiatives like Get Into London Theatre and Kids Week in August that are aimed at expanding audiences and access. I will seek to expand late night transport, in the first instance by looking at the business case for additional night buses. ## Improving the public realm London’s West End is crucial to the economy of the city. Upgrading the West End as a shopping destination, especially the East End of Oxford Street, improving transport access through the new station at Tottenham Court Rd and the faster links provided by Crossrail, and making the area more ‘pedestrian friendly’ through wider pavements, re-routing buses and other measures are crucial to maintaining the city’s premier position for tourism and business. We will extend the Legible London, making it easier for tourists to find pedestrian routes linking attractions like the Tate Modern, St Pauls and the Museum of London, or Oxford Street shops to the London Eye, or the theatre district. ## A London music festival – from the pub to Festival Hall London’s music scene is second to none. I will work with the music industry, from informal clubs to record companies and existing events like Camden Crawl, to develop a ‘SouthXSouthWest’ style music festival in London. Through international promotion of one or two weeks of music events across the city, it will raise the profile of London’s venues, performers, promoters and studios to an international audience, and encourage producers, artists and labels to take a closer look at what London has to offer. ## Promote the Museum of London The Museum of London – run jointly by the Mayor and the City Corporation – has successfully revamped the presentation of its collections to make it a real visitor and educational experience. It details the real history of London both good and bad – its welcome of immigrants and its role in the slave trade. I will promote the Museum of London and the Museum of London Docklands as a key first stopping point for visitors to the city and as a jewel in our international promotion of the city. ## Representative arts and culture boards Where I am responsible for appointments to Arts or cultural boards I will put in place a transparent, objective process for selection that values different skills and backgrounds. There will be no newspaper editor cronies railroaded in to chair arts boards on my watch. ## Save the High Street and the local pub One of the great things about London is that it is always changing and developing - often in ways that no-one could have predicted. But the wonderful mix of social and cultural offerings in our great city also sometimes has to be nurtured and protected. Over a quarter of people go to the pub at least once a week, and while not everyone thinks a good night out means a trip to a favourite bar, pubs and clubs remain a backbone of social life across many London neighbourhoods. But the local pub is under threat, a victim of predatory asset-strippers that are not afraid to destroy a local institutions in pursuit of a fast buck – in this case so that the venture capital owners of the big pub chains can cash-in on the property redevelopment value of pubs. Even though David Cameron said his Government would assist local people in taking over their community pubs, he axed £4.3 million in funds introduced by Labour to do exactly that. Similarly, as my colleague David Lammy MP has raised, many high streets are under assault from a seemingly unstoppable march of betting shops. In the last five years, London has gained three hundred and fifty new gambling establishments. Cash-rich bookmakers muscle other small businesses off the high street and saturate less well-off areas with gambling outlets. This is preying on vulnerable people’s hope that a bit of luck will change their lot, while in reality the odds remain firmly in the bookmakers’ favour. I’d love to say ‘Vote Ken for a pound off your pint’, but while that’s a bit out of the remit of the Mayor, I will: * **Work with local councils to protect the high street and local pubs** Local authorities can use their discretionary planning powers to protect the high street from the bookies’ takeover and prevent local pubs being redeveloped where there is a clear demand for them to stay open. That’s what the powers are there for – to protect the interests of the community as a whole from inappropriate individual developments. * **Support community-owned pubs** Work with local borough councils and lobby the government to support pubs which have a viable future to stay in business in co-operative ownership. We will make available funds from the Mayor’s Growing Places funds to do this. * **Support a fair deal for pub landlords** Two thirds of landlords who lease from the big ‘pubco’ chains earn less than £15,000 per year, and are forced to buy beer at premium prices. This is one reason why many are going out of business. I will support their campaign for fair contracts, so pub-goers get a cheaper pint and good landlords can stay in business. ## Making the most of the Olympic legacy When we won the Olympics in 2005 it was a massive coup for London. It gave us an unparalleled opportunity to showcase our great city to the world, to regenerate some of the most deprived parts of the capital, and to create a lasting legacy of participation in sports and athletics. I remain convinced that winning the Games was a great achievement and I am proud to have been able to play my part. I am equally certain that the Olympics will be a fantastic success and will bring London alive this summer. Some things could have been done better, however. The abuse of the ‘Olympic Route Network’ is a scandal: athletes and officials need a guaranteed fast route to the stadiums, but the Mayor should have worked harder to get a more sensible solution that prevented such a significant section of our road network being reserved for assorted corporate hangers-on. And much more should have been done to secure the sporting legacy, so that every young Londoner gets a chance to emulate their athletic heroes. There will still be time after 3 May to rectify at least the last of these issues. When we won the Games in 2005, we made a promise to the international community and the people of this country to inspire a generation of young people through sport. The Tories have broken this promise. Mayor Johnson has made much of his £5m a year school sports programme, but this is far outweighed by the Tory-led government cutting £12 million per year from the School Sport programme in London. I will call on the government to completely reverse its damaging cuts and re-instate or replace the previous national network of School Sports Partnerships as a matter of urgency. ## Invite the Tour de France back to London On a beautiful June day in 2007, two million Londoners revelled in the excitement of the world’s greatest cycle race streaming down the streets of the capital. The spectacle brought over £100m of benefits to the London economy and helped stimulate a new generation to take up cycling. As the Tour caravan packed up to travel to its next stage I said ‘a bientot’ to the organizers, not ‘au revoir’, because we had agreed that the Tour would return in a few years. Boris Johnson has let that opportunity slip in a mistaken drive to show he can ‘cut further and faster’ than the government. This was a false economy and I will waste no time in inviting Le Tour back to Londres. "We will waste no time in inviting Le Tour back to London" " I will put sensors in parking bays to make it quicker to find a empty parking spot. " ## Smart city London To make it easier for drivers to find a parking space I will trial a smart parking initiative, using sensors in the road to send data to drivers’ smart phones when a space is available. At a time when Londoners are struggling with the cost of living, we need to embrace technological advances that enable businesses and services to be run more efficiently, reducing prices. From the internet to the Oyster card and GPS navigation, our lives now depend on information technology in way we simply could not have imagined even twenty years ago. Analysts predict that by next year half of all web-connections will be mobile. The successful cities of tomorrow will be the ones that embrace technology most effectively today. One of the great advantages of information technology is the ability it gives us to use data to manage services more efficiently and with greater responsiveness to people’s changing needs. The business mantra of ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ is equally relevant for individuals as it is for the city as a whole. Even in a sophisticated metropolis like London there is much waste and inefficiency simply because we lack the information to make the best decisions. For example, a big chunk of the increasingly expensive energy we pay for is used to heat rooms in which no-one is present, or to keep devices on standby. Information technology gives us a chance ‘run on information’ – reducing the hassle of daily tasks, saving money, and cutting down on pollution. Making London a ‘smart’ city will also give us the ability just to make our lives a little easier – helping us find a parking space more quickly, or letting the lorry driver know that we are near them on our bike. There are lots of great examples of information technology innovation around the world. I want to bring them all here and develop new solutions on top that will make London the world’s first genuinely SMART city. I will: * **Cut congestion through ‘smart parking’** Learning from San Francisco’s SF Park experiment, I will make it easier and quicker for drivers to find a parking space in London. Sensors in parking spaces will provide data on when a place is available. This data will be made freely available to the market. If the Shoreditch app firms are as quick off the mark as their counterparts in Silicon Valley, then very quickly Londoners will be able to get information to their smart phones alerting them when they are near an available parking spot. As, particularly at peak times, a significant portion of traffic is simply circling to find a parking space, this smart initiative could help cut congestion as well as reducing the frustration levels of drivers and their passengers. ### Cut pollution with clean, quiet induction charged electric buses Electric vehicles provide the opportunity for efficient transport without the pollution. But electric cars have proved expensive and take up has been disappointing. Boris Johnson has only managed to attract 2,000 of the 100,000 electric cars he promised. The primary reason for the high cost of conventional electric vehicles is the price of the batteries. However, with ‘induction charging’ – where vehicles are recharged by pads in the road using a magnetic technology similar to an electric toothbrush charger – the number of batteries required can be reduced by four fifths. Costs plummet as a result. Induction charging is perfect for vehicles like buses which travel on the same route every day, and pause at the same places (bus stops and the end of routes) where their batteries can be partially recharged. As a result some industry analysts expect that quiet, clean electric buses using induction charging technology would already cost no more than conventional, polluting diesel buses. I will ask TfL to trial induction charging technology on at least two bus routes. If the technology works and is cost-effective we will make it the standard for London. We will also investigate the possibility of using the same technology for taxis. ### Improve cycle safety with traffic light sensors linked to RFID tags Half of all cyclists deaths in London occur when a lorry is turning left at a junction and the driver hadn’t seen the cyclist along side them. In Copenahgen, a new system of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags on bikes linked to sensors in the road and on traffic lights helps reduce the risk of collisions between vehicles and cyclists. The tags tell the traffic signals that a cyclist is present, and a flashing light visible in the driver’s side mirror is activated before the traffic lights are about to turn to green. RFID tags would also make it much easier for the police to crack down on bicycle theft, which thrives on the relative ease with which bikes can be made anonymous and re-sold. ### Cut energy bills with SMART energy and water meters As part of our plan to help Londoners cut their fuel bills (see environment section of this manifesto), our new London Energy Co-operative will offer householders energy-saving smart meters. These devices enable families to see exactly what it is that is pushing up their bills, to more easily use electricity-hungry equipment like washing machines when tariffs are cheaper, and so save money and carbon emissions. In trials around the world homes fitted with ‘smart meters’ cut energy bills and, therefore, carbon emissions, by as much as a quarter. That’s a saving of over £300 a year for the average family in London. ### Engage communities in mapping natural London London is a beautiful city partly because it is so green. We all know that is one of the reasons people love living or visiting here, but it is very hard to put a precise value on the benefits of nature. Yet if we want to protect natural London, that is what we need to do. Our Mapping Natural Capital programme will build on initiatives such as Wild London, to enable Londoners with a love of the outdoors to team together to chart London’s wildlife from their back garden to Hyde Park. We’ll make sure there are computers in libraries and other public places for those who don’t have access to a smart phone or a computer at home. ### Establish an ‘information architecture’ strategy for London A complex city like London has wonderful architects to plan its buildings and public spaces, and strategies and bodies to co-ordinate everything from transport, to housing and health services. But no-one looks at the big picture for technology, despite the fact that it rules most of our lives. With the advent of the so-called ‘internet of things’, where wired bits of infrastructure are effectively able to talk to each other, by-passing humans, our city is becoming more inter-connected than ever before. But there is a risk that if this is done without any co-ordination we will end up with multiple, conflicting systems that are expensive to adjust retrospectively so that they are compatible with each other. I will bring the best of private sector IT specialists together to develop a strategic plan for how to harness the power of information technology and make London a more efficient, fairer and more enjoyable place to live. ### Making good use of public data The creation of the London Datastore has been a good move. There is immense value in the data held by government about the operation of infrastructure and services. Clearly personal data needs to remain protected. London is full of energetic information technology entrepreneurs who can make good use of such data, creating apps and services which make our lives easier. I will ensure that London continues to be an open-data city. > Every pensioner who wants better insulation will save £150 off their energy bills on average ## Valuing older Londoners My home energy efficiency programme will prioritise offering free insulation to older Londoners. If we manage to secure London’s fair share of national funding, every pensioner in London who wants better insulation will save £150 a year off their energy bills on average. Just over one in seven Londoners are over the age of 60 - more than a million people. Almost 250,000 are over 80, equivalent to the entire population of Brighton. London relies on its older citizens. For example, for their wealth of experience and knowledge at work and in the voluntary sector, for the increasingly important caring role they play as grandparents in a city where child-care is so expensive, and as active participants in London’s rich cultural life. Many retired Londoners on fixed incomes are being squeezed by higher bills. One in five older Londoners live below the poverty line. In the winter of 2009-10 over two thousand older people died prematurely in London because they couldn’t heat their home adequately. Many older people experience age discrimination. I know - Boris Johnson and his Tory colleagues keep saying I’m too old to be Mayor. I will support older Londoners by protecting the Freedom Pass and by returning the age at which you are eligible for free travel to 60. I will focus a home energy efficiency drive on providing free insulation to pensioners, cutting bills by £150 a year on average. I will stand up for older Londoners, so that they gain the dignity and respect that they deserve after decades of contributing to society. ### Guarantee to protect the Freedom Pass I will guarantee to protect free travel for pensioners – the biggest threat to which is Boris Johnson’s annual above inflation fare rises, which is making the scheme unaffordable to the borough councils that fund it. I will return the age of eligibility for the Freedom Pass to 60. ### Free cycling for older Londoners To assist older Londoners to stay fit and health, I will extend the Freedom Pass to cover annual membership of the Mayor’s cycle hire scheme for those who want it. ### Lower bills and warmer homes In the winter or 2009/10, two thousand two hundred older Londoners died prematurely because of the cold. My home energy efficiency programme will prioritise offering free insulation to older Londoners. If we manage to secure London’s fair share of national funding,rather than losing out on £400m as under Boris Johnson’s part-time leadership, then we could cut the bills of every pensioner in London who wants better insulation by £150 a year on average. ### Supporting silver surfers – digital inclusion For my children, like most younger people, life is increasingly dominated by the internet. Yet six out of ten Londoners # Manifesto for London 2012 over the age of sixty-five have never been online. Those without the skills to use the internet risk marginalisation and exclusion in the longer term as more and more services are provided online. Access to the internet can help vulnerable older people keep in touch with family, friends and carers. I will work with business and the voluntary sector to provide free access to computers and internet training for older people, including donating surplus computers to older peoples’ groups. ### Time to cross the road In a mis-conceived attempt to ‘smooth traffic flow’ Boris Johnson has increased the time pedestrians have to wait to cross the road at many traffic lights. This puts additional pressure on older and other Londoners who have reduced mobility or find crossing roads stressful. I will put safety first and give Londoners back time to cross the road. ### Opposing ageism Many older Londoners experience discrimination because of their age. I know, because Boris Johnson and his Tory friends regularly attack me because I’m sixty-six. Here’s just a few of them: Lynton Crosby, Boris Johnson’s Campaign Director called me a “**freedom pass carrying**” divisive figure Deputy Mayor for Policing, Kit Malthouse, said: “**Choosing to exhume Ken Livingstone is an odd decision. Granted he’s a game old boy, but we’d assumed that Labour would choose the future, not the past.**” Boris Johnson himself swiped: “**I’m delighted of course that you’ve brought Voldemort from out of his lair. I have to say the old boy is talking complete tripe**” ### A London Living Income One in five older Londoners live below the poverty line, yet between £3.2 and £5.4 billion of income-related benefits go unclaimed by pensioners across the country every year. Around one third of those eligible for Pension Credit aren’t claiming it. > I want to establish a London Living Income for pensioners. The London Living Wage campaign has had huge success and profile demanding that no-one has to do a hard day’s work for less than they need to achieve a reasonable quality of life. I want to extend that principle to establish a London Living Income for pensioners. I will work with older people’s groups to: * Determine and publicise the ‘living income’ that Londoners require to enjoy dignity and a decent quality of life in older age * Raise awareness of benefit entitlements * Lobby for benefits to be paid automatically, rather than requiring pensioners to complete daunting forms “ I will restore London-wide EMA of up to £30 a week for 16-19 year olds ” ## Young Londoners After the Tory-led Government’s abolition of EMA I am committed to restoring a London-wide Educational Maintenance Allowance of up to £30 per week in term by bringing together existing funds in colleges, universities, and local authorities. When I became a parent that I appreciated even more just how lucky I was to grow up in London. It’s a wonderful thing to see my own children getting so much pleasure out of the same things I was able to enjoy as a kid, and many more new things besides. Whether you want to go to the Zoo or the Science Museum, the Globe or the Brixton Academy, Wembley Stadium or or just a kick-about in the park, there is no better place in the world to have fun, learn and enjoy new experiences. Labour policies such as free entry to museums and the free bus travel I introduced for under-18s, enhanced opportunities for young people. But while previous generations growing up in London could expect to do better than their parents, this implicit promise been put in danger as the ladders are kicked away by a Tory Mayor and a Tory-led Government. The axing of the Future Jobs Fund, cuts to EMA and trebling of tuition fees have all hit the aspirations of young people. London has the highest rate of youth unemployment in the country - with one in four young Londoners unemployed. The idea of home ownership is little more than a distant dream – with the vast majority likely to spend the next twenty years living in high cost, low quality private rented homes. Sadly one in four children in London are living in poverty. High costs of living and lack of money restricts many young people’s experience of London to the neighbourhoods in which they live. Despite making it a key issue in his campaign to be Mayor in 2008, knife crime against young people has continued to rise every year that Boris Johnson has been in office. And gangs create no-go areas that terrorise kids in some neighbourhoods. Mayor Johnson has talked a lot, but done little of substance to help. The images of the riots and looting on London’s streets during August stunned the entire nation and made headlines across the world. Those who committed crimes must face full punishment. We must seek to understand what is going wrong in some of our communities and take early action to prevent it in the future. The majority of young people are law abiding and wanted no part of the criminality that occurred in the summer. The rest of my manifesto sets out a raft of policies that will benefit all Londoners, including young people – from cutting fares, to a new lettings agency to bring down rents. But there are also some specific policies I will deliver to again make London the best city in the world to be young I will: ### Help reduce the cost of being young in London The biggest barrier to young people gaining the qualifications they need for a good start in life and to take advantage of all that London has to offer is the increasingly high cost of living under this Tory government and Tory Mayor. To help relieve this burden I will: * **Restore the London-wide Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA)** The Tory-led government abolished the Education Maintenance Allowance, taking away from 85,000 young people in London a weekly allowance of up to £30 to help them to go to college. Over the last year I have met young people from every London borough. They have made it absolutely clear to me that scrapping the EMA will make it harder for them to realise their potential. For many, £30 per week may be the difference as to whether or not they can stay on in further education By bringing together existing funds in colleges, universities, and local authorities, and working with the Association of Colleges, London Higher and councils across London we will be able to restore the EMA. The Allowance will be available to 16-19 year olds in further education on the same eligibility requirements for students to arrive and leave on time, deliver assignments on time and complete course-work as before, providing good life training. This will put over £1,000 per year back into the pockets of young students to help them concentrate on their studies and get where they want to be in life. * **Campaign against rises in tuition fees** I will join students and parents in campaigning against the Tory/Lib Dem government’s grotesque trebling of university tuition fees. * **Re-establish a London Child Poverty Commission** I will re-establish the London Child Poverty Commission to help highlight the serious issues facing four in ten of London’s children. * **Cut fares by 7%** My fares cut will particularly benefit young Londoners who no longer qualify for free travel, but many of whom are students or on low incomes. ## Enable young people to find a career One in four young Londoners are now unemployed. Our economy has an incredible capacity for growth and rejuvenation and talented people from all over the world are attracted to come and work here. That is a great thing and long may it continue. But we also need to make sure that kids who are brought up here gain the skills needed to compete for the jobs that London’s businesses create. Despite the Conservative Mayor’s rhetoric, there are not enough apprenticeship places for young people in London. More than three quarters of apprenticeships the Tory Mayor has supported are going to the over 25s, many of whom are already in paid employment. My apprenticeship policy will be to relentlessly focus on what apprenticeships have traditionally been understood to be – new opportunities to offer the young a pathway into a good, skilled job. I will: * **Create a London Apprenticeship Offer** By co-ordinating with business and leveraging national government funds, all 16-18 year olds with the desire and capability to complete an apprenticeship will be connected to employers offering a place. We will ensure that all apprenticeships deliver nationally recognised qualifications and provide at least 280 hours of training per year. * **Pilot a pre-apprenticeship course** Too many young people still leave school under-qualified to take up a job or an apprenticeship. Through reallocating funds allocated by Boris Johnson to academy schools, which are already supported by government, we will pilot a pre-apprenticeship course, which will support 1,000 young people to develop the literary, numerical and personal skills required to successfully apply for an apprenticeship place. * **Support London-wide careers advice** From September 2012 schools will be made responsible for careers advice. To support a consistent approach across London, we will provide support to involve major employers and help co-ordination between providers. * **Create jobs for young Londoners from the Olympic legacy and across the GLA** We will set targets through the Mayor’s Olympic Park Legacy Company to ensure that all new jobs created on the Olympic Park are offered at or above the London Living Wage; that for every hundred jobs created there are at least three new apprenticeship opportunities and that at least six out of ten new jobs created should be targeted at local people. We will also use all opportunities through the Mayoral Development Corporation, my home insulation programme, and via the GLA group’s contracts to provide new apprenticeship opportunities. * **Work with businesses to promote Saturday jobs** Difficult economic times have meant that there are fewer opportunities for young people to get their first experience of work while they are still studying. I will work with businesses to provide a new generation of Saturday jobs. ## Support young people to overcome gang culture Four out of ten young people in London grow up in poverty. Many live in troubled family environments. Some struggle to stay out of trouble, attracted by gangs and crime or simple disaffection. Most of those who have tough backgrounds, or become involved in crime can have their lives turned around with proper support and guidance. All of them matter. Despite Boris Johnson’s promises in 2008, knife crime has risen every year for the last 3 years. Last year there were over 1,000 more young victims of knife crime than in the first year of his mayoralcy. Young Londoners deserve better than this. Eradicating youth knife crime and gang culture will not be easy. But through forging better partnerships between London government, the police, local communities and young people, we can make progress. I will: * **Adopt an ‘early intervention’ approach that helps adolescents find alternatives to gang culture before they are drawn in.** I will work with the Met to learn from successful initiatives elsewhere in the UK, where trained anti-gang co-ordinators work in all ‘at risk’ neighbourhoods, along with ‘mediation projects’ to de-escalate conflicts within and between neighbourhoods, and better management of the secondary school transfer process with early identification of those most at risk of gang activity. * **Drive change from the bottom up, putting communities in charge of finding the solution that work best in their area.** Learning from the community-led commissioning approach that is being pioneered in Lambeth, I will provide funding for twenty pilot projects that will put residents in control, mobilising and building community resources in the fight against serious violent crime. * **A local police officer assigned to every school** Through Safer School Partnerships and Safer Neighbourhood Teams, many schools have become safer, better places for pupils to learn and develop. Schools in Redbridge and Hackney are leading the way through having a uniformed officer on site – building early relationships with pupils and ensuring that the police better understand the concerns and fears of the young people on their patch. As part of my pledge to provide an additional 1,700 police officers in London, I will ensure that every school that wants a local police officer assigned to it will be able to have one. * **Provide safe places for young people who are threatened by gangs or violence** London Citizens’ ‘Safe Havens’ programme provides a good model for how to encourage local shops and public buildings to declare themselves places where young people can go for protection if they feel threatened on the streets. I will work with businesses and London Citizens to support this scheme. ## Fight to protect children and young people from the ravages of growing up in poverty While the capital has some of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in the world, one in four children grows up in poverty in London. The Tory Mayor scrapped the body created to tackle and monitor child poverty. In addition to policies throughout this manifesto to reduce the cost of living for families, I will: * Reinstate the London Child Poverty Commission and Annual State of London’s Children Report to ensure proper and robust monitoring of the economic and social chances of London’s children. * Monitor the impact of changes to housing benefit caps and the introduction of the universal benefits cap, to inform discussion about how to prevent negative impacts on children and families. ## Tackling inequality to improve everyone’s quality of life London’s incredible diversity is its greatest strength. People of all backgrounds, whatever their gender, faith, race or sexuality, know that in London they can be themselves. London works best when every Londoner feels they have a real stake in the city’s success, as we did when we united to stand up to the terrorists who tried to divide us on 7 July 2005. That is why tackling discrimination and inequality is so important. London has the largest gap between rich and poor of any city in Europe. There is now very strong evidence that the greater this gap and the more pervasive is discrimination, the greater the problems for all, rich or poor. Crime, distrust and anxiety increase. Education, health and social mobility suffer. Economic inequality harms everyone. To revive the economy and ensure that everyone benefits from improved prosperity we have to draw on the talents of all Londoners. This means we must work to get rid of all artificial barriers to people contributing to society, whether it is discrimination and prejudice, lack of education and skills, unaffordable childcare, inaccessible environments or overly expensive transport. My commitment to do everything in my power to help to eradicate discrimination and exclusion and create a fairer London is, therefore, a theme that runs throughout this manifesto. However there are also some specific policies I will introduce to challenge discrimination: ### Challenge the impact of Tory cuts on women Women are bearing the brunt of the Tory government and Tory Mayor’s spending cuts, including a three-year freeze in the value of Child Benefit, a cut in childcare support worth hundreds of pounds per year, and the abolition of the Health in Pregnancy Grant. Women single parents will lose nearly one fifth of their net income. Boris Johnson, as a senior Tory and Mayor of the capital city, has not lifted a finger in the face of these cuts. And he cancelled the annual survey on the position of women in the economy, meaning a vital evidence base is lost. Myself and my Deputy Mayor, Val Shawcross, will stand up for women in London, challenging the Tory attacks and supporting services for women to survive in the face of the Tory assault wherever it is possible to do so. > I will help families with grants and loans to cover the cost of childcare. ## Equality of opportunity in employment Discrimination in employment can have a profound effect on individuals and whole communities. Women in London, as in the rest of the UK, continue to be paid less than men on average for the same work. The higher up the pay grade, the worse is the gender gap. Black Londoners have nearly double the rate of unemployment of the population as a whole, while Bangladeshis earn forty-two per cent below the London average and Africans twenty-five per cent less than the London average. Average hourly pay for disabled people is £1 lower than for non-disabled people and rates of unemployment are much higher. LGB&T Londoners continue to face discrimination in employment and bullying at work. I will work with the best employers to demonstrate how to challenge discrimination and deliver equal pay for women across London. London’s government has to lead by example, ensuring its workforce at City Hall, in the Metropolitan Police, the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, and Transport for London, fully reflects London’s diversity at all pay levels. I will reverse Boris Johnson’s radical reduction in the number of women in senior positions – a management team that does not represent women cannot properly represent London. As well as getting the Mayor’s own house in order, I will ensure we monitor the state of equality across public services as a whole, and publish data so that Londoners can judge progress. We will re-enter the GLA into the Stonewall Equality Index and once again ensure that City Hall is the top LGB&T friendly public sector employer in the UK. We will promote the national Access to Work scheme, which helps disabled people find employment. As seventy per cent of London’s economy is in the private sector we will also seek to create partnerships at every level – from FTSE 100 companies to small and medium sized businesses – to work together to remove obstacles to the full participation of every Londoner in the city’s economy. ## Support women back into work through childcare support Childcare costs in London are among the highest in the world – on average, £200 a week, or nearly £10,000 a year. The government has cut support for childcare costs paid through the Working Tax Credit by an average of £546 per year. A survey by Working Mums suggests that a quarter of mothers have had to give up work as a result of the changes. The Tory Mayor has done nothing to oppose his government’s cuts. On the contrary, he led the way in 2010 by abolishing the London Affordable Childcare Unit and its £20m budget to support childcare places. A lack of access to out-of-school childcare can limit parents’ ability to find work, given London’s 24 hour economy and sometimes long commuting times. I will establish a Childcare Contract for London to: * Help with the upfront cost of childcare through offering grants of up to £700 to low income families * Provide interest-free loans to fund upfront childcare costs to families earning up to £40,000 per year * Provide funding to create more out-of-hours childcare places at 200 nurseries across London * Campaign against Tory cuts to childcare tax credits and ensure London parents have the necessary information to access free childcare they are entitled to, worth up to £4,000 a year, but which only seventy-six per cent of eligible London parents take up ## A Fairness and Sustainability Unit Each year, the Greater London Authority group spends £3.4bn purchasing goods and services. The London Boroughs and other public sector bodies like the NHS spend hundreds of millions of pounds more. This procurement muscle is a lever through which the Mayor can help to make London a fairer and more environmentally sustainable city. I will establish a Fairness and Sustainability Procurement Unit at City Hall, whose job will include ensuring that any firm which contracts with the GLA: * pays at least the London Living Wage to all it’s staff and operates high standards of employment * meets high standards of environmental performance * publishes pay ratios between its highest and lowest paid employees * is an equal opportunities employer The procurement unit will also make proposals about how to streamline GLA procurement processes to reduce the cost and complication of bidding for public contracts in London. ## Celebrate London’s many cultures Anything that threatens London’s culture of respect and tolerance threatens the prosperity and stability of our city and the well-being of every Londoner. Recognition and celebration of the contribution of every community is what every Londoner is entitled to expect from their Mayor. Attempts to impose an artificial uniformity will back-fire, stoking the intolerance and separation upon which extremists of all types feed. London is the living proof that we can all live together. The festivals celebrating London’s many cultures ensure all communities understand they are really part of London and help all Londoners to understand and enjoy one another’s different cultures, breaking down the ignorance and distrust which can fuel racism and bigotry. We will promote and support free London-wide celebrations of our diverse cultures, like St George’s Day, Chinese New Year, St Patrick’s Day, Pride (including reinstating the Mayor’s reception), Simcha on the Square, Black History Month, Diwali, Eid, Vaisaki, Liberty, Christmas Carols on the Square, and the Notting Hill carnival. We will extend the range of such festivals, including reinstating the Rise anti-racist music festival and a first celebration of transgender Londoners. We will improve their promotion and profile, which has been run down by the Tory mayor. ## Support people’s right to practice all faiths London’s diverse faith communities not only provide a framework for people to follow their religious beliefs, but all make a vital contribution to all aspects of our society. Many different religious institutions, including Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, and Temples, provide a huge range of community services – from soup kitchens to nurseries, Street Pastors that help keep young people safe after clubs and bars close, care for the mentally ill and troubled, liaise with the police to fight gang culture, reduce community tensions and ensure safe neighbourhoods. We will recognise and support faith organisations and the contribution they make to London, promoting and advocating the services they provide as mentors and role models. There will be an ‘open door’ to my administration for faith communities and we will support inter-faith dialogue. I will make it a priority that the needs and symbols of all London’s faith communities are respected. I will use the Mayor’s planning powers and guidance to make it more straight-forward for rapidly-expanding churches to gain planning permission, especially with regard to the sometimes spurious opposition to ‘change of use’ applications, and ensure Transport for London assists in transport plans for new places of worship. ## Civil Partnerships The London Partnerships register we began in 2001 proved a fantastic success and paved the way for the national Civil Partnerships Act. But there is still not equality. I will support calls for marriage and civil partnerships to be open to both same-sex and opposite sex couples and lobby for them to be recognised across Europe and internationally. ## Challenge discrimination and bullying at school We will work with schools and voluntary sector organisations to challenge the bullying that can ruin children and young people’s lives, particularly that directed against disabled children, and racist, homophobic and transphobic bullying. To support LGB&T young people, we will challenge the creeping return through academies and free schools of an education which only recognises heterosexuality. The repeal of Section 28 (which Boris Johnson supported) by a Labour government was a victory against prejudice and homophobia being entrenched in education. It must not be effectively reintroduced by this Tory government through the back door. ## Ensure every community’s voice is heard One of the most important things the Mayor can do to tackle discrimination is to ensure that the voice of every one of London’s diverse communities is heard in London’s government. I have championed equal rights throughout my career and often been vilified for it in the media, particularly when I stood up for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in the 1980s, long before most politicians were willing to do so. at all levels in my administration that represent London’s diverse population, and including dedicated equalities officers, and genuine consultative forums of communities of Londoners that face discrimination and oppression. Boris Johnson has devalued representative forums that advise the GLA and abolished many dedicated equalities posts, including the women’s and black and minority ethnic adviser in the mayor’s office, and the LGB&T officer. We will recognise the growing Latin American community as an ethnic minority. I will adopt an open and representative government, ensuring that appointments In the context of the present Mayor’s purge of women from senior positions in the GLA Group, I am pleased to say that Val Shawcross, has agreed to become Deputy Mayor and to Chair Transport for London should I be elected on 3 May. ## Apply the Social Model of Disability I will continue to support and apply the Social Model of Disability, which recognises that the disadvantage and exclusion experienced by Deaf and disabled people is not the inevitable result of impairment, but stems from attitudinal and environmental barriers which can and must be changed to accommodate the widest range of individual requirements. This inclusiveness will have benefits for everyone in our society. There are 1.4 million Deaf and disabled Londoners. Disabled people are more likely to be in poverty and more likely to be excluded from the economic and social opportunities that others take for granted. The Mayor can make a significant difference to empowering disabled people, particularly through improving accessibility – as we showed previously through delivering an entire 8,000 strong fleet of low-floor, accessible buses, starting the step-free access programme on the Tube, and embedding ‘Lifetime Homes’ standards in planning policy. The Tory government is imposing terrible cuts on disabled people which will remove crucial benefits which support independence from hundreds of thousands of people. I will ensure that the Mayor is a voice against these attacks and will do all in my power to promote equality. ## Equality strategy The Labour government’s Equality Act 2010 was an important piece of legislation which risks being sidelined by the Tory-led administration. We will review implementation of Equality Act across the GLA Group and ensure that it is delivered to best practice standards, involving representative groups of London’s diverse communities in this process. We will strive for the GLA Group to be recognised as a gold standard equal opportunities employer across all the major monitoring schemes. > "I will be a full-time Mayor with one job – representing London" That is why it is so important that the Mayor is fully accountable to the people who elect them, making themselves available to the media and to individual Londoners to answer questions and explain their policies. And in times like this the Mayor needs to deliver more for less out of City Hall. After four years of Conservative rule which has seen high salaries soar and the Tory candidate’s political campaign director given a pass to City Hall, we need change. **I will:** ### Crack down on high pay Under Boris Johnson top-pay in City Hall has rocketed. The number of executives on six-figure salaries has almost doubled in just three years, whilst hard-pressed Londoners have seen fares rise by a quarter. This Tory administration has the wrong priorities. Presently, the Mayor’s salary is actually more than the Prime Minister’s. If elected I will cancel the pay rises Boris Johnson approved for his own pay and cut the Mayor’s salary to its 2008 level. I will then take a four year pay freeze. ## An open, accountable Mayor The Mayor of London has one of the largest direct electoral mandates of any political leader in Europe. There is no hiding place for the person elected – in the Greater London Authority system the buck stops with the Mayor on every major decision. I will cut the number of mayor’s staff on pay over £100,000 and institute a pay-freeze for all my senior appointees earning over six figures. By saving money on top-pay we can spend more on Londoners’ priorities and ensure fair pay for staff. ### Be a full-time Mayor I will be a full-time Mayor with just one job and one – representing Londoners. I will promote legislation in Parliament to ensure the Mayor of London takes no other salary. ### Be more accessible to the media Londoners need to understand what the Mayor is doing and be sure the Mayor is being held to account. This Mayoral term however has seen that undermined. Though the national media pays some attention to City Hall, it is the dedicated London media –from the Evening Standard to broadcasters and on to blogs and media dedicated to particular London audiences – that provide the most detailed coverage. Yet these very media have often been ignored in favour of highly spun showpiece activities. Many are forced to chase the Mayor to grab fleeting comments. Press conferences have dried up. London broadcasters complain that the amount of # Manifesto for London 2012 time given to phone-ins where the public can question the mayor have been cut in length, denying Londoners the chance to talk direct to the mayor. Working with the broadcasters, I will extend the length of Mayoral phone-ins to an hour part, increasing their frequency, and listen to Londoners. I will hold frequent press conferences at City Hall. Use the London.gov to let Londoners hold the Mayor to account I will ensure the GLA’s website, London.gov, is revamped to better enable Londoners to hold the Mayor to account, including: * A ‘Who’s Responsible’ service so that fare and council tax payers who have a problem can quickly find out which public body is responsible for fixing it * An automated email service for Londoners who want instant alerts for anything from a Tube line closure, to a smog or flood warning, or to know the dates when their local high street will have roadworks * I will fix the persistent problems that lead to MQT webcasts crashing. This fault causes frustration for those Londoners who want to know what the Mayor is doing in their name. Work with the London Assembly Assembly members frequently raise that the Mayor does not like answering questions and that Mayor’s Question Time sessions are unsatisfactory. I will hold talks with the London Assembly to see if we can improve the format and temper of Mayor’s Questions, to make it a better event for the public. I will work with the Assembly to find ways to eliminate the problem of late answered written questions. better OFF with KEN T: 020 7783 1170 E: ken@kenlivingstone.com W: www.kenlivingstone.com Vote Labour Thursday 3 May 3808_12 Promoted by Patrick Heneghan on behalf of the London Labour Party both at 39 Victoria Street, London, SW1H 0HA. Printed by The Color Company, 89 Victoria St, London, SW1H OHW