Month: Nov 2007

Judging by the headline story on the London Mayor’s website his most pressing concern over the last couple of weeks has been to shore up the beleaguered Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair. The Mayor spent Thursday touring radio newsrooms to make his case. One of his silliest lines was that he:

wouldn’t put the irresponsible politicians attacking the police Commissioner within a million miles of running the kind of anti-terror operations London has had to deal with over the last few years.

And still less would anyone put the Mayor anywhere near them either. Don’t forget this is the man who failed to condemn the IRA at the height of their operations and while slightly less mealy mouthed about Islamic fundamentalist inspired terrorism still manages to run with people like Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Over the weekend the tide has been running against Blair and the Mayor. You might ask why is Mayor quite so supportive of Blair? The answer is complicated.

Blair/Livingstone’s one bankable achievement in policing London has been the roll out of Safer Neighbourhood Teams. As Brian Coleman pointed out in the Independent on Sunday the highly political Blair did not baulk about rolling these teams out to coincide with the May 2006 local elections and taking part in a totally integrated comms exercise that included press advertising, to the tune of £300K paid for by the Met, but also all Labour council candidates’ election literature. See previous posting.

Whilst we all welcome, certainly here in Northfield, the SNTs the Met had to cut a lot of corners to deliver the teams to a political timetable and beyond this rollout the list of the achievements of Blair/Livingstone are thin indeed. Recently Blair/Livingstone have been trying to talk up falls in crime numbers but have cynically failed to mention increases in in-your-face violent crime – the thing that worries people the most. See previous posting.

Blair is a relative newcomer but Livingstone has had 8 years to reform the Met, confront its Spanish practices and to get our coppers out on the streets on their own rather than going around in pairs (even their ads show policemen going around in pairs). The Mayor knows that appointing a new commissioner over the next six months will throw a spotlight on his lack of achievement in the policing area. The Mayor would rather the Blair/Livingstone media double act continued unmolested as any incoming commissioner is likely to want to distance him or herself from the Mayor and start to set out the considerable room for improvement there is at the Met.

Brian Coleman, Tory London Assembly Member, says in the Independent on Sunday today:

The Mayor of London’s rush to defend Sir Ian is hard to explain. I do not recall Ken Livingstone defending the SAS when they shot dead three IRA terrorists in Gibraltar in 1988. On the other hand, Livingstone knows that if Sir Ian falls, his London administration’s great achievement of reintroducing neighbourhood policing and presiding over a fall in crime in the capital (though only in certain categories) will be tarnished.

Sir Ian’s tenure has suffered from one “unfortunate” episode after another. Yesterday, contrary to claims that he has “modernised” the Met, came new allegations that the victims of the botched Forest Gate raid in 2006 had been held at gunpoint again and racially abused.

Simon Jenkins in the Sunday Times doesn’t think he should go but hardly endorses him:

Blair has committed plenty of gaffes, but they have largely been a result of his love for publicity and for playing politics. He appears to have reacted to the de Menezes killing in a detached and initially obstructive way. As a result he continues to lack the confidence that his office needs to be effective. But he should not be sacrificed to a squalid health and safety gambit that can only make the job of counter-terrorism harder.

Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer says go:

Sir Ian has always been a politically controversial figure. He has now become a political liability for the government. He is not a figure who can build public confidence in the ability of the authorities to keep them safe. And he will not be a persuasive advocate for new anti-terror legislation. This will be one of the big contentions of the new parliamentary session, which begins this week when Gordon Brown attempts to persuade MPs to lengthen the period that terror suspects can be held without charge. The Prime Minister and his Home Secretary know that they are going to win this battle only with great difficulty. They want to be able to call on arguments from the police that they need these powers to deal with terrorism. To help the government make its case, Number 10 wants a police commissioner who is a compelling witness, not one tainted by anxiety about his competence and conflict about his right to be in office.

Anne McElvoy in the Evening Standard on Friday was clear that he should go too:

A resignation would be a harsh conclusion to a career which has also had its successes – not least in helping change the image of the Met. But an innocent young man was shot dead in a manner which the trial condemned as “catastrophic”.

That was not bad luck, but the result of serious errors of judgment. Sir Ian should do the honourable thing and accept the consequences.

Trawling through some answers to questions to the the Mayor this morning I came across a real gem regarding the Congestion Charge. The question from LibDem AM Sally Hamwee is typical of the garbled questions that AMs come up with:

How much gross income was generated in 2006/07 from

a) charging for entry to the congestion charge (broken down by the central and western extension congestion charge zones)

b) fining motorists for not paying to enter the congestion charge zone (broken down by the central and western extension congestion charge zones)

Was the income from each directed to specific projects?

The answer by the Mayor is typically disingenuous but even his slippery briefers can’t avoid letting some useful information slip:

It is not possible to breakdown income by any specific zone. The Congestion Charging Scheme is operated as a single scheme and therefore income is reported for the scheme as a whole. There is no record of whether a journey is to or within a specific charged area.

The gross income breakdown for 2006/07 was as follows:

• Charge Income £157.4m
• Enforcement Income £95.0m

This gives a Total Gross Income of £252.4m.

The net income is used on other transport schemes. The provisional proportional allocation of funds was:

• 82% to bus network operations;
• 11% on roads and bridges;
• 4% on road safety; and
• 3% on walking and cycling.

The talk of spending net income is just a straight lie as I have shown here. The interesting bit is the proportion of income from fines. This is £95.0 million, which is almost 38% of the total income, and exceeds the net income figure of £89.1 million stated in TfL’s annual report and accounts. So, without these fines the thing would make a loss every year. This is a shame because the system cost £265 million to set up and made a £58 million loss in its first part year of operation.

Interestingly the situation seems to have worsened over the last year. In 2005/6 fines were at 30% of a £254.1 million revenue (see answer to question here) whereas in 2006/7 they are 38% of a slightly smaller £252.4 million revenue.

The Evening Standard’s Andrew Gilligan today turns his blowtorch onto the Mayor’s so-called fares freeze. See here.