Green Mayoral candidate Jenny Jones today launched the Green Party’s policies to create a healthier London by protecting health services from privatisation, cleaning up the capital’s dirty air and making healthy food more easily available.
Jenny Jones said: "Alongside addressing climate change, promoting equality and making London more affordable, creating a healthier capital is a cornerstone of the Greens manifesto.
"Green Assembly members have scored real successes on healthy food in London and fought hard to improve London’s air quality. By electing more Green Assembly Members in May, London can help create healthier lives for every Londoner."
Policies include:
1. Campaigning for a properly-funded, publicly provided health service, opposing attempts to privatise or weaken the NHS.
2. Clean London’s air and comply with air quality laws, ensuring that air pollution is monitored in the right places and publicising bad air episodes, particularly to vulnerable people such as children and the elderly.
3. Support and significantly expand London’s street markets
4. Reduce fast food outlets near schools by requiring boroughs to create exclusion zones around schools where fast food shops aren’t allowed.
5. Make sure every new home has space to grow food, whether in a garden, large balcony, roof garden or allotment.
6. Build more allotments in areas where it is hard to buy or grow healthy food.
7. Help schools, hospitals, prisons and care homes grow their own food, offering more healthy food, and remove all junk food and drinks vending machines
8. Campaigning for better health services in London, including better access to contraception and family planning services, better resources for mental health services both in the community and in hospitals, and free prescriptions, eye tests and dental treatment.
9. Prioritise the reduction of inequality as a key aim of London’s Health Inequalities Strategy, because physical and mental health problems more common in more unequal societies.
10. Help millions of Londoners improve their health while saving money by requiring boroughs to map food poverty.
Greens on the London Assembly have already secured cross party support for the Low Emission Zone and other pollution solutions, set up London Food, which has gone on to train almost 2,000 school and hospital catering staff to provide healthy food and supported local campaigns against privatisation and hospital closures.
Darren Johnson said: "Greens are clear about cutting pollution, reducing the gap between rich and poor and defending our NHS, all of which will make London a healthier city."
Other campaign policies include:
1. Making London more equal with a job or apprenticeship for every young unemployed Londoner, and a Fair Pay Mark for companies.
2. Making housing affordable with new housing, the refurbishment of more than a million homes to cut energy bills and a radical shakeup of the private rented sector.
3. Brining down fares so that public transport is always cheaper than driving and make suburban rail services more regular.
4. Let’s transport our streets by reducing traffic in congested areas, cleaning up London’s dirty polluted air and making streets safer for walking and cycling.
5. Improving our environment by completing a network of green spaces, planting more trees to cool our streets and generating clean energy from food waste.
6. Rebuilding trust in policing with more officers on the beat through greater use of lower-cost office staff and police resources for road safety, not unnecessary surveillance.