Sian Berry will ensure that half the new recruits to the Metropolitan Police are women if she is elected Mayor of London.
She made the 50:50 pledge at a London’s Future for Women hustings event at the House of Commons tonight.
She said: “A police service works best when it is properly representative of the community it serves and that should include an equal gender balance.
“Changing the male-dominated culture of the Met would help the police deal better with violent crimes against women, which remains a recurring failure, but it would also bring benefits across the board, to men as well as women. A clear and decisive way of making that happen is to ensure that half of all new recruits are women. That is something I will push through if I am Mayor.
“A similar scheme delivered significant change in the Police Service of Northern Ireland when a rule was introduced that half the new recruits to a force that had always been dominated by Protestants had to be Catholic. I’ll take that model as my inspiration because we know it works.”