At a London Assembly budget meeting, Jenny Jones supported an amendment to the Mayor’s budget which includes the Metropolitan Police.
The alternative budget would reverse the decision to remove 100 sergeants from Safer Neighbourhood Teams. The amendment also proposes cutting 10% from the Territorial Support Group to help finance an additional £5m to support borough policing. £1m has been included to improve and expand the public order training provided to officers. An extra £3m has been provided for traffic policing including prevention work to reduce death and injury on the roads.
To provide this extra funding, the amendment identifies several areas where further savings could be made. These include £2m from reducing the surveillance of activists and storage of personal information about them, a reduction in the number and scale of a wide range of databases held by the Met, and speeding up plans to cut the number of DNA samples collected.
Although the Mayor’s budget includes cuts to overtime, the bill remains high at over £100m for officers and £30m for staff. The amendment would go further, particularly for police staff overtime increasing the cut from 5% to 25% and saving around £6m.
Jenny Jones said: "Although good work has been done to reduce costs in support services, I am worried that the Mayor’s budget means that borough policing will bear the brunt of policing cuts compared to central and specialist police teams.
"Safer Neighbourhood Teams are popular and important for community safety. Getting rid of senior officers will not only reduce the size of SNTs but risks the quality of the work they do. These 100 sergeants could be kept if the Mayor reduced the spending on unnecessary surveillance and the excessive collection and storage of personal information by the Met, as well as doing more to drive down the overtime bill.
"While boroughs had reductions last year, the TSG budget increased. I should like to see a transfer of resources from the TSG to the boroughs. This would mean boroughs could afford more officers, regularly working on community policing. They would also have additional resources to help them cope when borough officers are needed to support major events.
"I would expect the Mayor’s budget to offer more support to vital local policing and crime prevention work, work that Londoners have said is important to them that helps to make people feel safe and increases confidence in the police."