We’d love to promise a completely Green London, but sadly we’re under the heel of an austerity-obsessed government and face immense challenges that no

Mayor could completely fix in four years. If you think our manifesto still sounds brilliant, you’ll be glad to hear that we think it’s also realistic! After twelve years on the London Assembly, including four making budget deals with Ken Livingstone, we have plenty of experience costing our ideas.

There are three main ways that we would pay for our plans.

Doing things differently

The simplest is to change the way that City Hall, Transport for London, the Metropolitan Police Service and the London Fire Brigade work without needing any more money. For example:

Making better use of scarce police resources. We would employ more civilian staff, Special Constables and Community Support Officers in the police service. They are all cheaper to employ than fully warranted officers and could be used much more for jobs such as helping the public at front desks, working on investigation teams and keeping our roads safe as traffic wardens. Official advice from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary is to accelerate this "civilianisation", but Boris has reversed it to artificially keep police officer numbers high. Sacking staff cost us £60m last year.
Using the large amount of land the Mayor owns to build more low rent homes instead of flogging it off to the highest bidder. We think it makes no sense at all to say you are building "affordable homes" with rents so high that even reasonably paid workers will need housing benefits to pay them. It’s a false economy and a bad use of the £1.6bn affordable housing budget up to 2015.
Changing the way that TfL and local councils design roads so that they prioritise pedestrians, cyclists and buses. Our proposals to put a walking and cycling representative on the TfL board, to change their planning tools and to reintroduce the "road user hierarchy" spelling out this priority would bring about four years of smarter road design at no extra cost.

Giving Green ideas more priority

We would reduce spending on areas that are less important, and sometimes scrap entire programmes, so that we can fund the things London really needs. For example:

Scrapping the Mayor’s Academy schools programme, returning control of the academies already set-up to parents and teachers. This would save enough money to pay for our apprenticeships programme, which is a much better way to help young people.
Stop work on plans for major road building schemes, vanity buses and overpaid senior staff. These pointless wastes of money could redirect millions into much more pressing areas such as our policy to replace all the buses with low emission models, which would improve air quality and so benefit everyone’s health and quality of life.
Stop the police spending so much money unnecessarily surveilling innocent people and collecting data on them. The police don’t even know themselves exactly how many databases they have and how much they cost, how much data they have on completely innocent people, or what the benefit of the data gathering is. We estimate we could save up to £1m a year to help fund community policing.

Find new ways of raising money

Sometimes our plans are just more expensive, but we can raise the funds in fair and creative ways. For example:

Our pay-as-you-drive charge would replace the congestion charge, extend across the whole of London and raise approximately £1bn per year from motorists. Unlike the flat rate congestion charge, motorists would pay modest amounts on a pay-as-you-go basis, so it might add as little as £1 to make your weekly supermarket shop. All of this money would be ploughed into cutting fares and investing in our transport system. Anyone getting around more on foot, bike and public transport would benefit financially, our streets would be safer and less polluted with fewer potholes, and businesses could zip around on less congested roads.
The police could reclaim an extra 100,000 illegal vehicles a year, taking dangerous drivers off the road and raising £6.5m extra a year in the process to spend on making the roads safer. Jenny Jones got the police to take this more seriously through pressure on the Metropolitan Police Authority, and has been pressing the new Commissioner Hogan-Howe to expand the operation.

Ultimately, London’s Mayor needs more tax raising powers to really make a difference. For example, we think the Mayor should be able to tax the windfall gain in land values that land owners get when a new tube station or tram stop opens up nearby. Over the past twelve years Ken and Boris have both won new powers, we have set out some money raising powers that could completely transform the way London works.

Green London Assembly Members have been proposing balanced budgets for years, showing how both Ken and Boris could do more. From 2004-2008, we brokered deals with Ken that put hundreds of millions into smart schemes that make our streets safer, healthy food easier to come by and our neighbourhoods greener. You can read our budget amendment for the coming year online and judge for yourself our knack for making a difference without blowing a hole in the budget.

You can read our budget ammendment here.