On police numbers in London

The Evening Standard is claiming that Boris is under pressure over police numbers.  Firstly they should sack their picture editor for illustrating the story with a copper who is clearly not a Met officer (wrong helmet) and secondly they should look at the very simple and incontrovertible facts which show why neither Boris, nor Kit Malthouse or I or anyone else feels under any pressure on this issue.

Firstly the only figure that counts is the number of actual officers that are actually employed by the Met, you cannot send a "budgeted" officer out on patrol unless they have actually been recruited.  The actual number of officers rose from just over 31,000 when Boris came in to about 33,000 in 2009 dropped to about 32,000 in 2010/11 and will be back up to 32,500 by 2012.  There will be more officers next year than last year and more officers at the end of Boris's term than at the start, no confusion and no hidden agenda. 

Having got all that out of the way I would now like to say that these top line police number figures are almost completely meaningless.

The number of police officers only matters if they are all being properly used.  The fluctuations in numbers is eclipsed by the number of officers on long tern sick or restrictive duties, in Summer 2010 that figure was 2,483.  If we can get a grip of that figure we get extra policing that we are already paying for.  If we could cut down on the number of officers writing and enforcing meaningless guidelines they too could be redeployed to the streets, buses and schools where Londoners want them to be.

The policy to move to single patrolling means that we now have 50% more visible police patrols than in 2008, more than 120,000 extra patrols.  There has also been a massive expansion in the number of Special Constables since 2008, from under 1,000 to almost 5,000 this year, providing 10,000 extra police shifts per month.

The Met are also pushing to better utilise their numbers.  For example rather than having a officer sitting around in court all day waiting to give evidence, and sometimes never called, the Met and Croydon Magistrates Court are trialling police officers giving evidence by video link.  If successful this could free up a huge amount of police time.

The Labour and Lib Dem members can pretend that they don't understand the figures and feign stupidity (well I assume that they're feigning it!) but the falls in crime in London speak for themselves and the actual number of police officers, the one number that you cannot spin, caress or distort, is heading up.

So, what do Boris Bikes do all day?

Oliver O'Brien likes data and he likes maps, he likes turning data into maps.  I like data, I love maps and I like looking at data that has been turned into maps.
I like what Oliver does.

Here is an example of his work.  He has taken data from the London Datastore on the usage of the Barclay Cycle Hire scheme and plotted it over time on a map of London.

Enjoy:




Boris Bikes redux from Sociable Physics on Vimeo.

Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt

Chuka Umunna is showing a level of ignorance about business which is quite extraordinary. I'm not too surprised that the UKUncut gang don't understand the way that business and taxation works but Chuka Umunna is an MP, PPS to the Leader of the Opposition and member of the Treasury Select Committee.

Chuka has got himself some headlines by attacking Barclays Bank for only paying £113 million of Corporation Tax in 2009 against global profits in 2009 of £11.6 billion. I think that the Treasury Select Committee should send Chuka off on a basic, and I mean very basic, course on business finance.  Even the most cursory understanding of business shows what a gaping hole there is in his attack.

Corporation Tax is paid a year in arrears, meaning the money paid out in 2009 was for the 2008 business year so comparing last year's tax liability with this year's profits is meaningless. And the £11.6 billion (which is more accurately £6.1 billion) is the global profits for the company, so once again it is stupid to compare UK tax with world-wide profits. Taxes are paid in the jurisdictions where the profits are made and looking at their total worldwide tax it seems that in 2009 Barclays paid tax on profits at a rate of about 23%, quite a bit more than the 1% claimed by Chuka.

Don't get me wrong, the banking sector does need reform but in order to make this happen politicians need to be able to speak with credibility to the banking sector. Chuka's ill informed and childish attacks diminish that credibility and make it harder for real reform to happen.

When Chuka, with all the pomposity of the Grand High Poobah himself, tweeted that he was "In New York today meeting the world's biggest banks. Yes...I shall be talking truth to financial power." did he realise that he was actually talking a load of crap and those big banks were all laughing at him?

No to AV, Don't blame Clegg - blame the system

Some Conservatives, and others, will find it tempting to use the AV referendum campaign as a chance to attack the Lib Dems in general and Nick Clegg in particular.  This would be both unfair and unwise.

The Lib Dems have long been proponents of an electoral system which creates hung parliaments and coalition governments, when presented with circumstances to form a coalition it would have been ridiculous for Nick Clegg not to have taken up the opportunity.  I suspect that Clegg and the Lib Dems were surprised by the reality of coalition negotiations and the compromises that need to be made, it is clear that the bulk of the party is no more comfortable with it than Conservatives are.

Clegg's unpopularity has mainly been driven by his total u-turn on tuition fees.  Many students and Lib Dems supporters are furious at what they feel is a sell out by Clegg.  But what would any other Lib Dem leader have done in the same position?

The Lib Dems are the junior partner is a coalition and will get less of their agenda implemented than the senior partner, Clegg had to decide what his bottom line was going to be in those few days in May and he chose a referendum on changing the voting system.  A different person as party leader might have picked something else, but I doubt it.  To get the referendum Clegg had to drop a number of Lib Dem manifesto commitments, this doesn't indicate weakness or dishonesty on Clegg's part, it is the natural byproduct of coalition government.

People who are angry at Nick Clegg should really be angry that he was forced into dropping long standing manifesto commitments by the needs of coalition.  They should be angry that the commitments that both Lib Dem and Conservative ministers work by are the ones in the coalition agreement not either of the parties' manifestos.  They should be angry that when it comes to holding those MPs to account at the next election they will all have a sound defence in that their hands were forced by the needs to make a coalition work.

All the things which people are getting legitimately angry about are not the fault of Nick Clegg but they are the fault of the electoral system that he supports.  Say no to AV not because of Nick Clegg but because AV is a bad system which will make politicians less accountable to their electors.

Bins, bags and boxes

Is nine different receptacles for household waste and recycling too many?  Newcastle-under-Lyme Council seem to think not but some of their residents disagree.

Waste collection regimes are a very sensitive issue and are the responsibility of the council which is the local waste collection authority.  This is an area of local government where autonomy is fiercely guarded by councils and even the London Waste and Recycling Board doesn't try to dictate to boroughs as to how and how often they collect their residents' bins.

There is a balance to be struck.  The better segregated the waste the more effectively, efficiently and economically it can be treated, the more bins bags and boxes the more hassle and the more people are put off.  Where the sweet-spot lies I do not know and I doubt that it will be the same for all parts of the country.

What I do know is that sending untreated waste to landfill is not a sustainable solution in either ecological or economic terms as the European landfill tax increases.  We might all have to get used to a bit more hassle when we take the bins out but if we don't we will be find that our council tax bills increase dramatically.

I want to know what Geoffrey Rush thinks

Colin Firth and Helen Bonham-Carter are both fantastic actors and both are long term Lib Dem supporters, although Colin had a little wobble recently (more of which later).

Both are riding high at the moment on the well deserved acclaim for their performances in The King's Speech, neither can really claim to be experts on voting systems.  Despite this lack of expertise they have both been enlisted by the Yes To AV campaign to encourage people to vote yes in the referendum.


One person who knows about the failings of the AV system
and two people who don't



I'm not that interested in what Colin and Helen say about AV, the person I want to hear from is Geoffrey Rush, the only one of the film's stars who has actually used the system.  Indeed I'm at a loss as to why the Yes campaign haven't lined up a host of people from Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea to say how much they value the system. Might it be because the countries who use it don't think it works well and there are moves to scrap it in at least one of them?

I mentioned that Colin Firth has had a wobble in his support for the Lib Dems, back in December he renounced the party citing their U turn on tuition fees as being one of the main reasons.  I find it particularly ironic that he is now supporting a voting system that makes unaccountable, post election, manifesto busting, back room, political deal making far more likely.

Mubarak's resignation is the start of the process not the end

It was always going to happen and I'm glad that it happened without major bloodshed. Hosni Mubarak has faced up to the simple reality that his position was untenable after the reaction to his late night speech yesterday.

Mubarak was instrumental in maintaining a peaceful relationship with Israel and providing a point of stability in a region known mainly for turmoil, but that stability came at a high price in terms of human rights and civil liberties.

It is clear that Mubarak's time is past and Egypt is desperate for change but I can't pretend that I'm at all comfortable with the idea that power has been handed to the Armed Forces. It has long been stated, by those wishing to maintain the status quo, that the choice for Egypt was a binary one between the hardline Mubarak regime and a fundamentalist Islamic regime like the one which overthrew the Shah of Iran.

While I don't believe the options are as simple as that, there is a serious threat that the post Mubarak power vacuum could be exactly the unstabalising catalyst that could trigger serious problems in Egypt and the region. It doesn't need to be so and the support (not the same thing as interference or imposition) of the world community will be essential in preventing violence and extremism being the immediate future for the people currently celebrating in Tahrir Square.

The London Left were left behind by events

The London Assembly's Labour, Lib Dem and Green members embarrassed themselves rather badly yesterday at the budget debate.

It was well known that the Mayor had to cut the budget to the Metropolitan Police Authority by about £185 million, and because the Left cannot understand that it is possible to make significant cuts to budgets without making huge cuts in front line services they assumed this would mean big cuts in police officer numbers.  It didn't.

At the MPA we have been working hard to reduce bureaucracy and waste, I've pushed the Met on issues such as the levels of police officers unavailable for active duty and the cost and staff numbers tied up generating the thousands of pages of almost useless guidelines.  The Met have revolutionised their recruitment processes, taken a pragmatic look at the use of buildings and equipment and Kit Malthouse has used his experience as an accountant to crawl all over the Met's figures.  All this means that on top of a massive increase in the Met Special Constabulary, the number of full-time warrented police officers in the Met will increase despite the reduction in funding.

The figures are simple in April 2008, the month before Boris took office, full-time police numbers in London stood at 31,398 in the financial year 2010-2011 the figure will be 32,510 (an increase of 1,112).  Even when laid out on paper the Left can't understand it, Caroline Pidgeon of the Lib Dems once again echoed Ken Livingstone's attack line saying that this was all "smoke and mirrors".

The most embarrassing thing about yesterday's exchanges was that the Left had clearly written their speeches and their motions attacking the cuts in police numbers before the Mayor's announcement and delivered them regardless.  There is something quite surreal about watching people criticise cuts in police numbers that aren't happening.

New Gasification plant in Dagenham

Today I joined Boris Johnson and Isabel Dedring, the Mayor’s Environment Advisor to see work begin on the site of London’s first advanced gasification plant, which will take rubbish and turn into renewable energy.

When the Dagenham plant is built and operational in 2013, it will turn almost 100,000 tonnes of waste into 19 megawatts of energy. That’s enough to power nearly 20,000 homes, which is pretty impressive.

The London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB) agreed a £8.9million loan to Biossence East London Limited in order to secure the site and prepare it for construction. The site was acquired from Ford Motor Company, which will benefit from the energy generated from the facility, most of which will be exported to the National Grid.

The plant uses ‘Advanced Thermal Conversion’ gasification technology to process ‘black bag’ waste left after recycling taken from the four local boroughs within the East London Waste Authority (Barking & Dagenham, Havering, Newham and Redbridge & Ilford).

This waste is first treated at Shanks Waste Management’s nearby plant, where the rubbish is stripped of material that could be recycled such as glass and metals. The rest of the material, which would otherwise go to landfill, is then turned into a ‘Refuse Derived Fuel’ (RDF).

The Shanks facility is less than half a mile away from where the gasification plant is being built. This reduces the need for transportation, which cuts down on carbon emissions. Biossence will then take the fuel where it is cleaned and burned to create power. This is a great example of localised ‘closed loop’ waste management, resulting in over 90% diversion from landfill.

The new facility will also create 25 permanent skilled jobs as well as up to 100 construction-related jobs during the two-year building period.

I’ve been impressed from what I’ve seen so far and look forward to returning when the facility is up and running in the next couple of years.

How did they miss that out?

The BBC news have run damning comments about the Big Society and spending cuts all day, these comments come from Dame Elisabeth Hoodless the outgoing head of Community Service Volunteers (CSV).

She claims that there was no "strategic plan", the BBC also reports:

Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, the outgoing executive director of Britain's largest volunteering charity, told the Times "massive" council cuts would make it harder for people to do more in their communities.

Dame Elisabeth, who is retiring from the Community Service Volunteers (CSV) after 36 years, said: "We know we need to save money, but there are other ways of saving money without destroying the volunteer army."

Damning stuff indeed from an independent, unbiased voice from the voluntary sector. Or it would be if that is indeed what she was, but she isn't.  As Benedict Brogan reports in the Telegraph she is a long term Labour Party member and former Labour Councillor. Funny how the BBC managed to miss that out of the story.

We won't beat racism until the Left stop crying wolf

The response to the Prime Minister's speech on Saturday was for the most part thoughtful and balanced, as indeed was the speech itself.  There are some big philosophical questions which we need to ask ourselves, how far does our tradition on tolerance extend to people who are themselves intolerant?  Have we ever been good at absorbing other cultures into our own?  How can we fight terrorism or extremism that may grow from some communities without marginalising those very communities?

These question need to be answered, and to do so there needs to be the space for sensible discussion.  This cannot happen when party politically motivated people jump on every opportunity to brand such discussion as racism.

Labour's Shadow Justice Secretary, Sadiq Khan MP, came out with one of the more crass and thoughtless attacks on Cameron when he claimed that the PM was writing propaganda for the English Defence League.  While less shrill, Yvette Cooper's attempt to link the speech with the EDL march in Luton is just as cynical, bearing in mind the event was organised, the speech was planned and written well before the EDL march was announced. The Independent makes almost no attempt to be balanced in its reporting of the PM's reaction to these attacks and reinforces Coopers attack without putting the timing of the speech into context:

Mr Camero's [sic] comments were made on the same day as the anti-Muslim EDL held a big demonstration in Luton, prompting accusations that he was playing into the hands of the far-right.

The Left are far too keen to spray the accusation of racism around, even I've been accused of it (go figure!), but in doing so they undermine the fight against the racism that they abhore.  By closing down debate they play into the hands of the very people who would prefer not to discuss these issues rationally but would prefer conflict.  By accusing people with moderate views of being extremists they validate the views of people who genuinely are extremists.

Burying our heads in the sand will not make the disenchantment felt by some people in Britain go away, pretending we do not have a problem with domestic terrorism and extremism will not prevent bomb attacks and jeering marches.  It is time for the Left to grow up and stop using racism as a useful tool to attack people that they don't agree with.

On multiculturalism, David Cameron's speech and cake baking

The speech that David Cameron gave today at the Munich Security Conference on multiculturalism and our national response to domestic extremism was both important and timely.

100 g (4 oz) plain flour,
Pinch of salt,
125 g (5 oz) wholewheat flour,
2 tsp baking powder,
1 tsp spoon mixed spice
1/2 spoon ground cinnamon,
100 g (4 oz) soft brown sugar
100 g (4 oz) butter or margarine,
225 g (1/2 lb) mixed dried fruit,
50 g (2 oz) chopped mixed peel,
2 eggs, beaten, 2 tbsp marmalade

As well as specifically addressing the current international and domestic terrorism threat the PM also spoke about our internal national relationship and the increasing unwillingness of reasonable people to recognise and defend those elements of British culture that we value.  Fairness, tolerance, rule of law, free speech etc. are important to us as a society and it is both right and reasonable to say that those living under our national protection and sharing in our country's prosperity should also abide by these norms.

The speech was measured in its tone and calm in its delivery, yet it did not stop the Shadow Justice Secretary describing it as “propaganda for the EDL", it really come to something when saying that we should not tolerate extremism is called "far right propaganda". You can watch elements of the speech here, and you can draw your own conclusions as to how much comfort the EDL can take from it.

The racist organisations like the EDL or BNP are fearful that other races, religions or cultures are destroying Britishness, this demonstrates a fundamental failure to understand the very nation that they believe themselves to be defending.  As I wrote back in 2006 "We have managed to stay British through immigration from the Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Huguenots, Jews, Irish, West Indians, West Africans, East Africans, Indians, Pakistanis etc. etc. etc. Britishness evolved but it did not diminish."

So, why the cake? It's a metaphor.  The different races, religions and cultures that make up the population of the UK are like the ingredients in a cake recipe, on their own they are a list of disparate elements, it only becomes a cake when they are mixed together.

I'm glad that the vetting and barring system is going

I've written in the past as to why I didn't support the previous government's Vetting & Barring Scheme so I won't rehearse the arguments again here but I am very pleased to see that the Home Secretary is dramatically reducing the scale and scope of the scheme.

I am sure that some people will assume that this will lead to a flood of attacks by predatory paedophiles, but the facts do not bear out these concerns.  Indeed I have seen much which convinces me that much of our current social difficulties are caused by too little contact between children and adults not too much.  There is a level of mutual intolerance and a lack of understanding between the generation which must be reduced if we are to have a society that really works well.

I hope this move open a floodgate of future Scout leaders, cadet instructors, football coaches, youth club managers etc. because every youth organisation that I met as the Mayor's Youth Ambassador said that they were crying out for more adult volunteers.

On crime mapping

Firstly I'd like to remind you all that London's crime statistics have been available as an online map since the Summer of 2008, You can check it out here:

There are some concerns that the level on the new maps will damage house prices etc, and while I have a lot of sympathy for small businesses (yes even estate agents) I'm confident that their fears will not be realised and the advantages will hugely outweigh the disadvantages.

Can the London Ambulance Service withstand the pressure?

Find out more about our investigation here.