Sadiq Khan is failing our great capital city (Image: PA)
Another New Year, another remorseless spate of knife crime in London. The roll call of incidents makes distressing reading.
On January 1, a 25-year-old man was stabbed on Oxford Street. On January 5, a double-stabbing hits Kilburn High Road. The following day saw the stabbing of an 18-year-old man in Prince Imperial Road. Just hours later, on January 7, Kelyan Bokassa, 14, was killed in a stabbing in Woolwich. The very same day witnessed a reported stabbing Mile End. On January 11 a stabbing and two shootings occurred in separate incidents in Homerton. Two days later, father-of-two Gregory Castillo Volquez was stabbed to death in Haringey. The next day there was a stabbing outside City & Islington College in Finsbury Park as well as a stabbing in Ilford.
My job as Reform UK’s lone Assembly Member at City Hall is to hold the Mayor to account and I can think of nothing more important than decisive action from the Metropolitan Police Service for which Mayor Khan, as Commissioner for Policing and Crime, has oversight.
If ever oversight were needed, it is right now given the lack of answers to London’s knife crime crisis.
The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime has produced a crime plan for 2025-2029 but any Londoners seeking reassurance that knife crime is about to be tackled will find little more than platitudes. The plan does mention stop and search, an important part of the enforcement toolkit, but only because the Mayor is at pains to makes sure that people on the receiving end of it can scrutinise it.
Yesterday’s Mayor’s in City Hall gave me an opportunity to suggest an amendment to the forthcoming budget process. I mentioned Operation Sceptre to the Mayor, a UK-wide operation that runs for just one week, twice a year.
It has proven highly successful in London. In just one week in May 2023, the operation saw that 170 knives were recovered. 1,358 stop and searches were conducted. 22 warrants were executed.
How bad would knife crime have to get for the Mayor to roll out Operation Sceptre as a continuous programme? The Mayor continually blames underfunding and mentions “14 years of Tory Austerity” at every opportunity.
However, Reform UK believes Operation Sceptre can indeed be funded as a continuous programme. All that needs to happen is for the Mayor to take a look at his office staff costs.
Leaving aside front-line staff in the and Transport for London, Reform UK has identified significant cost savings simply by cutting back his City Hall staff payroll to 2016 levels in real terms.
It was in 2016 that inherited a City Hall team of bureaucrats of some 795. Whatever one might think of ’s record as Mayor of London, nobody complained that he had too few people for London to function.
Fast forward to 2024 and the Mayor’s headcount has ballooned to 1,396. The cost of this empire is in the draft budget, released on Wednesday, at £121.8m, compared with £40.8m in 2016 but in today’s money. Shockingly, Khan’s staff costs have multiplied threefold in real terms during his time as Mayor.
Londoners are tired of paying more and more for the bloated public sector with its inflated salaries, expense accounts and defined benefit pensions, increasing with inflation. They look at Argentina where President Milei has taken a chainsaw to an unproductive public sector, shedding 35,000 jobs. Incoming US President Trump has appointed the Department of Government Efficiency to reduce the size of the public sector by as much as one third.
In a series of calculations that have been verified by City Hall financial analysts, Reform UK has found that returning the Mayor’s payroll to 2016 levels would fund over one thousand police officers. This would fund a year-round enforcement programme in the demonstrably successful manner of Operation Sceptre.
The Mayor in his Police and Crime Plan talks up – as he did in City Hall yesterday – diversion activities such as mentoring. These are all well and good but the lessons from successful knife reduction programmes in cities such as Glasgow are that they have to be accompanied by a high level of enforcement.
It was my hope yesterday that the Mayor would encourage cross-party support for Reform UK’s amendment given the gravity of the knife crisis. Sadly, he chose to play politics, saying to me in his trademark withering manner: “As a rule of thumb, I never encourage anyone to work with Reform.”
I was similarly hopeful that the would join forces with me but they too made it very clear in the Chamber that they would not be supporting ’s budget amendment.
Knife is out of control in and Londoners deserve better than Mayor Khan’s complacency. Only Reform UK can fix this.