London can’t afford the cuts

By Ken Livingstone / @ken4london

Today I’m setting out the details of what we understand the scale of the cuts in London is shaping up to be. Our argument is simple – London can’t afford the cuts.

We have both a responsibility explain why it is wrong not just from the point of view of the human cost but the cost to future growth and prosperity to take an axe to jobs, services and pay. And the first opportunity to send a message by removing a powerful incumbent Conservative politician will be in London in 2012.

Reports tend to focus on individual years of the budget cuts. But taken across the period set out in George Osborne’s budget earlier this year the figures are breathtaking.

If we assume only that the cuts were applied in line with current regional allocation of expenditure, then London would account for 14 per cent of the spending cuts. In total of the £315bn spending cuts planned by the end of 2015-16 that would mean cuts of £45bn in London.

That’s £5,625 for every Londoner.

From January 2011-12, up to 126,000 newly born London children will miss out on the Child Trust Fund and the £190 Health in Pregnancy grant will be abolished next year with an estimated 100,000-plus mothers-to-be in London missing out. Over 100,000 London children are set to miss out on Free School Meals. The Future Jobs Fund, now cut, has helped over 5,000 Londoners train and find work. 170 secondary schools in London were hit by cuts to the Building Schools for the Future programme. The real-terms cut in Child Benefit will hit over one million families with children in London. Tax credits are to be cut, and in total 737,000 families in London receive Child or Working Tax Credit. Sure Start Maternity Grant has been cut affecting over 20,000 families. Changes to housing benefit pose a particular problem in London.

We know from the past what cuts did to the quality of life in London – leaving it to the market and slashing vital public services harms everyone and does not work.

Boris Johnson will do everything humanly possible to avoid the blame. But the government’s cuts are his cuts.

Boris Johnson began taking his axe to services in London even before the government was elected: cutting police numbers, failing to guarantee the future of safer neighbourhood police teams, reducing financial backing to the police service, gutting the Transport for London investment programme including key outer London transport links, hiking up fares. Moreover Boris Johnson vigorously campaigned for his Tory colleagues to win the general election, knowing full well the economic policy they would deliver.

Indeed, during the period in the run-up the election Boris Johnson’s batted away fears of cuts to key transport projects like Crossrail under the Tories, saying there was ‘no need to worry.’

We need a mayor who is on the side of hard working Londoners and will stand up for people in the face of this extraordinary onslaught. A Labour mayor will need the know-how to use every lever to get the best from public services and budgets and who will speak up vigorously on the side of London before and after the Mayoral election.

We should not allow the Tories and LibDems to lead the debate about the debt. We need a blast of reality into the debate about our country’s economic priorities. The idea that slashing spending is somehow more important than the needs of the public – more important than the schools our children go to, the NHS or a decent transport system, is false. Our debt is smaller than when Labour built the NHS.

Winning in London gives us the chance to prepare the ground for the next Labour government, confident about our beliefs and showing we will engage with the voters who lost their trust in Labour over council housing, jobs, privatisation, war and student fees.

My priority is to do everything in my power to seek to protect Londoners from the effects of economic uncertainty and the cuts now planned.