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Policing in London

I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker. Let me simply say that the spin-addicted Minister may decide to revisit his comments when he reads Hansard tomorrow. Let us consider another statistic. In 2007, 27 teenagers were murdered in London, nearly all of them victims of knife or gun crime perpetrated by other youths. That lends force to the observations of my hon. Friend the Member for Henley. Those rises in crime—which, I hasten to add, are not to be laid at the door of the police; I shall explain why in a moment—should be seen in the context of police funding. They have occurred as spending on the Met has gone up, with a budget increase of more than 30 per cent. That increase is of course welcome, but the fact remains that Londoners are paying increasing amounts through higher police precepts, and I think that many of them will wonder why crime is not falling in proportion to the amount of extra money that they are contributing.