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Crime (London)

The hon. Gentleman will try anything on; if he wants to try that, he can forget it. Let us move on to some serious debate. Fourthly, we believe in reorganising the mayoral financial budget to deliver long-term funding for neglected rape crisis centres. Finally, we believe that the police service in London can be made more accountable to Londoners by giving local communities, for the first time in this country and in this city, online crime maps that show the true levels of crime in every neighbourhood, which can ensure that borough commanders are held better to account at monthly open public beat meetings. On the first of those issues, tougher law and order priorities have to be set by a new London Mayor. The Mayor has the right to do that under existing legislation by chairing the Metropolitan Police Authority, but he currently does not bother to do so. Is that because he does not take law and order seriously? That is what we think. We believe that a new Mayor could drive a new policing plan drawn up in consultation with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner that will, as a priority, slash form filling. It is unacceptable that officers in London spend more time on paperwork than they do on the beat—about one hour in five is spent on the beat compared with the time spent doing other things. That is not acceptable. Even the commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, has said that the police need ““a bonfire of bureaucracy””, yet Mr. Livingstone's current policing plan up to 2010 does not list that as any kind of priority.