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Crime (London)

My hon. Friend makes a typically powerful point. The current London Mayor—I hope we do not have him for too long—is tolerant not only of low-level crime but of serious crime and he should go. In addition to the sanctions we believe should be attendant on under-18s' antisocial misbehaviour, which breaks the behaviour code, there should be permanent withdrawal of their bus passes until they participate in a restorative justice programme to earn them back. That is an excellent and original idea proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Henley. As well as those sanctions, we want more police visibility, which we can pay for in part by employing fewer press and communications officers. According to the Central Office of Information, Mr. Livingstone has more press officers than the Prime Minister, although as his popularity rating is almost as dire as the Prime Minister's we might wonder whether that is a good use of Londoners' money. Transport for London forecasts that it will spend £66 million on advertising, marketing and communications in 2007-08. It would be a sensible idea to cap that spending in real terms rather than going ahead with the £84 million requested by Mr. Livingstone. Those figures are from the Greater London authority group budget report, 2008-09. Under our proposal, £16.5 million of the money saved would be redirected to the existing safer transport teams and would pay for approximately 440 police community support officers, delivering more visible presence on our transport network—approximately doubling their strength. Police support officers are valued by the Conservatives; they could particularly help to crack down on one of the low-level issues identified by my hon. Friend the Member for Henley—fare evasion. Why? Punish the smaller offences and the larger ones will diminish in number. The example that we have already mentioned is New York, but there are other examples in cities around the world. In 2006, fare evasion in London rose from about 2.3 per cent. to 3.18 per cent on conventional buses, with a cost to the taxpayer of £36.7 million. On bendy buses, fare evasion rose by a much bigger amount, rising from 7.8 per cent. to 9.3 per cent. That is more than double the rate on conventional buses. Those are figures that my hon. Friend the Member for Henley has delved into, and they are quite worrying. The revenue loss on bendy buses alone was £8 million, and the total loss for all buses was in the region of £46 million. That is about £1 million a week in lost revenue. Every criminal who evades their fare and is not caught is a criminal who may have form for more serious offences, so the issue is not just about lost revenue. TFL deploys about 300 revenue protection inspectors on its entire bus network, about 200 revenue control officers on the underground, and about 200 traffic enforcement staff. Considering that there are about 7,700 normal buses and about 300 bendy buses, there is a minimal chance of people being caught, and offenders know it. We hope that a new London Mayor will be able to direct the Metropolitan Police Authority to investigate, in partnership with TFL, giving revenue protection inspectors new and better powers, including, for the first time, the power to take names and addresses, so fare-dodgers can truly be held to account.