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Crime (London)

I am grateful for that, Mr. Deputy Speaker. However, I have to say that issues have been raised about the commitment of my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson); apparently, that does not cut both ways. [Interruption.] Well, I could ask where the hon. Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) is. What I am saying is that we can all make such points. Crime is an issue for my constituency. When I conducted a crime survey, more than 3,000 people responded. They largely said that they felt as if their local area was getting less safe. They raised issues of antisocial behaviour, being mugged, their children being mugged and crime on transport. My constituents want those issues to be tackled because they do not feel that they are being so at the moment. Nor do they feel that the money that they are paying as part of the mayoral precept is giving them any sort of return in terms of policing per pound. In the eight-year period of the London mayoralty, my constituents have paid £66 million more than before into the Met police precept. We have not had any sort of return on the money that we have invested. Frankly, we would rather have spent the money locally and had more police, who can arrest people on our streets, to complement the PCSOs. That has not happened. Most of my constituents want a Mayor who will genuinely try to make the city safer instead of living by headlines. We want a Mayor who will seriously tackle youth crime, about which parents in my constituency worry every day. I shall finish by citing one statistic. In recent years, about one in 20 secondary-school-aged children who live in Wandsworth reported having been a victim of mugging. That statistic is surely unacceptable to any of us in this House, whichever side we sit on. If we can at least agree on one thing, it is that crime is too high and that we need to bear down on it by spending our money smartly so that communities such as my own can feel safer.