HOW THIS IS PAID FOR

The GLA group budget is in the order of twenty-one billion pounds annually, covering the Greater London Authority, Transport for London, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, the London Fire Brigade and the London Legacy Development Corporation.

The green commitments in this manifesto carry an indicative annual revenue cost in the region of and capital commitments across the term in the region of, excluding the Thames tunnels, which are addressed separately below.

Reallocation and the war on waste

The largest single source. TfL and MOPAC between them account for the great majority of the GLA group budget, and a change of mayoral priority is a change of spending priority. Combined with the value-for-money review in Chapter 2, the great majority of this programme is funded by spending existing money better, not by demanding more of it. Nothing in this manifesto requires the group to spend more than it currently does in order to spend it differently.

The precept

The Mayor sets the GLA council tax precept. This manifesto keeps the precept as low as is consistent with properly funding the police and the Fire Brigade, and any change is stated plainly rather than buried. A responsible Mayor will not reach for the taxpayer’s wallet before exhausting every saving first. The precise level will be published in the costed budget before polling day.

Capital borrowing

Bridges, tunnels, platform-edge doors and bus fleets are long-life assets with fifty to two-hundred-year horizons. They are financed prudently by borrowing against that life, as they always have been. Treating capital investment as though it were revenue spending is the accounting error that has left London with a closed bridge and a Victorian signalling system.

Revenue raising

Procurement reform and stricter bidding guidelines, criminal asset recovery under the Proceeds of Crime Act, philanthropic partnership for the Fire Brigade, and commercial development of GLA and TfL landholdings.

The two Thames tunnels stand apart from every other commitment in this document and are presented separately for that reason. At an indicative eight to twelve billion pounds they are the largest infrastructure proposal put to this city in a generation, and they cannot be financed from the GLA budget alone.

They require a settlement with government, a Development Consent Order, and a funding model combining national investment, borrowing against future toll revenue and private capital. A Mayor negotiating with the Treasury from a credible position is in the strongest possible place to secure that settlement. What this Mayoralty can do within its own powers is the part that has never been done: select the routes, prove the case, complete the design, secure consent and have the contractors ready. That is what the green commitment covers, and that is what I will be judged on at the end of the term.

Every amber commitment in this manifesto is costed at zero. This is deliberate. Amber commitments are campaigns, not budget lines. Where a campaign succeeds and creates a spending requirement, that requirement will be brought forward through the normal budget process with the Assembly and the public, and not smuggled in on the strength of a manifesto sentence.

No green commitment in this manifesto depends on a penny of additional funding from central government. That is the test I have applied throughout, and it is the reason the green list is shorter than it might have been.

Every indicative figure in this document will be confirmed against published sources before this manifesto is finalised. A fully costed budget, line by line and source by source, will be published before polling day.

I invite every other candidate for this office to do the same, and to state plainly, as this document does, which of their promises they have the power to keep.