THE SAFETY OF WOMEN
This chapter contains the single most deliverable commitment in this manifesto, and I have placed it first within the chapter because it is a matter of physical infrastructure that has been treated for years as though it were an aspiration.
6.1 Light
A woman’s journey home should not require calculation. It currently does. Routes are lengthened, buses are missed deliberately, taxis are taken that cannot be afforded, and phones are held with a thumb over the call button. This is a tax on being a woman in this city, paid in time, money and fear.
The remedy is not complicated. It is light.
- Every poorly lit street in London properly illuminated, so that no woman has to alter or elongate her journey home.Audit begins within the first fortnight. Works tendered within fifty days. Programme complete by the end of Year Three. Indicative cost: provisionally ninety million pounds across the term.
The audit will cover the TfL road network directly and will be delivered with every borough for local roads, funded from the mayoral transport and community safety budgets. It will prioritise routes to and from stations, bus stops, hospitals and universities, and the results of the audit will be published borough by borough so that progress can be tracked by anyone.
6.2 Policing
- Violence against women and girls made the single highest priority of the Metropolitan Police, with specialist units funded.Set formally through MOPAC within the first fortnight. Indicative cost: thirty-five million pounds annually.
- Dedicated support and advice services for single mothers on low incomes and approaching the poverty line.Commissioned through the GLA. Indicative cost: eight million pounds annually.
6.3 Fairness at work
Employment law is reserved. The Mayor is nonetheless one of London’s largest employers and one of its largest purchasers, and both positions can be used to set an example rather than to impose new burdens on business.
- Pay gap reporting mandated across the entire GLA group, and post-childbirth salary reduction prohibited.Applied directly across the GLA, TfL, MOPAC and the London Fire Brigade, covering tens of thousands of employees.
- Harassment clauses removed from non-disclosure agreements, banned outright across the GLA group.Direct action within the Mayor’s own organisations as an example to every London employer.
- Stricter and higher penalties for abuse, harassment and violence committed against women.Pursued through Sentencing Council evidence and public campaign.
- The Firearms Act 1968 reviewed so that women may lawfully carry a defensive spray for self defence.Defensive sprays are a prohibited weapon under section 5. Reform requires an Act of Parliament. I will make the case to government and report honestly on whether it is won.
6.4 Online harm and image abuse
- Public awareness campaigns and funded support for the victims of deepfake and image-based abuse.Indicative cost: two million pounds annually.
- Heavy penalties for the creation and dissemination of non-consensual deepfake imagery.Non-consensual intimate imagery is already criminal. Enforcement will be pressed on Ofcom under the Online Safety Act and with the Metropolitan Police directly.