The Mayoral manifestos
The London mayoral election is nearly upon us, with the last of the manifestos from the three main party candidates, Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone and Brian Paddick, being published.
There are recurrent themes in the manifestoes, with all of them highlighting their support for tackling violence against women, addressing knife and gun crime and putting more bobbies on the beat.
It does, however, lead me to think – what effect will the new London Mayor have on people in the revolving doors group?
There have been some important pledges made by the candidates that directly relate to this group. Brian Paddick has promised to support the increased use of community penalties by bringing in a ‘tough London Community Payback scheme’. Short-term prison sentences often disrupt the support people receive in the community. So while many may find the ‘tough’ focus is worrying, being sentenced to a community penalty rather than a short-term prison sentence could play an important part in getting and keeping the revolving doors group on the road to recovery.
Boris Johnson has also highlighted the importance of community payback and has pledged to ensure that offenders sentenced to a community penalty are doing valuable and visible work. It is important that this focus on work does not mean that rehabilitative elements lose focus and support – without these elements, it is unlikely that reoffending rates will effectively be reduced.
Most promising is Ken Livingstone’s pledge to reduce reoffending. It is very positive to see his recognition that “in London, there are around five thousand people who are in frequent contact with the criminal justice system and have multiple unmet needs, including for example addiction and mental health problems”.
His pledge to “create a small intelligence-led unit within the Metropolitan Police to identify repeat offenders and the services that can support them” will provide valuable data about the number of people repeatedly arrested by the police. As highlighted by our paper Repeat offenders with multiple needs in London, published today, accessing this data is inherently problematic as currently it is only possible to determine the number of arrests as opposed to the number of people arrested. The delivery of Ken’s manifesto pledge will allow us to identify how many people are being repeatedly arrested and where this is happening. This data will go some way to help us track how many people are in the revolving doors group at any one time and will show where extra support is needed.
Several Integrated Offender Management (IOM) schemes in London are focusing on individuals who are repeatedly arrested and therefore collect data on numbers of repeat arrests. However, this work is not universal across the capital. Ken’s pledge would allow for a pan-London approach to tracking repeat offending.
As has been repeatedly reported in the media, this election is often a battle of personalities rather than a battle of pledges. Whoever wins on the 3rd of May, Revolving Doors will be working with the successful candidate, the Greater London Authority, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime and other strategic partners to ensure the revolving doors group are not left behind in the next mayoral term.
