Funding London’s priorities

The priority has to be increasing law & order and reducing crime. The only way this can be done is by increasing funding to get more police officer on the streets and increasing their stop & search powers. It has become embarrassing as a Londoner to see the reputation my city now has internationally due to the rampant crime e.g. phone snatching and knife crime. Which the Mayor has yet not done anyway near enough about. Please sort that. And the litter.

Tackle reckless cyclists! So many of them cycle on the pavement, don't use lights when dark or run over red lights. A lot of food delivery riders use illegally modified bikes. I've only seen law enforcement in the City of London but not elsewhere in London.

Campaign to join the EU. London very much needs it, as does the country 

Nightlife in London is dying if not already dead. London is sadly no longer a 24/7 city. We need to support pubs and nightclubs by doing what is possible to remove taxes, fees, and levies on them. We need to run the night tube across more lines and more often. We need to make sure our streets are safe late at night. But most of all, we need to make sure that Londoners can afford a night out. 

Funding is very much needed for ending knife crime and phone snatching. Everywhere I goi in Europe has made me feel safer than in London. I would rarely go out at night because of this.

Also TFL should not be allowed to raised their fare every single year given the quality of their service and the disruption tube drivers has caused. Its a disgrace how much these people earn. TFL is such corrupted this needs a thorough investigation and changes to implement for citizens!

Something needs to be done to protect London's cultural history and iconic trade districts . Limitations  need to be introduced that stop areas from being bought out by endless chains, and instead incentivise and encourage independent businesses, with an oversight to an area's local personality . London is swiftly losing all the things that make it a city worth living in. Camden Market is now an unrecognisable shopping mecca carbon-copied from any other city in the world, Denmark Street has been in danger for years of losing its historical musical significance, Berwick street - once the beating heart of London's fabric trade, has been homogenised into luxury flats, with rising costs pushing the all but the last remaining traders out. And with Deptford market next on the hit list, I'd like to see more oversight into protecting London's cultural heritage and character, whilst simultaneously supporting the city's independent businesses and cultural venues. That's what always made the city great. 

Invest in young people, in prevention and early intervention, and in making our city more accessible (from a disability standpoint and an affordability point of view). Would love to see rent controls, more social housing, investment in art, youth and community centres that celebrate local communities and create spaces to develop a pro social city, where young people can afford to work and stay, to build lives. 

Where those community built services already exist, fund them! 

More MET police on the streets will NOT make our city safer, as so much evidence points to the racial and gender discrimination running deep in the MET. 

Improving safety on the roads - lime bike users should definitely require a licence to register with the app and enable police to crackdown on traffic violations. As a lime bike user myself I still think this! It’s by far the most convenient mode of transport but not safe while so many people use it haphazardly … a small amount of intervention could go a long way 

Addressing crime is a really difficult one when the met have been literally shown to be systemically racist and misogynistic. I want to feel safer as a top priority but investing in police feels like it will achieve the opposite for women and minorities, unless systemic issues are reformed

It's been sad to watch the closure of cultural venues, and the slow increase in ticket pricing. Our writers, artists and performers are a crucial part of our city and they are all having to move to different parts of the country because they can no longer earn a living in London. A city without culure is a city without a heartbeat.

Pedestrianise Oxford Street! Walkable mixed areas in big cities around the world are always the most attractive places, and typically become cultural centres. We could have popup markets, events, exhibits, all sorts of things on the street. 

An upheaval of council tax applied to residential areas would help in discouraging the purchase of "affordable housing" by speculative investors and instead encourage working and salary-earning people to buy instead. You could do this by increasing the tax rate based on the number of square feet in a property, IE if you own one 800sqft flat you pay £X per sqft in tax per year, but if you own say 3200sqft from 4 flats you would pay £3X per square foot. 

Furthermore, delays in public transport cost London enormous sums in productivity hours, so maintaining punctuality is key to maximising productivity from what we already have. It will also take cars and taxis off the road.

Social housing, decommodify public transport, decrease wealth inequality, give everybody a chance to do well in life, invest in communities, tackle crime in the short term but make sure you do the above because crime doesn't happen in a vacuum, it's an effect of inequality rising.

Honestly, everyone talks about “affordable housing” like it’s this great solution, but speaking as someone who actually lives in it, it’s really not affordable at all. The system feels designed to make housing associations rich while people in Help to Buy or shared ownership are squeezed for every penny. The rents are high, the service charges are high, and whenever you ask them to explain why, they either can’t or won’t. It just makes the whole thing feel pretty shady.

And building more so-called “affordable” homes isn’t going to magically fix anything. Half the time, “affordable” is just a label they slap on so it sounds good.

What would actually help is proper regulation of the housing market—something that stops wild speculation and keeps prices from shooting up for no real reason. That’s how you make housing affordable again, not by building endlessly.

We already have enough homes. The real issue is that one landlord can buy up dozens or even hundreds of properties on the same street and then rent them out for double the normal price, which pushes the whole area up. If we had better rules in place, those homes could go to regular working people at fair, reasonable prices instead of being hoarded for profit.

I think people living in Greater London should all receive free access services. Instead of paying fares, we should be taxed via GLA. This would promote usage and decrease the amount of cars on the road. It would also help stop the hundreds of millions (around £200m) we use every year from fare dodgers! For most people this would be cheaper than paying daily. It means the fare dodgers  would have to now pay for the services (like they should). It would also encourage people that  use it to stop using their cars and   use public transport.

Crime reduction and citizen safety. I was subject to a homophobic attack while walking through my town (Brixton) at 6pm.There were no local police I could turn to at the time. My local police station was not initially helpful, though they were when I returned to report the incident a day later.

Stratford station has become too busy, there continues to be new construction in the area but the station’s capacity is the same, and people don’t wait for passengers to disembark before pushing onto trains. The quality of the shops is poor with a small shop opened in the station that just sells vapes and sweets, and similarly in Westfield there is mainly junk food and candy shops have opened, despite there being a high proportion of young people and families. On the other hand, Elizabeth park is great, well looked after and calm and inclusive

It's disappointing that the critical lack of accessible - not just affordable - housing wasn't even mentioned in the survey!  With that level of focus, no wonder most disabled and many frail older people are consigned to living in totally unsuitable accommodation.  

Similarly, the particular problems facing disabled and neurodivergent people regarding policing and crime were ignored, e.g. the fact that many Met police officers don't engage appropriately with young autistic people, despite the availability of training, thereby escalating already fraught situations and making it more likely that neurodivergent people will be arrested due to perceptions of them being uncooperative.

I was also disappointed that there was no question about the importance of tackling high levels of domestic abuse against women and girls, including disabled women, nor expanded refuge provision, including accessible refuges.

Overall, the survey was pretty weak on issues of equity and  inclusion, with the exception of transport to some degree.  If you don't ask questions about minority concerns, support for addressing them won't be evidenced and resources won't be targeted accordingly.  

A further example is that older, younger and many disabled people are more negatively affected by the effects of cold and climate change in terms of cold or hot homes (because they can't regulate their body temperature effectively), but again, this wasn't raised as a topic within the broad areas of the economy / cost of living (ability to heat one's home) climate change (ability to cool one's home).

I appreciate there's a limit to how many questions can be included, but the survey questions are pretty broad brush and can't do more than give very broad indications of Londoners' concerns, rather than provide genuinely helpful insights.  It seems a bit of a wasted opportunity not to dig down further into people's views.

I would like to see more funding going towards cleaning public spaces especially in lower income parts of London as I think that would make a huge difference. I'm thinking about trash on streets, fly tipping.

I think more funding towards tackling phone theft would be amazing as I've had my phone stolen before and now I feel very unsafe using my phone.

I would love to be able to use the tube at night. This would help so much when I need to get to the airport and back. I know the night tube exists but having more days of the week where it has a and extended schedule would be very helpful.