Plans to spend £15.6m on new public toilets, pedestrian crossings, ‘a drug consumption room’, and other projects have been voted down by the London Assembly, after an overwhelming majority of members argued the ideas were not workable. The proposals were tabled on Thursday as an amendment to Sir Sadiq Khan’s budget by the Assembly’s three-strong group of Green Party members, who said their spending package “would make meaningful differences in the lives of so many Londoners”.
Most of the package’s funding would have been raised by increasing the congestion charge by £1, which the Greens claimed would generate an extra £13m per year. The remaining £2.6m would be drawn from City Hall’s reserves. The drug consumption room would have taken the form of a three-year pilot scheme, and would have followed in the footsteps of the clinic opened earlier this month in Glasgow, which is the UK’s first such facility.
At the clinic, Londoners would be able “to take their own drugs under the supervision of trained health professionals”. No drugs would be provided by those health professionals, and buying and selling drugs would still be illegal on the site. The Greens said there was “extensive evidence” that such facilities “improve individual and community well-being and health, reduce death rates, bring users into contact with health and treatment services, and reduce drug-related crime”.
Another suggestion in the Greens’ amendment was to spend £100,000 on a London Renters’ Commission, which would “advise the mayor and design research on what model of rent control could work for London and how it could be implemented through current legislation”.
