Boris Johnson: budget lines

Sometimes a gentle grilling makes toast of a politician more effectively than trying to send him up flames. Mayor Johnson was hardly caramelised at this morning's budget committee meeting , but he emerged a little charcoaled just the same. Boris talks a good balance book, of course, and won't lose many votes with fine words about freezing precepts and making savings from the GLA family of half a billion quid during 2010/11 (£2.4 billion over the the next three years in all, he says). At the same time he emphasises that most of the precept will (continue) to be spent on the Met. "More for less," is the soundbite. The key political argument, though, is how the £3,257.3 million he plans to spend in the next financial year is being carved up. Darren Johnson tackled him on the rise in public transport fares. Boris has some strong lines of defence against accusations of nasty party-ness : he's maintained concessions, "controversial though they are," in order to protect the vulnerable; he insisted that he'd defended bus services; he stressed that 40 percent of Londoners - school age kids and Freedom Pass-holders - use these for free. He got his Green namesake to acknowledge that he'd supported large fare hikes under Ken Livingstone. But when asked why he hadn't raised the precept across London and used the extra income to bear down on fares, he seemed less frank. Couldn't he have spared Londoners on low income the extra £270 a year many will have to find by upping the precept by, say, £22 a year on Band D households? "Because, er, Darren, we had to look at the reality of TfL's position," he began, before listing the financial ravages brought about by the Tube ridership slump and the cost of buying out Metronet. "With respect, you couldn't begin to address that by adjusting the precept." No, you couldn't. But that wasn't the question. A candid answer, I suspect, would have been that the political gains from freezing the precept all over town are worth rather more to Boris than lifting it a little to keep down the price of bus travel for a group of Londoners who probably vote Labour anyway. He also said, in passing, that he thought the level of bus subsidy far too high. That's the politics of it: as ever, they're all about priorities.