The background
Boris Johnson got the biggest standing ovation so far at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham today.
Winning a second term as Mayor of London and fronting a successful Olympics have clearly made him a beacon of optimism for many delegates.
Rumours that the blond bombshell may be contemplating a leadership challenge have persistsed, despite strenuous denials from Mr Johnson.
The jokes came thick and fast, but what about the substance? We’ve called Boris out for bending the truth before and were keen to run the FactCheck slide-rule over the details in today’s keynote speech.
The claim
“I am so proud that we have expanded the London Living Wage, now paid, entirely voluntarily, by about 250 of the swankiest banks, law and accountancy firms in London.”
Launched on Ken Livingstone’s watch in 2001, the Living Wage campaign encourages private and public employers to volunteer to pay more than the minimum wage, in recognition of the real cost of living in different parts of the country.
In the capital the Greater London Assembly sets the wage – a Livingstone innovation. It currently stands at £8.30 an hour.
Firms and local authorities have to prove that they are paying everyone, including sub-contracted workers like cleaners, the agreed minimum, in order to get the proper accreditation from the Living Wage Foundation.
Companies who have been given a Living Wage Employer mark include many City firms like accountants KPMG, law firm Linklaters and big banks like Barclays. Hats off to them.
Boris has consistently backed the idea and the numbers have gone up on his watch. But the Mayor may be getting ahead of himself on the numbers.
The official figures don’t come out until next month, but the Living Wage Foundation is not expecting the final list of firms to have achieved accreditation reach 250.
A spokesman told us: “There’s a difference between people talking about it and making a commitment and actually meeting all the criteria.”
We note that Boris only referred to private companies in his speech, not local authorities. That may be because all the London councils that have achieved accreditation (Camden, Islington, Lewisham) or have applied for it (Ealing, Enfield, Haringey, Lambeth, Southwark and Tower Hamlets), are run by Labour.
The claim
“We’re driving forward a massive programme of apprenticeships. We’ve done 76,000 in the last 18 months or so. We’re going to go forward to 250,000 over this mayoral term.”
It’s clear from the context that Boris is pushing apprenticeships as the answer to youth unemployment.
We’ve picked him up before for getting the numbers wrong on apprenticeships, but he’s in the right ballpark this time.
The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills puts apprenticeship starts in London at around 75,000 between August 2010 and April 2012.
But are apprenticeships a magic cure for youth unemployment? What Boris didn’t mention is that apprentices are getting older. Over-25s are now the biggest group, and only a quarter of apprenticeships created last year were for teenagers, compared to more than half in 2005/06.
The claim
“Over the last four years crime has come down very substantially, by 12 per cent.”
Boris’s preferred method of comparing his record on crime to that of his predecessor is to count the total number of record crimes committed over his four years in office and put them alongside Ken Livingstone’s last term.
That’s slightly odd, though not entirely bogus, and it enabled Boris to come out with a “12 per cent fall in crime” story earlier this year.
There is more than one way to skin this cat, and a comparison between the 12 months to March 2012 with the same period in the last year of Livingstone’s mayoralty (2007/08) reveals a more modest fall of just under 6 per cent.
Whether this is attributable to anything the Mayor has done is of course debatable. Crime has been falling year-on-year since at least 2002, no doubt for complex reasons.
Boris has in the past linked falls in crime to high levels of police numbers, but as we’ve shown before, he’s cut overall Met Police strength and broken his election pledge to keep recruitment up.
“Every single chocolate Hobnob in the world is made in London.”
True. The chocolate-coated version of the oat-based biscuit of FactCheck’s favourites and it’s made exclusively at the McVitie’s factory in Harlesden, northwest London.
And Kendal mint cakes really are made in Kendal.
By Patrick Worrall
