£25m to clear bus lanes

Transport chiefs plan to spend £25 million a year "hiring" police officers to end illegal parking in bus lanes.

Several hundred special constables, traffic wardens and uniformed officers would join a Transport Policing Unit to patrol bus lanes under the proposals.

Mayor Ken Livingstone and Transport Commissioner Bob Kiley are willing to pay the Met £25 million a year in a radical attempt to tackle the problem.

The huge scale of delivery drivers and other motorists blocking bus lanes and the losses inflicted on the capital's economy as a result has been highlighted in the Evening Standard's "Block the Blockheads" campaign.

While any efforts to tackle the problem will be welcomed, the use of tax-payers money to pay police for a job they technically already perform is bound to raise questions.

John Biggs, transport spokesman for the Labour group on the GLA, said: "We already have traffic wardens patrolling red routes and we have to ask what we are getting extra for this amount of money?"

If the Met agrees to start the scheme next year it will cost £25 million to set up and an extra £25 million a year to run.

The "majority" of the cost will come from the the budget of the Mayor's Transport for London authority. Met Commissioner Sir John Stevens has held meetings with Mr Livingstone and Mr Kiley although a Met spokesman stressed that negotiations are "at an early stage" and nothing has been agreed.

The Met's manpower crisis in the current security alert may cause a delay in a decision.

A spokesman for Transport for London said the scheme will "improve traffic flow, journey speeds, frequency and reliability".

Members of the unit would also be used to protect staff and passengers on 20 bus routes. They would ride on buses to prevent vandalism and act as a deterrent to offenders. In one proposal bus inspectors could be made special constables and given powers of arrest over offenders.