Doocey reports on a very busy 2011

• [Dec 19] Dee Doocey writes: AFTER eight years on the London Assembly I will be standing down in May, when I intend to focus all of my attention on work in the House of Lords. For the last year, I have been balancing my work on the Assembly, the Metropolitan Police Authority and the Lords. This has proved to be quite challenging at times and has involved very long hours and weekends. But the work is fascinating and the past year has been the most interesting time of my career so far. I have been involved in tackling child trafficking, security for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, scrutiny of the delivery of the Games, plans for what happens afterwards and chairing the Metropolitan Police Authority's Finance Committee, responsible for a budget of £3.5 billion. It's been quite a year!

In this edition: The future of the Olympic Park; Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime; Tackling child trafficking; Policing protests, and the use of weapons by the police; and Work in the House of Lords

• The future of the Olympic Park

The London Assembly's Economy, Culture and Sport Committee, which I chair, has just released a report about the future of the Olympic Park venues beyond the Games. Our report focused on how to secure a lasting legacy for the aquatics centre, the velopark, the handball arena and the hockey and tennis centre. Our main conclusion was that the whole of the Olympic Park needs to be promoted as a family tourist attraction with joint tickets for the attractions. The park has the potential to become a major visitor attraction - a place where visitors can go to use amazing sports facilities but also to visit an exhibition, a museum or street market, have lunch or go shopping, all in one place.

We were clear that community usage should be maximised, with each venue being open to the public for at least 80% of the time. It is likely that the venues will need a continuing public subsidy - both Eton Manor (the tennis and hockey centre) and the velopark are likely to lose about £300,000 a year, but the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority has agreed to pick up this cost for the next 25 years.

We have concerns about how much public subsidy the Aquatics centre will require (Ponds Forge in Sheffield gets £3 million a year in public subsidy), but the Olympic Park Legacy Company is confident that the public subsidy needed will be minimal. The investment in these venues will provide thousands of much-needed jobs and business opportunities, which will help boost the economy and encourage regeneration in the surrounding areas.

• Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime

In January, a new structure for governing the police in London will be introduced, following new government legislation. The Metropolitan Police Authority will cease to exist and the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPC) will replace it. MOPC will set the strategic direction for the Met, but all operational decisions will remain with the Commissioner. A new committee of the London Assembly will be established to scrutinise the work of MOPC, but the committee will not have any powers to set policy. Caroline Pidgeon and Mike Tuffrey will represent the Liberal Democrat Assembly Group on this committee until the elections in May.

I have represented the MPA on the Home Office Olympic Security Board for the last 3 years, and with the abolition of the MPA I have now been appointed by the Mayor to represent him and MOPC on the Board, so I will continue to play a role in the oversight of the Met's delivery of Olympic security for London 2012. I have chaired the MPA's Olympic and Paralympic committee since its inception. All of the Met's expenditure on Olympic security has been cleared by our committee through detailed scrutiny of individual business cases, dealing with everything from VIP protection to explosives detection dogs, to briefing centres for the thousands of extra officers involved. Despite what has been reported in the press, the Metropolitan Police's expenditure on security for the Olympic and Paralympic Games has not increased at all. More details of how the Games will be policed can be found on the Home Office's report Olympic and Paralympic Safety and Security Strategy.

• Tackling child trafficking

For the past five years, I have been working closely with the Met's Heathrow-based Paladin team (which is dedicated to stopping child trafficking). Paladin was set up some years ago; in its first three months it found 1,800 unaccompanied children coming through the airport, of which a third were deemed vulnerable.

Children are trafficked for a variety of reasons but primarily for benefit fraud. Many are put to work as domestics or childminders or are forced into street crime, which is a big money-earner for criminal gangs. The Met estimates that each child forced into street crime makes £100,000 a year for his or her gangmasters.

The team at Heathrow has been very successful, making it much more difficult for child traffickers to operate. The gangs have responded simply by switching to easier points of entry, such as the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras International railway station. Entry to the UK by train does not have such rigorous standards of security as air travel. Although the British Transport Police do work with other agencies at St Pancras, there is currently no dedicated child protection team based there to tackle trafficking.

I am determined to close this loophole and have raised this in parliament, with the Mayor and with Kit Malthouse (the Deputy Mayor for Policing) who is the only senior politician who has taken this issue seriously enough to try to do something about it. In January, Kit and I will meet British Transport Police and Eurostar at St. Pancras and we are both determined to find a solution to this appalling problem.

• Policing protests, and the use of weapons by the police

The August riots have led to the Metropolitan Police re-examining how it deals with public order threats. Rubber bullets and the use of water cannon are two of the tactics being considered. Separately, the Commissioner of the Met has stated that he is looking at the wider routine deployment of Tasers across London.

Seventeen people, including eight children, have been killed in Northern Ireland by plastic bullets. I don't think that their use on the streets of London would ever be justified. And the deployment of water cannon just isn't practical or appropriate in London. A relatively small number of highly-trained police officers are already armed with Tasers. In certain circumstances they can be the most appropriate tactic to defuse a violent situation. But I believe that to move to a situation where all 6,500 police patrol cars in London routinely carry Tasers would do irreparable damage to the reputation of our unarmed police service, which is the envy of the world.

Furthermore, the knowledge that police officers are routinely armed would place a psychological barrier between the police and the public. Public trust in the police is a great asset that we must not put in jeopardy.

• Work in the House of Lords

Since entering the House of Lords a year ago, I have been balancing my work on the Assembly and the Metropolitan Police Authority with my new role in parliament. Thankfully, many of the issues that I have been working on in the London Assembly have now come to the Lords in the form of new legislation. For example, in the first few weeks after I started, the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill came to the Lords. On behalf of the MPA and the London Assembly, I tabled several amendments to this Bill, and a number of changes affecting London were adopted by the government. This included the power for the Assembly to veto the appointment of the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, if that person was not an Assembly Member. Sadly, my opposition to the premature introduction of a new system of police governance fell on deaf ears and in January the new regime will be introduced in London, even though it's only a few months before the Olympic Games and the Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

This was followed by the Localism Bill, when I raised the issue of overcrowded households. It's hard to believe that the formal definition of 'overcrowding' has not changed in 75 years. People sleeping in living rooms, kitchens and even in the bath are not officially deemed to be 'overcrowded'! Sadly the Government didn't accept my arguments and the Minister in reply said that changing the statutory definition would "increase the number of families deemed to be statutorily overcrowded", and that therefore this was not the answer!

In the Protection of Freedoms Bill, I tabled amendments relating to the retention of DNA, and argued strongly against the government's proposal to scrap the need for taxi drivers to have enhanced Criminal Records Bureau checks before getting a licence. This last amendment was looked on favourably by the minister and I am hopeful that the government will accept my arguments and drop this ill thought through proposal.

I have also been involved in the London Olympic and Paralympic Games (Amendment) Bill and the Human Trafficking (Further Provisions and Support for Victims) Bill.

The final bill I am involved with this year is the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, where I am challenging the appalling proposal by the Government for disabled people to lose the right to legal aid to assist them in appealing benefit decisions. Currently, 60 % of decisions are overturned on appeal and it cannot be right that the legal aid to challenge this is removed from some of the most vulnerable people in society.

So my first year in the Lords has really been a baptism of fire but I wouldn't change a second of it!