Crime victims to be assigned a designated police officer under Boris Johnson's new plan

All crime victims will have a named police officer they can contact about their case, under new plans to be unveiled by Boris Johnson.

The Prime Minister will reveal his Beating Crime plan on Tuesday, built around three key reforms.

Writing in the Sunday Express, Mr Johnson said that having an "officer on call who is able to see the crime in ­context" will prevent "serious ­problems" being "treated as minor ­irritants".

He also pledged to publish league tables outlining answering times for the 999 and 101 emergency and non­-emergency numbers.

In the third pillar of the plan, Mr Johnson wrote that the Government will "intensify the successful Adder programme - the war against the county lines drug gangs", saying they will "throttle the life out of" them. Mr Johnson said he wanted to bring the same focus to fighting national crime as "we brought to London during my eight-year tenure as mayor".

He previously claimed to have cut the murder rate by 50 per cent while he was in office, having pledged in his 2008 manifesto that cutting knife and gun crime in the capital would be a "high priority for the police".

The murder rate fell from 22 per million to 12 per million by the time he stood down in 2016. His pledge to publish response times for phone calls comes amid increased pressure on 999 and 101 services as call handlers are forced to self-isolate.

The number of officers off work in Britain's biggest police force has reached a record pandemic high due to the chaos of the 'pingdemic'.

Earlier this week, Dorset Police was forced to temporarily suspend its 101 service because 35 per cent of its 999 staff were either off sick or self­-isolating.

And the expansion of the campaign against county lines follows figures published earlier this month by the National Referral Mechanism, showing a 61 per cent rise in the number of children being drawn into modern slavery through county lines gangs in the 12 months since the pandemic started compared with the year before.

The Conservative Party's 2019 manifesto promised to recruit 20,000 new police officers, of which more than half have been hired.