London cannot afford another decade like this one

Eventually, he finds a farmer, whereupon he winds down his car window, leans over, and pleads for directions to his destination. The farmer looks heavenwards, sucks his teeth and says: “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you.”

Sadiq Khan has been Mayor of London for 10 years and would surely prefer not to start from here. However, he has no one to blame but himself for the accumulated detritus of 10 years of his mistakes, his poor judgment, and his deeply damaging choices are piling up all around him. Londoners are all paying the price for Sadiq Khan’s terrible choices.

If the London Mayoralty were a stool, its three legs would be policing, transport and housing. A decent Mayor would have focused on ensuring the Met catches criminals, cracks down on crime, and keeps Londoners safe.

He would have made sure Londoners and visitors to London can travel around our city as quickly, safely and cheaply as possible. And he would pull every lever at his disposal to ensure that the tens of thousands of homes London needs each year are being built.

In my report, The Cost of Khan: London’s Lost Decade, I show how, on all these measures – and frankly, on many more – Sadiq Khan is failing Londoners. He has presided over soaring crime, up 26% since he became Mayor.

Compared to May 2016, sexual offences are 64% higher, knife crime has increased by 27%, robberies are 57% higher, robberies using a knife have doubled, violence against the person is up 26% and shoplifting has more than doubled.

Meanwhile, Sadiq has presided over a record-breaking 156 TfL strikes, three times as many in ten years as occurred in the previous 16 years under Ken and Boris. He has completed some transport projects started by Boris Johnson, but these have invariably been delayed and (often significantly) overbudget. He has failed to keep the pipeline going. There are no Sadiq Khan-era transport projects that his successor will be able to cut the ribbon on.

On housing, the previous Government gave the Mayor a whopping £8.82 billion to build up to 151,000 affordable homes. At the time of writing, 87,308 of those affordable homes have been completed. In his 2024 manifesto, Sadiq Khan bragged about “a golden era of council housebuilding.”

The reality is just 23,485 council homes have been ‘started’ under the Mayor’s flagship council housebuilding programme. A start can mean a hole has been dug in the ground of the relevant site. Even with that generous qualifier, only 14,246 council homes have been ‘completed’ at the time of writing.

Even this is deceptive, as a statistical loophole means the Mayor can purchase existing homes and count them as ‘completed’. Nearly one-fifth of the “completed” homes were, in fact, purchased.

When asked to list his achievements, Sadiq Khan jumps to policies like universal free school meals, rather than the core parts of his job. This is like claiming to have made a brilliant sandwich, using delicious jam, but omitting to mention that the bread is mouldy and the butter is rancid.

London remains a great city because of its energy, its creativity and, fundamentally, because of Londoners, despite suffering a decade of Sadiq Khan.

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Susan Hall AM is Leader of the City Hall Conservatives.

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