CITY HALL CONSERVATIVES SLAM SADIQ KHAN’S “DECADE OF FAILURE”

The City Hall Conservatives today have launched a report to mark the 10th anniversary of Sir Sadiq Khan’s mayoralty, branding the Mayor of London’s record tenure as a “monument to failure”.

The report, authored by Conservative group leader and former mayoral candidate Susan Hall AM, examines the manifesto promises of Sir Sadiq Khan and how his promises to London have not been met. By looking at particular policy outcomes - or lack thereof - Susan Hall considers whether London will be better or worse off when Sir Sadiq leaves office compared to when he took office. 

Some of the key findings include:

• That the Mayor has failed to build housing in the capital over the last decade, with his latest housing programme building just 2,600 of the 35,000 originally promised

• How despite promising 0 days of strikes if he was elected, the Mayor has presided over more than 150 days of strike action since 2016,

• An 80% increase in the Mayoral precept of Londoners’ council tax, at a time when the police face cuts and crimes such as business robbery and phone theft explode in the capital 

Other aspects of the report examine how, whilst the Mayor has cut the ribbons on a number of projects begun by his predecessors, such as the Crossrail Elizabeth Line, the Thames Tideway Tunnel, and HS2, the next Mayor of London will have almost no similar projects to open as a result of Sir Sadiq’s lack of ambition in delivering physical legacies in London. 

Put simply, Ms Hall believes that when people come to reflect on Sir Sadiq’s mayoralty, the only positives they will be able to draw will either be the length of time he spent in office, or redistributive spending schemes which siloed taxpayer money into bodies, boards, quangos, and commissions. This will be before they come to consider the areas in which London moved backwards under the Mayor, despite his attempts to claim otherwise. 

Susan Hall AM, Leader of the City Hall Conservatives said:

“We all go into politics to make our area better: to represent our neighbours, to speak up for our communities, and to build societies which provide a strong social inheritance for our families. It is deeply regretful then that the tenure of Sir Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London will be nothing more than a monument to failure: a forgotten, lost decade where opportunities to shape the future of our city forever were squandered. By all metrics, it is a decade of failure. Crime is up, positive outcomes are down, our economy is in shambles, and investment and delivery of infrastructure are left wanting. And all this is because he chose to focus on himself, rather than our city. Well, when the obituaries on this sorry episode of civic leadership are written, let the epitaph read ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ Anything else will have been window dressing for a useless Mayor.” 

Cost of Khan.pdf

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