The 2024 London mayoral election was held on 2 May 2024 to elect the next mayor of London. It took place simultaneously with elections to the London Assembly, some local council by-elections in London and regular local elections elsewhere in England and Wales. Following the Elections Act 2022, voting in this election took place under the first-past-the-post system for the first time and only time, replacing the supplementary vote system. The result of the election was announced on 4 May 2024.
Sadiq Khan of the Labour Party, who has served as the mayor of London since 2016, was re-elected as mayor and became the first person to be elected to the role for three terms. The Conservative Party stood former London Assembly Conservative leader Susan Hall as its candidate, the Green Party nominated Hackney borough councillor Zoë Garbett, the Liberal Democrats nominated Rob Blackie, and Reform UK nominated Howard Cox. There were eight other candidates.
Background The mayor of London has responsibilities covering policing, transport, housing, planning, economic development, arts, culture and the environment. They control a budget of around £18 billion per year. Mayors are typically elected for a period of four years, with no limit to the number of terms served. Under the Greater London Authority Act 1999, mayoral elections are held on the first Thursday in May in the fourth calendar year following the previous election, unless varied by an order by the Secretary of State. On 13 March 2020, the government announced the election would be postponed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The change in election date has been ignored when setting the date of the following election. Consequently, this election was held only three years after the 2021 London mayoral election that saw the Labour mayor Sadiq Khan re-elected.
In the 2022 London local elections, Labour gained control of Barnet, Wandsworth and Westminster councils from the Conservatives, but lost Croydon to no overall control, Harrow to the Conservatives and Tower Hamlets to Aspire, a local political party. Labour saw a small net gain in seats of 28 to 1,156 while the Conservatives lost 104 seats, winning 404 across Greater London. The Liberal Democrats and Greens both made gains, winning 180 and 18 seats respectively.
Khan froze London Underground fares from 2016 to 2020 and introduced a violence reduction unit into the Metropolitan Police. In August 2023, he announced a £135m programme to provide free school meals for all primary school children in London not covered by the UK government.
Ultra Low Emission Zone Khan introduced an Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) in April 2019. The scheme had been initially planned by Boris Johnson when he was mayor. The scheme means that vehicles that fail to meet emissions standards need to pay a £12.50 charge each day they drive within the zone, with money raised from charges invested to improve transport and air quality. The zone was expanded in October 2021 to cover the area between the North Circular Road and the South Circular Road. Khan announced plans to further expand the ULEZ to cover the whole of Greater London in August 2023. The proposal was voted through by the London Assembly with support from Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green members and opposition from the Conservatives. The expansion was unsuccessfully legally challenged by four London borough councils and Surrey County Council. Khan had expressed a desire to replace the ULEZ in the future with a more comprehensive road pricing scheme. He later said that no such scheme would be introduced during his mayoralty. In July 2023, Labour failed to win the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election by a narrow margin, which was credited to local opposition to expansion of the ULEZ. Khan later extended financial support available to scrap non-compliant vehicles to all London residents, rather than the previous plan to apply a means test, funded from reserves.
Electoral system Nominations closed on 27 March.
Following the Elections Act 2022, the 2024 election used the first-past-the-post voting system. Prior elections had employed the supplementary vote system. The Greater London Authority considered changing to counting votes by hand instead of electronically to save money.
All registered electors (including British, Commonwealth, Irish, and certain European Union citizens) living in London aged 18 or over were entitled to vote in the mayoral election.
Campaign The incumbent mayor Sadiq Khan announced in January 2022 that he would seek election to a third term as mayor of London. There had been speculation as to whether he would instead seek election to the House of Commons in hope of becoming leader of the Labour Party. The Labour Party officially reselected Khan as its candidate in December 2022 following a vote of party members and affiliated trade unions. Khan pledged to maintain the 2030 target for Greater London Authority operations to reach net zero emissions, including decarbonising all buses and establishing a fund to put solar panels on school roofs as part of a wider climate plan. He said he would establish a new publicly owned company to take over London buses with support from a potential future Labour government. He matched Hall's promise to extend Night Tube services to four more lines. Khan promised to increase police budgets by £88 million raised "mainly from council tax" and sought more central government funding for policing. He said he would hire 1,300 more police officers and establish a free legal advice service for victims of sexual offences. He promised to have built 40,000 new council houses between 2018 and 2030. Khan pledged to end rough sleeping in London by 2030 by investing £10 million to extend a network of hubs "designed to help an extra 1,700 rough sleepers every year with rapid reassessment and rehousing". He said he would not increase the minimum standards for the ULEZ, or seek further expansion. He promised not to introduce road pricing, which a Conservative election leaflet, designed to look like a penalty notice, accused him of doing. Labour reported the leaflets to the Crown Prosecution Service to assess their legality. Khan asked supporters of the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats to vote for him to avoid the Conservatives winning after making changes to voting ID laws and the electoral system. Khan was endorsed by Siobhan Benita, who was temporarily the Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate in 2020 before withdrawing. He was also endorsed by the actor Mark Hamill.
In July 2023, the Conservatives selected Susan Hall, a member of the London Assembly who led the Conservative group there from 2019 to 2023, as their candidate. Hall is considered to be on the right wing of the Conservative Party and had enthusiastically supported Liz Truss as prime minister and Donald Trump as president of the United States. In September 2023, Hall was reported to have liked a tweet that praised Enoch Powell (who gained fame for his Rivers of Blood speech) and liked tweets that described London's mayor Sadiq Khan as "our nipple height mayor of Londonistan" and a "traitor rat". When asked about the tweets, a spokesman for Hall's campaign said "Susan engages with many people on Twitter without endorsing their views". She later disavowed Powell. Several people in the Conservative Party said they should make the election a "referendum" on expansion of the ULEZ. Hall said she would reverse expansion of the ULEZ immediately if elected. She said she would remove 20 mph speed limits on main roads. Hall listed policing and housing as her other priorities. She pledged to extend Night Tube services to four more lines. Hall said she would "ban officers overtly supporting LGBT campaigns by wearing rainbow flag badges, or engaging in anti-racism gestures". She said she would increase police budgets by £200 million by cutting City Hall staff and Transport for London staff benefits, including pension spending. She said she would hire 1,500 more police officers and establish two new police bases in every borough. Hall promised to introduce a women's commissioner, increase British Transport Police presence and make it easier to report harassment to Transport for London staff. She said she would invest in knife detection equipment for police officers and schools. She supported "more family homes, even if they are high-density, low-rise, as long as they are beautiful homes". She promised to extend Khan's policy of free school meals for all primary school students for at least one more year. She said that tourists visiting from abroad should receive a value-added tax refund on purchases made in London. Hall was endorsed by an editorial in The Sunday Telegraph.
In February 2023 the Green Party selected Zoë Garbett, a councillor on Hackney London Borough Council who works on health inequalities for the NHS, to be their mayoral candidate. Garbett also ran in the 2023 Hackney mayoral by-election, where she came second with 24.5% of the vote. She said that if elected mayor of London, she would introduce free bus transport for people under the age of 22 and "free morning travel for older people", de-prioritise policing of cannabis and improve protection for renters. She proposed a strategy for London to reach zero murders by 2034, in part by hiring youth workers. She said she supported expansion of the ULEZ to cover all of Greater London, but wanted greater financial support for owners of non-compliant cars. She said that she wanted to replace the ULEZ and congestion charge with road pricing based on "distances driven, vehicle emissions, time of day and location", with potential to account for the number of passengers in the future. Garbett said that she wanted the Silvertown Tunnel to be closed to cars. She advocated a "London living wage" of £15 an hour. In January 2024 she proposed a two-year rent freeze and a rent commission that would set target rents. She said she would buy more homes from the general market to be let out as council housing.
The Liberal Democrats selected Rob Blackie in August 2023. Blackie said he would provide legal support to undocumented immigrants who had lived in London for several years to seek citizenship and maintain Khan's policy of free school meals for at least one more year. He promised to seek devolution of work permits in the form of a "London passport" to attract foreign workers. He said that reducing crime and prosecuting more sexual offenders were priorities for him, and that he would deprioritise the policing of drug possession and significantly reduce the use of Stop and Search powers. He proposed a new "Sexual Offences Unit" of the Metropolitan Police with a target of returning the proportion of sexual offenders being caught from 9% back to 18%, the level it was in 2016. He proposed a "voluntary tourist tax" levied on hotel bills to raise more funds for policing. Blackie promised to introduce grants to pay for the installation of solar panels and trialling both allowing all buses to be hailed from any location after 10 pm and free cycle hire on Sundays. He said he wanted ULEZ implementation to be "fairer", giving an example of some night shift workers being charged to both go to and leave work. Blackie said that Khan's policy of freezing London Underground fares was "phoney", as it did not apply to travelcard tickets or caps linked to travelcard prices. He promised to cancel the Underground fare freeze and suspension of peak prices on Fridays to increase police budgets by £117 million. He said that Khan and Hall would be equally bad mayors.