Twenty-five years of London Mayors

The position is imperfect and underpowered, but the city would be worse off without it

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It’s 25 years since Londoners first cast votes for a directly-elected Mayor and 25 London Assembly members. Every now and then someone still pops up to say that they and the Greater London Authority should be abolished, but few people in the business of running the capital and making things happen there agree.

Yesterday, for example, John Dickie, chief executive of BusinessLDN – which, under its original name of London First, played a big part in making the case for the return of a London-wide tier of government – praised what has been achieved by Mayors so far, and renewed calls for more power to be devolved to City Hall.

Below, to mark the mayoralty’s first quarter of a century, are 25 major events or innovations that have happened because of, or in some cases, happened to, London’s three Mayors so far. Each, in different ways, demonstrates the value of the institution, how it has matured, changed and how it has dealt with various forms of adversity. The list could have been twice as long. If you have suggestions for what else might be on it, please feel free to leave a constructive comment (I don’t publish any other kind).

1. The first election

It was held on 4 May, 2000 and won by Ken Livingstone, with Conservative candidate Steve Norris finishing in second place and Labour’s Frank Dobson in third. Livingstone ran as an Independent, having failed, under controversial circumstances, to be selected to run for Labour. He had previously been Labour leader of the Greater London Council, the previous London government regional tier, which had been abolished by Margaret Thatcher’s national government in 1986.

After his win, Livingstone opened a speech with the words: “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted 14 years ago…” He would later tell Jack Brown, lecturer in London Studies at King’s College and a contributor to On London, that he got the idea from a man who spoke to him on the Tube. The story is as good and as depressing an insight as you could get into how vicious and perilous politics has since become. Livingstone’s latest successor cannot move around the city without an armed police escort, let alone travel by Tube.

2. Same sex civil partnerships

Introduced by Livingstone in 2001, the London Partnership Register recognised and formalised same-sex couple relationships. The idea had been suggested by his Green Party mayoral opponent Darren Johnson, who had been elected to the Assembly, during the first ever Mayor’s Question Time. The scheme did not legalise gay marriage, but prepared the ground for the Civil Partnership Act (2004) and the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act (2013). It wouldn’t be the first time a Mayor of London blazed a trail the whole country would follow.

3. Launch of the Congestion Charge

Even Livingstone’s closest advisers thought this road user charging scheme was going to be a catastrophe, a “poll tax on wheels” that might even cost him reelection in 2004 (it didn’t). Anxiety about it delayed Labour accepting the Independent Mayor back into the party in time for that contest, which Prime Minister Tony Blair was keen to do. But it began on 13 February 2003 without a hitch and even though Boris Johnson did away with Livingstone’s 2007 western extension of the charging zone, he retained the central London original.

4. Launch of the Oyster card

It wasn’t the first electronic payment smartcard used on the capital’s transport network: early versions had been trialled on bus route 212 in 1992 and on a bunch of routes in Harrow in 1994. The Oyster card was launched by TfL, whose board Mayor Livingstone chaired, in June 2003. Two other names for it had been considered: Gem and Pulse.

Ten years later, TfL was celebrating its anniversary by calling the Oyster “the world’s most popular transport smartcard” and claiming that “London leads the way globally in transport ticketing technology”, though by then the Oyster was in the process of being joined and in part superseded by the advent of contactless Pay As You go, which was introduced for buses in 2012 and rolled out to cover tube and rail as well in 2014.

5. The first London Plan

London’s Mayors are required by law to produce a “spatial development strategy” for the capital, a kind of master blueprint for planning and defining what gets built where and how. It has to be consistent with and embracing of the other statutory strategy documents City Hall has to draw up, such as for transport, housing, health inequalities and the environment. The first London Plan, as the document came to be called, was published in February 2004. Work on the fifth has begun.

6. London wins Olympics bid

Almost no one believed it would happen, but on 6 July 2005, in Singapore, the International Olympic Committee announced that London would host the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. This was a triumph for the bid team, for the Blair government and for Livingstone’s administration, all of which worked together to make it happen, but also for the mayoralty as an institution.

Olympics are awarded to cities, not nations, and London’s lack of a single leadership voice after the abolition of the GLC had made it hard to bid effectively. Livingstone hated sport, but knew the Games would be a huge catalyst for investment in east London’s neglected Lower Lea Valley. London’s Games legacy is by far the most successful ever.

7. 7/7

The day after the Olympics bid triumph, 7 July 2005, four suicide bombers attacked London’s public transport network, killing 52 people and injuring nearly 800 others. Livingstone, still in Singapore, made one of his most famous speeches.

8. London Overground established

“London’s new train set” as it was called in a marketing campaign came out of its box on 11 November, 2007, when TfL officially took over the management of services on the old North London and other lines. Mayor Livingstone formally opened the London Overground in a ceremony at Hampstead Heath station the following day. Today, the Overground’s six lines have their own names and serve 113 stations. The current Mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan hopes that more suburban services will soon come under TfL control.

9. More planning powers

The balance of power between City Hall and the London boroughs changed significantly from 6 April 2008, when the government gave the Mayor of London the ability to block or take over planning applications deemed to be “of potential strategic importance” to Greater London, as primarily defined by their scale and height.

The exercise of these “call-in” powers or the possibility of it has fundamentally altered the way development projects are devised and progressed through the planning system in the capital, with developers, council officers and councillors all knowing that if large schemes don’t meet certain requirements of the Mayor, her or she can intervene.

10. Boris Johnson becomes Mayor

The 2 May, 2008 should probably go down in history as the day the journey to 10 Downing Street of one of UK politicians least suitable for occupying it began in earnest. But at the time, Johnson’s election as the first Conservative Mayor of London was greeted with enormous interest and excitement. He was chaotic, colourful and unconventional and Livingstone had lost his lustre.

“Boris” had no relevant experience for the job or even a proper team in place to help him, and his early months were a shambles. Matters improved once he’d accepted the responsibilities and limitations of the job and learned to depend on his more capable lieutenants. He was never as good a Mayor as (now pretty dormant) fan club claimed, but neither was he as bad as his more vehement critics from the Left protest. He won again, once more defeating Livingstone, in 2012.

11. Mayor ousts Met chief

Prior to his election, Johnson’s Deputy Mayor for Policing, Kit Malthouse, had been critical of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair. Within a few months of Johnson’s election, Blair was gone. “Without the Mayor’s backing I do not think I can continue to do my job,” he explained.

Officially, Home Secretaries hire and fire Met chiefs. Johnson and Malthouse had shown that, in reality, Mayors too have a way to get rid of them. Mayor Khan underlined the point in 2022 when one of Blair’s successors, Dame Cressida Dick, announced she would be leaving the role, saying it was clear to her that she had lost Khan’s confidence.

Mayors have acquired greater powers of scrutiny over the Met over the years, being allowed to appoint the chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority from 2008 (Johnson took on the role himself for a couple of years) and then being handed direct control of Met accountability with the creation, in 2011, of the Mayor’s Office for Crime and Policing (a provision of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act (2011). More change was to come.

12. London Underground “nationalised”

In his recently-released book, transport expert and Livingstone-era former TfL board member Stephen Glaister documents his case that the public-private partnership arrangement ushered by the Blair government to pay for badly-needed upgrades to the Tube was “no way to run a railway”. Mayor Livingstone felt the same way, but it was not until Johnson became Mayor that maintenance of the tube came back “in house” in 2010. “Why haven’t you written more about me nationalising the Tube?” he cheerily demanded of me one day.

13. The London Riots

It all began after a police officer shot dead 29-year-old Mark Duggan in Tottenham on 4 August 2011. Riots followed in several parts of the capital and beyond. Mayor Johnson was on holiday. Not everyone thought he went out of his way to hurry back. When he did return, he visited Clapham Junction, brandished a broom and thanked everyone who had come out to volunteer to clean up the mess. It was all very “Boris”.

14. The Localism Act

It became law in November 2011 and put more levers at London Mayors’ disposal. They included taking over from the national Homes and Communities agency the ability to purchase land and allocate affordable homes funding to housing associations and councils, and the power to established Mayoral Development Corporations (MDCs) in defined parts of Greater London in order to facilitate development programmes.

The first MDC embraced the Olympic Park and its environs, and resulting in, among other things, the evolving East Bank education and culture hub next door to Stratford. The second took in Old Oak and Park Royal. Mayor Khan intends to to use the same mechanism to implement a transformation of Oxford Street.

15. The zip wire

London 2012 was a huge success, memorable for all sorts of reasons, not only sport.

16. Bicycle lanes

Although East Bank will be completed under Sir Sadiq Khan, it should arguably be recognised as his predecessor’s greatest legacy. Johnson, will, however, probably continue to be most remembered more for a bespoke new bus, variously termed the “New Routemaster” or the “Boris Bus”, and for launching a programme of dedicated cycle tracks, including segregated ones, beginning from November 2013. That policy has been continued and expanded by Mayor Khan.

17. Sadiq Khan becomes Mayor

Despite enduring a dirty campaign by Tory challenger Zac Goldsmith, which sought to exploit anxieties about Islamist extremism, on 5 May, 2016 the Labour bus driver’s son from Tooting became London’s third Mayor and the first Muslim Mayor of a major European city, winning by a big margin.

18. Terror, turbulence and disaster

In 2017, Mayor Khan had to respond to a string of horrifying events that took place in the capital. There were Islamist terror attacks on Westminster Bridge, London Bridge and a less deadly but still serious one at Parson’s Green. The Finsbury Park mosque was attacked by a far-Right terrorist. The Grenfell Tower fire took place.

Before that, in November 2016, the Croydon tram crash had occurred. Also during his earliest months in power, Khan took part in the campaign to stay in the European Union and then framed the pro-Remain capital’s reaction to the Leave outcome of the June 2016, launching a London Is Open campaign. Each of these major events have, like 7/7 and the 2011 riots, demonstrated the part of a Mayor’s job that is being the voice of Londoners.

19. The pandemic

Khan had barely launched his campaign for a second term at City Hall when London bore the initial brunt of Covid-19’s arrival in Britain. His re-election triumph was postponed for a year in which the capital went into lockdown and London government moved largely online.As well as being deeply traumatic for the city, the pandemic period exposed and aggravated tensions between the Conservative government, led by the former Mayor Johnson, and the Khan mayoral administration.

Khan was not invited to a COBR meeting, at which responses to major national crises are determined, until 16 March 2020, just a week before Prime Minister Johnson ordered the population to stay at home to help prevent the spread of the disease.

The resulting near-complete collapse of income from public transport fares pushed TfL to the point of financial collapse and forced it to seek emergency financial help from national government, which attached so many strings to a succession of short-term deals it effectively imposed its own priorities on London’s directly-elected Mayor.

It was a reminder that just as devolved powers can be bestowed from on high, they can also be casually taken away.

20. Vote fiddling

The Elections Act (2022) abolished the Supplementary Vote electoral system Londoners had been using to pick their Mayors ever since Mayors had been invented. It gave electors the freedom to opt for both a first and a second preference candidate and gave election winners stronger mandates than could be attained through the First Past The Post method. Former head of the civil service, Bob Kerslake, wrote of the Conservative government: “It is hard to see any other reason for them doing this than perceived electoral advantage.”

21. The Elizabeth line

When the central section of the railway formerly referred to as Crossrail went into operation on 24 May, 2022, having been officially opened by the monarch after which it was named, it was the end of a late-running and sometimes fractious journey. The job was meant to have been finished four years earlier. Who was to blame for the delays?

There was more finger-pointing between the government and the Mayor, though part of the problem may have been – to put it crudely – that being co-sponsors of the project meant neither had a proper grip of it. When appointed TfL commissioner two years earlier, Andy Byford had made getting the Elizabeth line going one of his top priorities. In October 2020, TfL took control of its complex final stages. Things went more smoothly after that.

22. The Casey Review

The abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer, Wayne Couzens, in March 2021, was but the most sickening of a string of dark episodes involving London police officers during a period that saw Cressida Dick depart. Baroness Louise Casey was appointed to conduct a review of the Met’s culture and standards of behaviour. Her final report, published in March 2023, was damning.

In line with one of Casey’s recommendations, Mayor Khan set up the London Policing Board, whose meetings the current Met Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley attends. Rowley, Dick’s successor since July 2022, has had some success with turning the service around.

Meanwhile, London Mayors’ blurry job share with the Home Office continues. Some contend that Mayors are expected to accept a lot of blame for crime rates in London while having relatively little power to reduce them – not to mention a growing responsibility for funding the Met. The case is also made for relieving the Met of its national responsibilities so that it can become London’s police service alone and accountable only to its Mayor.

23. The ULEZ goes Londonwide

London’s Ultra-Low Emission Zone was a little policy acorn planted by Mayor Johnson before he left City Hall, which Mayor Khan has grown into a Londonwide oak tree, having first expanded it out to the North and South Circular roads. The full ULEZ came into effect in August 2023 in the face of months on end of Tory and right-wing media hostility, making it the largest clean air zone in the world – another first for the London mayoralty.

24. Khan’s hat trick

He won his third term last May, making history by doing so, comfortably defeating his Tory challenger and slightly increasing his support in most of outer London, which his enemies supposed would rise up against the second ULEZ expansion. Later, he was made a sir.

25. The Silvertown tunnel

For decades, schemes for a new road crossing east of Tower Bridge had been devised and faltered. The Silvertown tunnel was one of the few big infrastructure schemes Boris Johnson didn’t cull in the name of efficiency in 2008, and it has taken Sir Sadiq to deliver it. Not everyone is happy about it. But it exists and it is tolled, as is its dirty old Blackwall neighbour. Will it pay off? Time will tell.

End notes

Thanks to London nerd friends who came up with suggestions at short notice. I might also have included the dawning of the Hopper fare in 2016 (originally a Liberal Democrat idea), the rise of The Shard (assisted by Mayor Livingstone), the use of the Mayoral Community Infrastructure Levy to help fund the Elizabeth line, the devolving of the adult education budget from 2019, and things that make people cross, like the cable car at the Royal Docks – the location to which Mayor Khan relocated City Hall in May 2022. But you can’t have everything.

For a more complete and scholarly account of the Greater London Authority’s powers and workings, see Mark Sandford’s excellent House of Commons Library briefing.