ACCOUNTABILITY AND VALUE FOR MONEY
This chapter comes first among the policy chapters because it is the foundation of everything after it. A candidate earns the right to run this city by being trusted with its money and honest about its power. That trust is built here.
2.1 The case
Public money is not the government’s money. It is the taxpayer’s money, held in trust and spent on their behalf. City Hall has too often forgotten this, treating Londoners’ council tax as a limitless resource and their scrutiny as an inconvenience. I reject that entirely.
The Mayoralty is an executive office with a personal mandate. The powers listed in the previous chapter are held by the Mayor, not by a party group. The London Assembly scrutinises and can amend the budget only with a two-thirds majority. That is exactly why the discipline in this chapter matters: a Mayor with this much executive latitude must accept binding transparency, or the office invites abuse.
2.2 Transparency commitments
- My full meeting diary published every month, without exception.Covering every lobbying contact, every developer, every commercial interest and every organisation seeking to influence a mayoral decision. Published within thirty days of each month’s end. Cost: negligible, absorbed within existing GLA communications.
- A live public register of every campaign donation above five hundred pounds.Published as received, not in retrospective quarterly returns. No donation accepted from any foreign source, or any organisation with business before City Hall. Cost: negligible.
- No paid outside interests for the duration of the term.No second job, no consultancy, no directorships, no paid speaking. The Mayoralty of London is a full-time office and will be treated as one.
- The TfL and MOPAC budgets published in full, line by line, in machine-readable form.Not summary tables. The working budget, in a format any Londoner, journalist or researcher can interrogate. Indicative cost: estimated under one million pounds over the term.
- Every mayoral appointment above a defined salary threshold made through open competition and confirmed before the London Assembly.Ending appointment by patronage in the office of the Mayor.
2.3 Accountability commitments
- A public accountability session every quarter, held in a different borough.Open to any Londoner, questions unfiltered and unscreened, with a written response published to every substantive issue raised within twenty-eight days. Sixteen sessions across the term, covering sixteen boroughs. Indicative cost: estimated at three hundred thousand pounds annually.
- Attendance at every Mayor’s Question Time in person, and no use of the mayoral veto to avoid scrutiny.An open working relationship with the London Assembly regardless of its political composition.
- An annual published progress report against every commitment in this manifesto.Each marked delivered, in progress or not achieved, with reasons given. Published each year, with a final reckoning at the end of the term.
2.4 A war on waste
Every pound spent on managerialism, vanity projects and duplicated bureaucracy is a pound not spent on lit streets, open youth centres and visible police. A responsible Mayor treats waste as the enemy of good public services, not a regrettable side effect of them.
- An external value-for-money review of the entire GLA group in the first hundred days, published in full.Commissioned from a body the Mayor does not appoint. Indicative cost: two million pounds, repaid many times over in savings.
- A cap on senior City Hall headcount and communications spending, with every restructuring reported publicly.Direct within the GLA. Savings redirected to front-line commitments in this manifesto.
- Procurement reform across the GLA group, with open competition, published contracts and stricter bidding guidelines.Net saving. The purchasing power of a group spending billions annually is a discipline, not a slush fund.