Susan Hall, centre, is taking on the Labour mayor Sadiq Khan for the Tories (Picture: PA)
The London Mayoral elections are due to take place on May 2.
Londoners will get their chance to vote for who they would like be the Mayor of London for the next four years.
Among the 13 candidates in the running are incumbent mayor Sadiq Khan and his top rival, Conservative Susan Hall.
Hall is aiming to block the Labour politician from bagging an unprecedented third term in the top role, but what will she do if she is successful?
What are Susan Hall’s policies?
Susan Hall has not yet launched her full manifesto for Mayor of London, but it may be on the way after Sadiq Khan revealed his yesterday.
Soon after she was announced as the Conservatives candidate in July last year, she put a list of five main priorities on her campaign website.
They give an indication of the most important issues she wants to tackle if she’s elected next month.
Here is a summary of her plan’s key points.
Ulez
Khan’s expansion of the Ulez has led to protests from some Londoners (Picture: PA)
On her website and across social media, Susan Hall has made it clear that scrapping Sadiq Khan’s controversial expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone is one of her top priorities.
Under the scheme, drivers in vehicles that don’t meet certain emissions standards are charged £12.50 a day when they travel in any of London’s 32 boroughs.
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It was first introduced by Boris Johnson and applied to an area around the centre of the capital, but Khan extended it to cover the entirety of Greater London in August last year.
Hall has pledged to reverse that decision on her first day in office.
To replace it, she wants to set up a ‘Pollution Hotspots fund’ worth £50 million, which would ‘tackle air pollution where it is’.
The website does not give details about what this money would go towards, but in an interview with the Telegraph last year Hall said this may involve widening roads to remove ‘pinch points’ and installing air filtration technology.
Crime
Hall has said she will boost police numbers by 1,500 if she wins next month (Credits: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Susan Hall has said she will ‘get a grip on crime’ as mayor, arguing that the capital does not feel safe after eight years with Sadiq Khan in charge.
She says she will bring back ‘borough-based policing’ by investing £200 million in bringing crime down and putting two extra bases in every borough.
Earlier this month, she pledged to put an extra 1,500 police officers on London’s streets if she’s elected – slightly more than the 1,300 promised by Khan.
Hall has said she would set up specialised units within the Metropolitan Police for tackling burglaries, robberies and thefts, while also recruiting a women’s commissioner to improve women’s safety in the city.
Her ’24 Hour London Strategy’ would, she says, help keep late-night revellers safe too.
Housing
Housing in London remains in short supply (Picture: Getty Images)
Susan Hall has accused her opponent Sadiq Khan of not building enough houses in the capital – and of not building the right sort of houses.
Her housing plan could ‘focus on beautiful, green, community-oriented places that are high density but not high rise’, according to her website.
She has also argued for the development of homes on public brown field sites, saying she would ‘unblock the barriers’ preventing that from happening.
To that end, she also promises to relaunch the London Land Commission, originally announced by then-Chancellor George Osborne in 2015.
It would work to identify brown field sites where more family homes could be built.
Environment
Electric and hybrid buses are used widely on London’s network (Picture: Getty Images)
While she’s keen to see housing pop up in London’s brown field sites, Susan Hall has said she will ‘fiercely protect’ the city’s green belt from overdevelopment.
More bus routes need to make the switch to electric vehicles, she says, and for ordinary EV drivers she pledges to boost the number of car charging points.
She also says she would work to ensure Transport for London (TfL) becomes carbon neutral.
Hall’s website says: ‘Renewable energy is the future, so that we can become a zero-carbon city. Under my Mayoralty, I will ensure TfL leads the way.’
London Underground
Hall has said she will improve safety on the Tube (Picture: Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Several of Susan Hall’s plans for London involve the Underground network.
She has said she would like to deploy more CCTV cameras on the Tube in an effort to improve women’s safety.
‘I’m hoping that people will feel safer, especially women,’ she told the Evening Standard.
‘With CCTV in those carriages, I think they would feel much safer, and happier to stay out later.’
Hall also wants to expand the Night Tube to incorporate more lines each weekend – the Hammersmith and City line would be added ‘as soon as possible’, and the District, Circle and Metropolitan lines ‘when feasible’.
That promise was immediately echoed by Khan after it was announced earlier this week.
Other promises made by Hall include getting TfL to carry out a review into the ‘poor air quality’ on the Underground, and bringing in harsher punishments for passengers who play music out loud or engage in ‘disruptive filming’.
What is Susan Hall’s background?
Susan Hall describes herself as a ‘Harrow girl done good’, having started off stripping down car engines while working in the garage owned by her dad.
She went on to marry a hairdresser, and later opened a salon named Enhance in the Wealdstone district of her home borough.
At one point, the business employed 20 people – a fact that seems to be included every time the salon is mentioned online.
Hall was first elected to public office in 2006, when she became a member of Harrow borough council.
In 2013, she became the council’s leader, a role she held until the following year.
Her next step up the ladder came in 2017, when she replaced a certain Kemi Badenoch as a London-wide Assembly Member.
Caption: Susan Hall manifesto – who is the Tory candidate for London mayor
Photographer: Stefan Rousseau
Provider: PA Images
Source: PA Archive(Credits: PA)
She became deputy leader of the assembly’s Conservative group in 2018, and the following year became leader – a role she held until May last year.
Across her time at City Hall, she has become known for her regular attacks on Sadiq Khan.
In a post on the website ConservativeHome last May, she said she had become the ‘world expert’ on Khan’s weaknesses: ‘His tense body language when he is taken off script, the way he lambasts his team for mistakes and saps their morale, and the deep-rooted insecurity that dictates his every decision.’
Hall has got into trouble over her activity on social media site X, formerly Twitter, in the past.
She replied to a 2019 tweet by Katie Hopkins that called Khan ‘our nipple height mayor of Londonistan’, saying: ‘Thank you Katie!’ – apparently endorsing a term for the capital used to suggest that Muslims are taking over.
In subsequent interviews, she said she did not remember sending the tweet and she was not aware of the implications of the term ‘Londonistan’.
Who is running for Mayor of London 2024?
There are 13 candidates standing in the election on May 2.
Below is the full list of candidates and the parties they represent as they will appear on the ballot when you go to vote:
Femy Amin, Animal Welfare Party
Count Binface, Count Binface for Mayor of London
Rob Blackie, Liberal Democrats
Natalie Campbell, Independent
Howard Cox, Reform UK
Amy Gallagher, Social Democratic Party
Zoe Garbutt, Green Party
Tarun Ghulati, Independent
Susan Hall, Conservative Party
Sadiq Khan, Labour Party
Andreas Michli, Independent
Brian Rose, London Real Party
Nick Scanlon, Britain First
How do I vote for the Mayor of London 2024?
How will you be voting on May 2? (Credits: Reuters)
To be eligible to vote in the London mayoral election 2024, you must live in London, be registered to vote, and be over the age of 18.
The deadline to register to vote in the London Mayor is April 16 at 11.59pm.
For more information on how to do this, visit the London Elects website.
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