Sadiq Khan faces the prospect of a Conservative challenger from September at a time when there are concerns about knife crime, questions about Transport for London’s finances, and uncertainty about how far the capital’s mayor is able to address the housing crisis.

Khan has completed more than half his term of office and while there is widespread support for his “London United” response to last year’s terror attacks in Westminster and London Bridge and his robust responses to Donald Trump, opposition politicians are critical of his record on crime, transport and housing.

So far this year, there have been more than 60 murder investigations in London, and, while the long-term trend has been for crime to fall, there have been times this year – as in February and in March – where there were fewer homicides in the traditionally more violent city of New York. Of those, an estimated 37 have been stabbings – with some nights of multiple stabbings – as police chiefs and council leaders talk about an upsurge in violence related to the crack cocaine trade.

Khan has been accused of failing on his election pledge to “make London safer”, although he announced an as yet largely unspent £45m knife crime fund in February. But in response to the criticisms, the mayor told the Guardian he is not getting enough money from central government for policing. “I’ve been saying since I first became mayor, I’m concerned about the unsustainability of policing in London; we’ve lost £730m from the Met police budget and over the next three years we’ll lose £335m. So that’s a billion pounds.”

So far, despite the financial pressures, the Met has managed to maintain officer numbers. Figures produced by the House of Commons library show there were 32,125 officers in April 2016, Boris Johnson’s last year of office; falling to 30,871 by September 2017. But the Met has warned that numbers could fall to 27,500 and Khan has put £110m from council tax and business rates into propping up its budget as government funding has fallen.

Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics, said: “The muddled nature of accountability for London policing, split between the mayor who sets budgets, the home secretary who provides money and decides policy, and the commissioner who handles operations, makes it hard for anybody to decide who has responsibility for crime in the capital. But it is the mayor [that] has to be elected next and it is he who will end up taking the flak.”

Funding also looms over London’s transport budget. Khan’s popular election promise to freeze tube and bus fares, and introduce a single hopper fare for multiple bus journeys made within an hour has, according to Conservatives, blown a £640m hole in TfL’s finances. Northern and Jubilee line train upgrades have been axed and non-essential road improvements, including some pothole repairs, have had to be halted for at least two years. Meanwhile, bus and tube use in London is falling, adding to the financial pressures.

However, Khan said TfL is “the only public transport system in the western world not supported financially by central government” and blames Boris Johnson for agreeing with then chancellor George Osborne to remove £700m of national subsidy. On the fare pledge, he said: “I don’t apologise for freezing TfL fares. Eight years before I became mayor, TfL fares went up by 42%, we pay the highest public transport fares of any city in western Europe.”

Many Londoners also want to see the housing crisis resolved. In Khan’s draft London Plan, which sets a policy framework in the capital, the pace of housebuilding should increase to 66,000 homes a year from the current 29,000 and half of those need to be affordable, defined as as being rented for no more than a third of average earnings, or under shared ownership schemes.



But the development environment remains fraught. Private developers show little willingness to build large quantities of affordable homes: despite Khan’s objections, a government-approved high-profile Sainsbury’s development of 700 homes in Ilford included just 4% affordable housing. London boroughs are largely withdrawing from public-private regeneration projects after the collapse of Haringey’s controversial HDV scheme with Lend Lease.

Khan admits it will not be possible to hit the 66,000 home target “without much more central government support” and says “so what we are going to do is build as many as we can”. The mayor says that just over 12,000 “genuinely affordable homes” began to be built in the 2017/18 financial year. However, Travers says the headline promise of 66,000 home builds a year would have been “better not made, because it will be used as a stick to beat the mayor with” and there is a growing feeling that in both Labour and Conservative circles, the system for house building in London isn’t working.

Tories such as Gareth Bacon, the leader of the party’s group on the Greater London Assembly, accuse Khan of repeatedly “finger pointing” at central government, prefiguring the essence of what could be an 18-month-long re-election campaign once the Conservatives have selected a candidate. But following Labour’s strong general election performance in the capital in 2017 which was largely – although not completely – replicated in recent local elections, Khan remains the favourite to repeat his 56.8% win in May 2016 if he is reselected by the London Labour party over the next year.

“I love being mayor, I want to be mayor for the foreseeable future,” he says.

