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Sadiq Khan has launched his campaign to be re-elected Mayor of London with a vow to boost council housing as the UK capital’s most senior politician warned supporters not to assume he would win a third term.

The Labour mayor said at a press conference on Monday that the result of the election could be the “closest ever”, despite some polls giving him a huge lead over Susan Hall, his Conservative challenger.

Khan pledged to deliver 40,000 new council homes in the capital by 2030 — double a previous target — if he was returned to City Hall, in what he called the “greatest council homebuilding drive in a generation”.

The London mayoralty is one of a series of local contests on May 2 that will be heavily scrutinised for signs of the likely outcome of the general election expected in the autumn.

More than 2,600 council seats will be up for grabs in 107 councils, along with elections in 10 combined mayoral authority areas and for police and crime commissioners across England and Wales. There are no council elections in Scotland.

The Conservatives are expected to fare badly, not least because the party did especially well the last time these elections were held in 2021, when then prime minister Boris Johnson was enjoying a Covid-19 “vaccine bounce”.

Apart from London, attention will focus on how the Tories are faring in “red wall” areas such as Bolton and the mayoral contests in the West Midlands and Tees Valley. Andy Street and Lord Ben Houchen respectively are fighting to keep their jobs as the party’s only directly elected mayors.

“Andy is facing a really difficult fight given where the national polling is right now, and it won’t be a walkover for Ben either,” said one cabinet minister.

However, Street suggested he still believed that he could defy the national polls, saying: “My prediction . . . is that voters here are willing to distinguish between what is going on nationally and deciding who is best placed to deliver their services on the ground.”

According to a briefing on Monday by Tory peer and psephologist Lord Robert Hayward and polling company Savanta, the Conservatives had a “national equivalent vote” of 40 per cent in the 2021 elections compared with Labour on 30 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 15 per cent.

Now the Financial Times general election poll tracker gives Labour a national lead of 20 points, with some surveys putting the Tories on only 20 points.

Khan, who was first elected mayor in 2016, said he could accelerate the pace of housebuilding in London — an important issue for voters — in lockstep with “a new Labour government” led by the party’s national leader Sir Keir Starmer. 

Although London has traditionally supported Labour, the party lost out to Johnson between 2008 and 2016.

Khan said new compulsory voter identification rules — first introduced in May last year — risked damaging his chances of re-election.

The London Assembly last month said the capital had a “higher population” of some groups deemed less likely to meet the new requirements, “including ethnic minority voters and younger voters”.

Khan also warned that changes to the voting system in the capital from a form of proportional representation to a “first past the post” system put the election “on a knife edge”.

However, the Labour candidate remains by far the bookmakers’ favourite to win in May, with William Hill offering bets on his victory at 1:33 odds-on.

A YouGov poll in February for the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary University of London gave Khan a 25-point lead over Hall, at 49 per cent to 24 per cent respectively. 

Khan said he had stood up for London’s “values of openness, equality and inclusion”. He cited as his greatest achievements freezing rail and bus fares, putting more police on the streets and giving all primary-age children free school meals.

But Hall said Khan was “still not listening” after eight years in power. “He has . . . allowed crime to soar and imposed his disastrous Ulez expansion tax against the wishes of Londoners,” she said, referring to the bigger low-emissions zone in the capital.

If the Conservatives sustain a battering, Downing Street is braced for a possible new threat to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s leadership, particularly from disillusioned right-wing MPs.

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