The frustration driving the question is real. Knife crime has dominated London headlines for the better part of a decade. The Ultra Low Emission Zone expansion hit hundreds of thousands of outer London households with a daily charge they did not vote for. Housing in the capital remains out of reach for most people who grew up here. And Sadiq Khan is still at City Hall, with two years of his current term ahead.
He is still London’s mayor because, on 4 May 2024, he won his third consecutive mayoral election with 1,088,225 votes and an 11-point lead over Conservative candidate Susan Hall. British law sets no limit on how many terms a London mayor can serve. There is no recall mechanism between elections, no public override, and no parliamentary instrument that removes a sitting mayor outside of a criminal conviction. Win the ballot, hold the job.
That is the direct answer. What follows explains everything behind it.
Table of Contents
The Law Gives London’s Mayor No Term Limit and No Recall Process
Under the Greater London Authority Act 1999, the Mayor of London serves four-year fixed terms with no cap on re-election. The London Assembly can scrutinise and reject the mayor’s annual budget, but only on a two-thirds majority vote, a threshold it has never reached against Khan.
No recall election process exists at the mayoral level.
Ken Livingstone served two terms. Boris Johnson served two terms. Khan has now won three, making him the first person in the history of the role to do so. His current term runs to May 2028.
He Won the May 2024 Election by 11 Points
The 2024 London mayoral election, held on 2 May, was the first to use first-past-the-post after the Elections Act 2022 replaced the old supplementary vote rules under which Londoners previously ranked candidates.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sadiq Khan | Labour | 1,088,225 | 43.8% |
| Susan Hall | Conservative | 812,397 | 32.7% |
| Rob Blackie | Liberal Democrat | 145,184 | 5.8% |
| Zoรซ Garbett | Green | 145,114 | 5.8% |
Source: House of Commons Library
Hall had positioned herself on the right of her party, publicly backing Liz Truss and Donald Trump in the run-up to the vote. Reports during the campaign showed she had liked social media posts referencing Enoch Powell and using Islamophobic language about Khan. Several senior Conservatives distanced themselves from her campaign.
Khan framed the race as a two-candidate contest, consolidated the progressive vote, and won the inner London boroughs of Hackney, Lambeth, and Newham by margins Hall’s outer London support base could not close. Turnout was 40.5%.
The Bus Driver’s Son from Earlsfield: Three Decades in Politics
Sadiq Aman Khan was born on 8 October 1970 in Tooting, south London, to Pakistani immigrant parents who arrived in Britain in 1968. His father drove a London bus for 25 years; his mother worked as a seamstress. Khan grew up the fifth of eight children in a three-bedroom council flat on the Henry Prince Estate in Earlsfield.
He qualified as a solicitor in 1994 after studying law at the University of North London, and built a practice in human rights cases brought largely against the police and government departments. At 27 he was a partner at law firm Christian Khan. He also chaired the civil liberties group Liberty for three years.
His route into politics ran through Wandsworth council, where he served as a Labour councillor from 1994 to 2006, before winning the Tooting parliamentary seat at the 2005 general election. In his first term at Westminster, The Spectator, then edited by Boris Johnson, named him parliamentary Newcomer of the Year for opposing Tony Blair’s 90-day detention proposals without charge.
Under Gordon Brown, Khan became Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities in 2008, then Minister of State for Transport in 2009, becoming the first Muslim in British history to attend Cabinet-level government meetings. Under Ed Miliband he served as Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and Shadow Lord Chancellor.
He entered the 2016 mayoral race with a decade of frontbench Westminster experience. He beat Conservative Zac Goldsmith with 56.8% of the second-round vote under the old supplementary vote system. Goldsmith’s campaign, which attempted to link Khan to Islamic extremism, was condemned by several senior Conservatives including Baroness Warsi as race-based. Khan was re-elected in 2021 with 55.2% of the vote.
London Crime Statistics: What the 2025 Data Shows
Crime is the most persistent point of criticism aimed at Khan, and the figures are used selectively by both his critics and his defenders.
The legitimate criticisms on record:
- Overall crime in London rose every year from 2016 to 2020
- Knife crime went from 10,149 offences in Khan’s first year to a peak of 15,552 in 2017-18, and stood at 12,786 in 2023-24, still 26% above where it started
- 36 police stations closed during his tenure
What the Metropolitan Police published in January 2026:
There were 97 homicides in London in 2025, an 11% reduction from 109 in 2024 and the lowest total since 2014. This happened while London’s population grew by more than half a million over the same period.
| City | Homicide Rate per 100,000 |
|---|---|
| London | 1.1 |
| Toronto | 1.6 |
| Milan | 1.6 |
| New York | 2.8 |
| Berlin | 3.2 |
Source: Metropolitan Police, January 2026
Violent incidents resulting in injury fell by a fifth in 2025. Firearms discharges are less than half of what they were seven years ago. The Met achieved a 95% homicide solve rate last year.
There is also a constitutional point that rarely makes it into public debate. Under the Greater London Authority Act 1999, the Mayor sets the strategic direction for the Metropolitan Police but has no control over day-to-day operations. The Met Commissioner is appointed by the Home Secretary, not the Mayor. Attributing all crime statistics to Khan directly overstates what the role legally allows him to do.
Khan established the Violence Reduction Unit in 2019, the first of its kind in England and Wales. By 2025 it had delivered more than 550,000 targeted interventions with young people. Of those under 18 arrested for a violent offence and then engaged by a VRU youth worker, nearly 90% did not reoffend within the following 12 months, according to City Hall data backed by a Home Office evaluation published in 2025. Teenage homicides fell to 8 in 2025, the joint lowest figure in nearly 30 years and a 73% reduction since 2021.
Five Councils Took Khan to Court Over ULEZ. They Lost on Every Ground.
The August 2023 expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone to all 32 London boroughs was Khan’s most divisive policy decision. The ยฃ12.50 daily charge for non-compliant vehicles hit outer London hardest, where car dependency is higher and public transport alternatives are fewer.
A coalition of five councils, including Bromley, Bexley, Hillingdon, and Harrow, challenged the expansion in the High Court. In July 2023, Mr Justice Swift dismissed the case on all three grounds in Hillingdon LBC v Mayor of London [2023] EWHC 1972, ruling the expansion “was within his powers.”
The City Hall one-year report, published in March 2025 and reviewed by an independent expert panel, recorded the following from measured air quality data:
- Roadside NO2 concentrations 27% lower across London compared to a scenario without the ULEZ
- 54% lower in central London, 29% in inner London, 24% in outer London
- Monitoring sites exceeding the UK’s annual legal NO2 limit: down from 56 in 2016 to just 5 in 2023
- Hours when NO2 exceeded the UK’s hourly legal limit: down 99%, from 4,130 hours in 2016 to 22 hours in 2023
- Vehicle compliance: 96.7% by September 2024, up from 39% in February 2017
- For the most deprived communities near London’s busiest roads: an estimated 80% reduction in people exposed to illegal pollution levels
The Policy Record Across Nine Years at City Hall
Housing
Between 2016 and 2023, work started on 116,000 genuinely affordable homes in London, exceeding the government-set target. More than 23,000 council homes were begun in the same period, the highest rate since the 1970s. The proportion of affordable housing on planning applications approved by Khan doubled from 22% in Boris Johnson’s final year to 43%. Overall housing delivery averages 36,000 homes per year under Khan, compared to 26,000 under Johnson.
The criticism is also grounded in data: London builds roughly 15,000 homes a year below its own plan target of 52,000, and more than 300,000 households remain on social housing waiting lists.
Free School Meals
Since 2023, all state primary school pupils in London receive free lunches regardless of household income, funded at ยฃ140 million per year by City Hall. By November 2025, the programme had passed 100 million meals served, saving families an estimated ยฃ1,500 per child across primary school years.
Transport
The Elizabeth Line, opened under Khan’s mayoralty, is widely regarded across party lines as the most significant addition to London’s rail network in a generation. The Hopper fare allows unlimited bus and tram travel within one hour on a single payment. London now operates the largest zero-emission bus fleet in western Europe, with over 1,800 electric and hydrogen buses in service.
A Knighthood in 2025, Peerage Rumours in 2026, and a Running Rift with Starmer
In January 2025, Khan was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours for political and public service, becoming the first and only Mayor of London ever to receive a knighthood.
In March 2026, the Financial Times reported, citing sources familiar with internal discussions, that Prime Minister Keir Starmer was considering offering Khan a seat in the House of Lords after May’s local elections, describing it internally as a way to “shore up” the PM’s position during a period of significant political pressure. Labour was facing projected losses to Reform UK, the Greens, and the SNP across council, Senedd, and Scottish Parliament elections. Downing Street called the reports “speculation.” Khan’s office declined to comment.
Khan has not been an easy ally for Starmer. After Labour finished third in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February 2026, Khan wrote in The Guardian that the national party needed to “fundamentally rethink its approach,” pushing in particular for Labour to move further toward rejoining EU trading structures. On 22 April 2026, he told Bloomberg that replacing Starmer this year would be “folly.”
Khan’s term does not expire until May 2028. For that to change, he would need to resign or accept an appointment elsewhere, two steps he has shown no public interest in taking. Before the 2024 election, he told LBC that being mayor was “the best job in politics.”
For anyone still asking why Sadiq Khan holds the mayoralty, the law and the ballot box are returning the same answer: he keeps winning the only vote that counts, and nothing in British law exists to stop him from doing so.
All figures and data in this article are sourced from the House of Commons Library, City Hall (london.gov.uk), the Metropolitan Police, the Home Office, the Institute for Government, the High Court judgment Hillingdon LBC v Mayor of London [2023] EWHC 1972, and Transport for London. All information is current as of 30 April 2026.
