‘Our report shows how desperate the Mayor is to impose this unjust tax on Londoners’-Keith Prince AM.
GLA Conservatives have today released documents that reveal that Sadiq Khan made ‘false and dishonest’ statements to the London Assembly on six occasions.
- Sadiq Khan and his deputy Seb Dance told the London Assembly that they had not been briefed in advance on the ULEZ consultation results, when asked repeatedly by Peter Fortune AM at public meetings. Internal correspondence and secret documents released today reveal that this was untrue and dishonest.
- Nick Rogers AM, GLA Conservatives transport spokesperson, has submitted a formal complaint about Sadiq Khan’s misconduct to the Greater London Authority Monitoring Officer. The Mayor is expected to face an investigation into his behaviour.
- The documents also show thousands of responses, 90% of which opposed the expansion, were secretly and improperly excluded from the final ULEZ consultation results after an intervention by the Mayor’s senior advisers. The intervention lowered the overall level of opposition in the final count by 3 percentage points (from 62% to 59%).
Sadiq Khan made ‘false and dishonest’ statements to the London Assembly on six occasions, as newly released documents expose a secret campaign by the Mayor’s office to manipulate the results of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) consultation.
Internal correspondence released today proves that the Mayor was secretly briefed on the ULEZ consultation results on 29 September, contrary to his repeated and dishonest denials to the London Assembly. His senior advisers were also regularly briefed.
Nick Rogers AM has made a formal complaint against Sadiq Khan to the Greater London Authority Monitoring Officer, the statutory officer responsible for investigating any allegations of misconduct by the Mayor or London Assembly Members.
The documents released today have exposed “The ULEZ Scandal,” and comprise over 200 pages of internal correspondence and documents from the Mayor’s senior advisers and TfL directors during the final weeks of the ULEZ consultation process.
Seb Dance, the deputy mayor for transport, also made false and dishonest statements to the London Assembly when he denied on three occasions receiving the ULEZ consultation results in advance. In fact, the documents reveal that he and Shirley Rodrigues, deputy mayor for the environment, received weekly updates on the results alongside the Mayor’s senior advisers.
The correspondence reveals the Mayor’s office intervened in the consultation process, which skewed the results and reduced the percentage opposed to Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ expansion.
This included a decision at the end of the consultation to secretly exclude thousands of responses from the final results. So-called ‘campaign responses’ from ULEZ expansion opponents Fair Fuel UK and pro-ULEZ group Living Streets were not counted as responses to the main questionnaire, while ‘campaign responses’ from the remaining pro-ULEZ campaign groups were accepted.
This intervention lowered the level of opposition in the final count by 3 percentage points (from 62% to 59%).
The Mayor’s office also used the interim results to launch a £165,000 digital marketing campaign in the final weeks of the consultation, focused on demographics more likely to support the ULEZ expansion, and tracked the impact it had on the final count.
And the documents reveal the Mayor spent public funds commissioning a YouGov poll in the final weeks of the consultation to re-run the main question, after his office was made aware of the level of opposition in the interim results.
Consultations by public bodies have status in law, and any improper interference in the results could be unlawful.
Havering and Redbridge GLA member Keith Prince told the Havering Daily:”Our report shows how desperate the Mayor is to impose this unjust tax on Londoners.
“We, the Conservatives have exposed that there is no health benefit to this tax and that they Mayor’s office have had to lie and cheat in order to try and justify it.
“Unlike any other party we are committed to standing up for the less well off, businesses and charities to stop this injustice.”
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*no health benefit to this tax* Keith Prince isn’t unintelligent but making two errors in 6 words is an amazing achievement even for an embittered Conservative. He’s parked his brains in a locker and forgotten the key. Claiming there are *no* health benefits from removing clapped out 18 year old cars from the roads isn’t just wrong it’s willfully wrong. This is lethal politics. Prince then goes on to say *this tax*. This is beyond stupid. To misunderstand what a tax is when he’s been Leader of Redbridge Council and a GLA member is breathtaking. But, of course, Prince does know what a tax is and this is just shroud waving right-wing extremist ranting. Actually he’s getting to be quite expert at this. Perhaps he wants to lead the Conservative group in Havering?
Rather than introduce genuine democratic voting reform, Labour and Conservative promote pretend reform called “statutory consultation” and there has been considerable “statutory consultation” about everything.
But its really just expensive window dressing as although there is a statutory duty to consult, there isn’t a statutory duty to listen, hence a decision can be legally made irrespective of the outcome of a “statutory consultation”.
In practice ‘decision makers’ will listen, but only if you agree, not if you don’t, but it becomes a bit embarrassing if they proceed with little support and so “consultations” are manipulated to provide the correct or less disagreeable response.
However a failure to ‘fully and correctly consult’ becomes grounds for a Judicial Review and if a Judge finds the decision wasn’t correctly made, they can direct the decision to be made again requiring a properly conducted “statutory consultation”.
The important point is a JR cannot overturn a decision to do something, but only ensure a decision is correctly made following properly conducted “statutory consultation” and this means the outcome of another “statutory consultation” can be ignored too and so at best its an expensive delaying tactic.
In short rather than bogus “statutory consultation” we need to abolish the post of Elected Mayor of London (how can one person hold Executive power in a City bigger than many countries?) and reform the GLA, returning power to the elected Assembly, providing effective representation for outer-London areas.
However the problem remains, both “Net Zero” Mayor and Government support the expansion of ULEZ!