Member Article

Zac Goldsmith named Conservatives' 2016 London mayoral candidate

Winning by a landslide victory, Zac Goldsmith has been named as the Conservative Party’s London mayoral candidate for the 2016 election.

The Richmond Park and North Kingston MP stole 70% of the 9,227 votes cast in the election held this week.

Goldsmith beat both London Assembly Member Andrew Boff, MEP Syed Kamall and London’s deputy mayor for crime and policing Stephen Greenhalgh to win the nomination.

Last month, Sadiq Khan beat former cabinet minister a number of current MPs, including Tessa Jowell, to win the Labour nomination.

Current mayor Boris Johnson is set to step down in 2016, after fulfilling two years in office. next year after two terms in office.

He said: “Our living environment is facing increasing pressure, and we will need to protect, enhance and improve access to our green spaces, as well as radically improving the quality of the air that we breathe,

“You need land – and we have stacks of brownfield publicly-owned land… (TfL) alone owns land that, if you put it together, would be the equivalent of Camden. We can prise that land away from the public bodies and we can build on it.

“You need planning – that’s a political issue, a political problem which the mayor and the local authorities can deal with.

“You need finance and the one thing London is not short of is people wanting to invest in our property.

“Put those together and you can create a very ambitious house building programme for Londoners.

“The key is that you build well – it’s not all about quantity, it’s also about quality. If you build badly…you will exhaust Londoners’ appetite for development. It’s got to be done with community consent – it’s got to be done well.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ellen Forster .