London Mayor Sadiq Khan not only saw the consultation document before it was published but secretly manipulated the data contained within it to fit his plan.
Sadiq Khan has not only been found to have lied to City Hall, repeatedly, but also to have manipulated the data contained with the crucial ULEZ report, removing over 5000 objections submitted by residents.
According to the Conservative delegates of the London Assembly Khan saw the consultation document, well before it was published, and had the report altered to fit his political agenda.
Khan removed over 5000 objections that were originally included in the report, erasing them from the document before publishing the 'doctored' results.
Khan is seeking a huge expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), to envelope much of greater London which would see 90% of London's private vehicles charged £12.50 every time they venture into the zone.
The plan has already been met with huge opposition from both residents, businesses and motoring organisations, but Sadiq Khan has pushed through the plan. who will be penalised for merely owning or driving their own vehicle around their own city in Khan's plans.
Now Khan has been exposed for not only lying to the Assembly, but also manipulating data, and ignoring residents objections calls for him to go are growing.
At a Mayor’s Question Time session on October 13, Sadiq Khan told members he had not “seen or been briefed” on the consultation results. This however, was a lie. Official records from the Mayor's own office reveal that he had seen the consultation results and that following that briefing the report mysteriously changed, with some 5000+ registered objections to the scheme disappearing before publication.
Khan's reluctance to admit he had seen the findings may have been because the consultation results didn't support the ULEZ scheme. The conclusions were that the scheme would make negligible difference to London's air quality.
Conservative member of the London Assembly, Mr Rogers, said: “We now have overwhelming evidence that Sadiq Khan has committed serious misconduct, by violating the integrity of the consultation and improperly excluding thousands of legitimate responses.
"He approved scheme despite 59.4 per cent of respondents opposing it. 5,273 votes from motoring groups - equivalent to one in ten responses- ignored. If included, the level of opposition would have risen to 62.4 per cent"
When the idea was floated in May last year, Mr Khan pledged the Ulez expansion across Greater London would not proceed if there was ‘overwhelming’ opposition. Unfortunately the consultation showed that there was, so Khan simply removed the objections from the report making it look like voters were in favour of the scheme.
Peter Fortune, deputy leader of the Greater London Authority Conservatives, said the revelation revealed Mr Khan’s ‘contempt for the rules, his failure to follow due process and his disregard for the people’.
Nick Rogers, the Conservative assembly member for South West London, has lodged an official complaint with the GLA monitoring office for ‘multiple serious breaches of the code of conduct and the principles of public life’.
Last week it emerged Sutton Liberal Democrats, who control the outer London borough, had vowed to block the installation of cameras needed to enforce Ulez. Four other boroughs said they were considering legal action over the lawfulness of the decision to proceed.
A total of 47,502 responses were declared in the published result of the public consultation - 27,237 against, 18,733 for, and 532 ‘don’t knows’.
But emails between City Hall officials obtained under Freedom of Information rules showed thousands of votes were excluded on the basis they were ‘copy and paste’ responses ‘where the same blanket statement is sent to us by email or post’.
A spokesman for the Mayor said: ‘The Mayor made the decision after considering Transport for London’s full report on the consultation responses and a number of modifications were made to the scheme, based on feedback received in the consultation. ‘TfL takes its responsibility to run robust and legally compliant consultations extremely seriously and any suggestion that TfL or the Mayor has sought to influence the results of the Ulez consultation is simply untrue.’
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