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Eric Francis Manu · For Mayor of London 2028

Strategic Framework

The London Opportunity Agenda — a strategic framework for building a better London together.

This is a framework, not a manifesto.

THE SIX PILLARS

Where We Would Start

Six areas where London most urgently needs progress. The detail comes after the Listening Tour, because these should be shaped by Londoners rather than written before we have spoken to them.
01

Youth Employment, Skills & Opportunity

02

Housing & Affordability

03

Safer Communities

04

Transport & Connectivity

05

Jobs, Investment & Enterprise

06

A Cleaner, Greener London

OUR SIGNATURE COMMITMENT
PILLAR ONE

Youth Employment, Skills & Opportunity

Talent is spread evenly across this city. Opportunity is not.

Young Londoners are growing up a short bus ride from some of the finest employers in Europe and cannot find a way in. That is not a failure of ambition.
Where entry to a profession runs through an unpaid internship and a personal contact, the people who get in are the ones whose families can subsidise a summer in central London. That is not a talent market. It is an inheritance.
City Hall is not starting from nothing. The weakness is not absence — it is scale, coordination and visibility.
WHAT WE WOULD DO

The London Youth Guarantee.

Paid work, an accredited apprenticeship or a quality training place for every young Londoner within four months of leaving education or losing a job.

Sector Skills Academies, scaled.

Extended into construction, transport and logistics, with a guaranteed interview attached to completion. A course that ends in a certificate and silence has failed.

A London Levy Bridge.

City Hall as the broker that moves expiring apprenticeship funding to the small firms taking on young Londoners.

Opportunity conditions on City Hall land.

Where we are the landowner, the investor or the buyer, we can make employment and skills commitments a condition of the deal.
PILLAR TWO

Housing & Affordability

London cannot keep asking the people who run it to live further and further from it.

The gap is widest exactly where it hurts most: homes that working Londoners can genuinely afford. Nurses, teachers and transport staff are being priced out of the city they keep running.
WHAT WE WOULD DO

City Hall Homes.

Use mayoral land and development powers to build directly on underused public land.

A genuine affordability fast-track.

Accelerated support and planning certainty for schemes delivering homes that are truly within reach.

Key worker allocations.

Dedicated reservations in publicly funded schemes for the workers this city cannot run without.

Grey land, honestly defined.

Selective release of genuinely derelict industrial land near stations — with the definition published in advance, so it can never later be stretched to mean green space.
PILLAR THREE

Safer Communities

Safety is not a statistic. It is whether you change your route home.

Where the work is going well, we will say so and build on it rather than rebrand it. Being credible means being willing to give credit.
And too much of this risk is still carried by young people — most of it far closer to an ordinary street robbery than to the narrative that dominates the coverage.
WHAT WE WOULD DO

Sustain the public health approach.

Violence spreads like a contagion and can be interrupted like one. Build on what is working, do not rename it.

Somewhere to be after four o’clock.

Multi-year funding for youth centres, sports clubs and community anchors — multi-year, because annual grant cycles force good organisations to spend their spring writing applications instead of working with young people.

Youth workers where young people arrive injured.

Hospital-based intervention reaches people at the one moment they are most open to changing course.

A borough-by-borough safety review.

Written with residents rather than about them, covering the specific junctions and estates people actually avoid.
PILLAR FOUR

Transport & Connectivity

A short journey across outer London should not mean travelling into the centre and back out again.

Central London has world-class connectivity. Go further out and the orbital links thin dramatically. Underneath it sits a structural problem: transport funded in short settlements cannot be planned on the timescale railways actually take.
WHAT WE WOULD DO

Extend the Superloop.

Continue the orbital express network to link outer town centres, hospitals and rail interchanges directly.

Campaign for a long-term transport settlement.

So signalling, rolling stock and station renewals can be planned on the timescale they genuinely need.

Fares designed around people who cannot choose their hours.

For shift workers and apprentices, travel costs are a tax on the lowest-paid work in this city.

Judge every scheme by access.

Can a young person here reach a job, a college or an interview in reasonable time? If not, it is an opportunity failure before it is a transport failure.
PILLAR FIVE

Jobs, Investment & Enterprise

Investment measured in opportunity

Investment that creates no local opportunity is investment we compete for less hard.

High streets need demand as much as they need occupancy — catchment, local incomes and the number of people passing through. You do not fix a demand problem with a vacancy policy.
And the Mayor does not set business rates. Any campaign promising mayoral rate cuts is promising something it cannot deliver. We will not do it.
WHAT WE WOULD DO

An opportunity test on every investment.

Before City Hall backs a development or an investment package, one question is answered on the record: how many jobs, apprenticeships and training places does this create for Londoners, and in which boroughs?

A single front door for investors.

So a fund looking at a multi-site development is not negotiating separately with every borough in London.

Back the clusters outside the centre.

Life sciences, green technology and advanced logistics have natural homes in outer London and the Thames Estuary, where the land exists and the jobs are needed.

Demand-side high street support.

Footfall, events, transport access and local spending power, rather than assuming empty units are the binding constraint.

Campaign for business rates reform.

An advocacy commitment, correctly labelled.
PILLAR SIX

A Cleaner, Greener London

Where health inequality sits

Clean air is a children’s health policy that happens to be an environmental one.

The Mayor has no direct responsibility for health and care services in London. So we have placed health where mayoral power genuinely reaches: the air, the homes, the streets and the food environment. Claiming to run the NHS would be the fastest way to lose a debate.
WHAT WE WOULD DO

Protect and extend the air quality gains.

Low-emission zones around schools, with monitoring published at a level parents can look up for their own street.

Prevention where people already are.

Preventive health brought into community centres, leisure facilities and youth settings — convened and part-funded by City Hall, delivered with the partners who hold clinical responsibility.

Retrofit as a health programme.

Cold, damp housing is a respiratory issue. Retrofit is also one of the clearest apprenticeship pipelines available, which links this pillar straight back to Pillar One.

Green space where it is thinnest.

Prioritised by the places that need it most, rather than spread evenly for appearances.

Listen before leading.

The Listening Tour will change this framework. That is the point of it.

THE LISTENING TOUR
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