About the elections

On 6 May 2021, Londoners voted for:

• the Mayor of London
  Voters made a first choice and could also make a second choice – often referred to as a first and second preference.
• a Constituency Assembly Member
  The person the voter wanted to represent their local area on the 25 Member London Assembly. There are 14 Constituencies in all, each with one seat on the Assembly. Constituencies are made up of between two and four London boroughs.
• a party to take up one of 11 London-wide seats on the Assembly (London-wide Assembly Members, also known as ‘London Members’)
  Each party submitted in advance of the election a list of candidates to take up any seats it won.

There were three separate ballot papers and three different voting systems.

The Mayor of London and London-wide Assembly Member results drew on the total numbers of votes cast across the whole of London in the two respective elections. Constituency Assembly Members were elected based only on the votes cast in the Constituency.

All the votes were counted – electronically – at Constituency level. Seven Constituency counts were held on the 7th May, and the remaining seven on the 8th May. Once a Constituency count had finished, the relevant Constituency Returning Officer declared the winner of the Constituency Assembly Member contest. The Returning Officer also gave ‘public notice’ of the number of votes cast in that Constituency for the candidates in the Mayor of London contest (first and second choice votes); and each party standing in the London-wide Assembly Member contest.

Once the counting had finished in all 14 Constituencies, the 14 sets of the Mayor of London totals were added together and the results and winner were announced by the Greater London Returning Officer, Mary Harpley, at City Hall, on the evening of the 8th May.

Similarly, the 14 sets of London-wide totals for the Mayor of London and the London-wide Assembly Member contests were brought together, the rules applied. The results and the 11 winning London-wide candidates were again announced by the Greater London Returning Officer on the evening of the 8th May.

About this factsheet and where to find out more

This factsheet sets out and explains the high-level results of the 6 May 2021 elections for the Mayor of London & London Assembly.

The results page of this website provides an overview of the outcome of the elections. You can also download the result and local total sheets for each Constituency, showing:

• the declared result of the Constituency Assembly Member contest (i.e. which candidate won) and the number of votes each candidate received;
• the number of votes each party received in the London-wide Assembly Member election;
• the number of first and second choice votes each candidate received in the Mayor of London election;
• the number of rejected ballot papers in each of the three elections, broken down into categories;
• turnout in each of the three elections;
• and, the overall results sheets for the London-wide Assembly Member election and for the Mayor of London election.

There are also detailed breakdowns available to download, including:

• a matrix showing, for each Mayor of London candidate, the second choice votes received correlated to the candidate the voter gave their first choice to;
• votes cast for each candidate and party in each of London’s 33 local authorities and, within each local authority, by ward;
• the electorate and turnout at local authority and ward level.

Other things you can find out about on this website include:

• the three different voting systems used in the elections;
• the candidates, including full lists of the candidates that stood in the Mayor of London & London Assembly elections;
• the process candidates had to go through to stand

Mayor of London results

Twenty candidates stood in the Mayor of London election. The Mayor was elected using the supplementary vote system. The number of first and second choice votes each candidate received was:

Had a candidate received more than 50 per cent of the total good first choice votes, they would have been elected without considering second choice votes. No candidate did so. The candidate with the highest number of first choice votes, Sadiq Khan, gained 40 per cent of the total first choice votes for all candidates (1,013,721 as a percentage of 2,531,357).

Therefore, the winner was decided by adding together the first choice votes received by the top two candidates, Sadiq Khan and Shaun Bailey, and the second choice votes that those candidates had received where the voter gave their first choice to one of the other eighteen candidates.

Sadiq Khan received 192,313 of these second choice votes. Shaun Bailey received 84,550 of these second choice votes. The table below shows how these two figures relate to the total number of second choice votes.

The calculation to determine the winning candidate was:

Sadiq Khan’s first and second choice vote total was the higher of the two candidates and he was therefore elected the new Mayor of London.

Candidates who received more than five per cent of all first-choice votes had their deposits returned:

Constituency Assembly Member results

The 14 Constituency Assembly Members were elected through 14 separate contests, each decided based on first past the post, with the candidate with the highest number of votes elected.

Labour Party candidates won nine seats; Conservative Party candidates won five seats:

Any candidate that gained more than five per cent of the Constituency vote had the £1,000 they had deposited with the Constituency Returning Officer returned.

London-wide Assembly Member results

Both political parties and individual (independent) candidates can stand in London-wide Assembly Member elections. In 2021, however, there were no independent candidates.

The 11 London-wide Assembly Member seats were allocated by the ‘additional member’ system.

Each party presents a ‘party list’ before the election, of up to 25 candidates. The party ranked the candidates when submitting their list, for example if the party won two seats, the first and second candidates on their list would take up the party’s two London-wide seats on the Assembly.

To allocate the seats, first the votes from across London in the London-wide Assembly Member election were added together. Parties that failed to secure more than five per cent of the total vote were eliminated. For the four parties highlighted above, 11 rounds of calculations were performed to determine the winner of each of the 11 seats. The calculation – called the Modified d’Hondt Formula – uses the number of London-wide Assembly votes for each party (the numerator in the formula), but also considers the number of Constituency Assembly Member seats each won (the denominator). In the second and subsequent rounds of calculations, the number of London-wide Assembly Member seats won by the party up to that point is added to the number of Constituency Assembly Member seats it won.

Total London-wide Assembly Member votes for the party
_______________________________________________

Constituency Assembly Member seats won + London-wide Assembly Member seats won + 1

The party with the highest figure once the calculation has been performed wins that seat – as shown below:

The Winning Candidates are:

Any party that gained more than 2.5 per cent of the total London-wide Assembly Member votes cast had the £5,000 it had deposited with the Greater London Returning Officer returned. There were four such parties – Conservatives, Green Party, Labour Party and Liberal Democrats.

The results of the Constituency and London-wide Assembly Member elections mean the distribution of seats on the 25 Member London Assembly for the 2021 to 2024 term is: