Open Council · Election Lens · 2026

London elects a new mayor and 14 ward councillors on October 26, 2026. This page is a lens laid over the real record on Open Council — every number and every link here comes from the same council-meeting data the rest of the site is built on. Nothing here is new information; it’s the existing record of the current council (2022–2026), organized around the questions an election raises.

Raw yea/nay votes don’t tell you much on their own — a “yea” on a motion to increase permitted density and a “yea” on a motion to remove where townhouses are allowed point in opposite directions. Every position summarized here has been translated into what the vote actually did, with the underlying motion linked so you can check the translation yourself.

This is a descriptive record of how the current council voted. It is not an endorsement of any candidate, and it does not tell you who to vote for.

Find your ward

New ward boundaries take effect for this election. Look up your current representative and what’s on your Oct 26 ballot →

What council actually controls

Zoning and the budget, yes. Policing and healthcare, mostly not. Read the plain-language breakdown, sourced line by line →

Divided votes by issue

These are the issues where council has actually split since 2023 — where a vote wasn’t unanimous, and wasn’t purely procedural. 487 additional divided motions since 2023 were independently classified as not fitting any of these tracked issue clusters, and are not force-fit into one; all of them are listed on the issues page.

Councillor stance profiles

Full voting pattern per councillor per issue, current council (the Mayor plus 14 ward councillors, 15 seats in total). Every pattern sentence links to its evidence.

Only sitting councillors appear here, because only sitting councillors have a council voting record to summarize. Challengers are not covered, and their absence from these pages is not a judgement about them. For everyone actually on your ballot, see the City Clerk’s certified list of candidates (linked on the ward finder).

Methodology: A “divided” vote is any council or committee motion since January 1, 2023 that wasn’t approved unanimously and wasn’t a routine procedural step, and it doesn’t include a vote decided by secret ballot to fill an appointment, since those don’t produce a recorded yea or nay by councillor. Every motion’s issue, axis, and direction (“what a yea did”) come from an independent, motion-by-motion review, checked against that motion’s own complete text in the official meeting record rather than a keyword search, with a small, separately published list of after-the-fact corrections applied on top — never a silent edit to the reviewed record. See the issues page for the exact counts and the unclassified/unclear disclosure.

4 meetings in this month.