Our recommendation that our voters cast their second vote for Ken Livingstone is for an insurance vote to stop the Tory candidate Boris Johnson whose anti-social and anti-environment views and policies we believe would be a disaster for London.

But the elections on May 1 are about more than just the Mayor. There are 25 Assembly seats available and the Green party hopes to gain at least 4 of these. In the last term our 2 seats have allowed us to drive a hard bargain over Ken Livingstone’s budget every year, where he needs our votes. Therefore, we have been able to seriously influence policy in London. For instance we introduced measures to provide free insulation for the most vulnerable in our city that will cut fuel bills and save residents money, tripled the budget for walking and cycling from 21m to 63m, and created the London Living Wage Unit that campaigns for the all employees in London to be paid a minimum wage of £7.20.

There is a danger that this election is turning into a personality contest, a sort of “London Mayor Idol” if you like, rather than a proper debate about policies that could deliver better services in the capital over the next four years. Instead you have a candidate running on their old record, a candidate who has never run anything and avoids all discussion of policy where possible, and someone like me who wants a proper debate about how we take London forward. I am serious about the job, and I don’t promise anything I cannot deliver. See my Contract for London for further details.

Sian Berry

There do seem to be a lot of policies in this election that are made up in the back of taxis on the way to the press conference. My favourites of these are both from Boris Johnson. He said he will plant just 10,000 trees, when we are already half way through a programme of planting a million trees in London, so he clearly knew nothing about this and just made his number up. The other classic was when he said he’d put bus conductors back on every bus – a great idea, but he underestimated the cost by more than £100 million.

Because the London Greens have worked on the budget for the past four years (since Ken Livingstone has had to rely on our votes to get his budget through since 2004) our policies are much better thought through. We do know what our policies cost and how we’ll pay for them, unlike some other parties’ candidates.