Susan Hall has launched a fresh attack on Sir Sadiq Khan as she demanded a London investigation to be set up within the national grooming gangs inquiry.

Speaking to GB News, the Conservative leader at City Hall accused the London Mayor of “denial” over the rape gangs operating in the capital.

The latest demand follows a now viral fiery Assembly exchange in 2025, she asked Sir Sadiq: “Grooming gangs, that I would call rape gangs. Tell me about them. How many of those have we got? Not county lines. Those particular groups.”

Sir Sadiq told the London Assembly: “We know in London there are issues about exploitation of young people, but they are not as defined by the member in her definition of what those types of gangs are.”

Discussing Sir Sadiq’s approach to London’s grooming gangs, Ms Hall told GB News: “He simply refused to answer, which made me think, what’s going on here?

“If he’d have given a proper answer and said that it was a shocking thing and they were looking into it, and they’d said some details even, but it was this denial.”

She revealed: “I thought, well, there’s no way it can be going on all over the country and not in London.

“And after that video went viral, the number of girls and parents that contacted me to tell me their story because they wanted to and I thought, I’ve got to pursue this, but it was months before they admitted there was any such thing.”

Heaping praise on GB News and National Reporter Charlie Peters for continuing to shed light on the grooming gangs scandal, Ms Hall declared: “Thank you for putting it on your show, Martin, because we’ve got to shine a light on grooming gangs. We can’t keep letting this go because it flares up and then nothing happens, and then it seems to go away.

“So it’s vital that we all keep talking about it, and Charlie Peters is incredible. We must all talk about it until the police do something about this.”

Admitting that the stories she has heard are “heartbreaking”, she told Martin: “What we’ve got to do is look after these young, mainly girls, but also boys. If you heard their stories, Martin, I know you, you would be absolutely heartbroken. I was when I heard them.

“We have got to look after these kids, far more than we do now, and we’ve got to recognise this, and it’s not something from the past, I’ve been told that it is still going on.”

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Having written a letter to Baroness Longfield, the chair of the National Rape Gang Inquiry, Ms Hall made clear that she wants London to be fully included in the investigation.

She told GB News: “Yes, I absolutely do want London included. We’ve got nine million people in London, we’ve got terrible historic problems with childcare, so it absolutely needs to be looked at here.

“It would be nice if we had a Mayor that would engage with this properly, and would have engaged with it properly before.”

Ms Hall argued: “He’s been the Mayor for nearly ten years, and he still blames Boris for anything that goes wrong. It would be nice if he engaged in this properly, and we could look to see if we could get to the bottom of this, because I will not leave it alone.

“I will keep going on about it, and I’m very grateful for people like Charlie Peters and yourself, Martin, for actually covering it.”

Martin concluded: “People just deserve justice, I think that’s what it is. There is a huge sense of disenfranchisement, of betrayal and, frankly, a political class that simply don’t want to engage.”

A spokesman for Sir Sadiq has previously said: “The Mayor has always been clear that the safety of Londoners is his top priority and nowhere is this truer than in safeguarding children.

“Sadiq is committed to doing all he can to protect children in London from organised criminal and sexual exploitation and bring perpetrators to justice.

“This includes his £15.6million Violence and Exploitation Support Service, which provides specialist support to young Londoners who are vulnerable, caught up in or being exploited by criminal gangs in the capital as well as supporting the Met to deliver a new child-first approach to safeguarding and enforcement action to tackle county lines.

“We remain vigilant to emerging and changing threats and will continue to do everything we can to protect children in the capital from abuse, violence and exploitation in all its forms.”