Comment: We need a mayor to rescue lost generation

London is incredibly successful, the financial centre for the rest of the world, where telephone number salaries are earned by a young metropolitan elite.

Yet there is another London: where life expectancy is years lower, educational outcomes low and where family breakdown is endemic.

These pathways to poverty are threatening to create a lost generation. A young male born in Lambeth can expect to live eight years less than his counterpart in Kensington and Chelsea; he has a 50 per cent chance of being born into a single parent family; he has less than a 40 per cent chance of attaining five good GCSEs and is five times more likely to become a problem drug user than his counterpart in Richmond.

In Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Islington, too many residents suffer from the compounding effects of family breakdown, educational failure, unemployment, drug and alcohol addiction and debt. Living in poverty and excluded from mainstream society, these communities form a hardening underclass.

We need a programme that deals with the drugs scourge by getting people off drugs, not maintaining them on drugs, that reforms the welfare system to make it a pathway to work not an entrapment and that forces parents to be more involved in their children's education. Most of all, a programme that puts stable family formation at the heart of society. For too long, governments have penalised couples. If you are on benefits, you are far better off not living together if you have children. In the tax system if you are married and one of you chooses to stay at home for a few years to nurture your children, you are penalised.

This election should be an opportunity for the candidates to put anti-poverty issues at the heart of their campaigns. The mayor can change the terms of the debate and ensure that much more is done. They can help to end this tale of two cities.