Gareth Thomas MP has joined the race to be his party's candidate for Mayor of London in 2016's election. This week he exclusively shares his vision for sport in London with the Sports Think Tank, specifically the 2024 Commonwealth Games.

It's ten years since London was awarded the Olympic Games and now it's time to start preparing a bid for London to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games.

We cannot take our capital's vibrancy and economic success for granted. A future Mayor needs to champion bringing major international sporting and cultural events to London to help promote the capital in the future. After Glasgow's great Games last summer, few will be in any doubt that London would benefit from hosting the 2026 Commonwealth Games.

A key part of a London bid should be to host the first T20 cricket tournament at a multi-sport event. There have previously been calls for T20 cricket to be included at the Commonwealth Games but this has so far been ruled out. Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist have been prominent advocates for cricket to be included in the 2024 Olympics, however the ICC have not yet indicated their willingness to push for cricket to become an Olympic sport. Cricket is the most popular game in the Commonwealth, indeed, it's often been said that cricket is an Indian sport accidentally discovered by the English! So what better place for cricket to make its debut at a multi-sport event than the home of the Commonwealth, and the Home of Cricket?

In Lords and the Oval, London already has the facilities that would be required to host T20 cricket. Glasgow had 70% of the sports stadia in place giving their organising team a huge logistical head start. London has an even stronger advantage in having world class sports facilities already available in virtually all the Commonwealth Games events.

With the Olympic Park, Lea Valley Cycling Velodrome, Twickenham and Wembley Stadium, London already has the big venues in place, and that's before a bid team begins to look at the myriad other possible venues for hosting parts of the Commonwealth Games.

We need to learn from the failure to build a lasting sporting legacy from the 2012 Olympics. Sport England's half-yearly survey recently revealed a fall of 220,000 in the number of people who took part in sport of any kind for at least half an hour a week.

I would want to see the London Youth Games incorporated into the Commonwealth Games to inspire London's youngest to take up sport. The fitness levels of school children have been falling for some time, but the decline appears to be particularly acute following the cuts to the school sports partnership program, and the pace at which school children's fitness levels are now falling is more than twice the global average. From early on in the bid team's thinking, a clear, long-term, grassroots sports development plan needs to be in place.

We also need to ensure this time every London borough benefits. Dagenham, Harrow, and Croydon residents need to feel the more homely Commonwealth Games is their Games, just as much as those boroughs where the big stadiums are sited. I would want to see groups of London boroughs working with the local business community to bid to host particular sports to help ensure the Games' events are properly shared across the capital.

Why might the Commonwealth want to hold their Games in London? London is the home of the Commonwealth and we haven't held the Games in our capital since 1934.

The next time Britain can realistically bid for the Commonwealth Games is in 2026. London's population is growing at the rate of 100,000 a year so by 2026 we'll have over a million new citizens. Further investment in our public transport is essential and the hosting of the Commonwealth Games should be a further powerful incentive to promote Crossrail 2 and other public transport progress.

London needs to secure its future. We cannot take our capital's vibrancy for granted. Given how much of a trading city we are, London needs to continue to promote itself as an international city with global reach. The next Mayor of London needs to have a plan for how to create opportunities for the next generation of Londoners, and then to showcase our city's talents to the world.