Conservative London mayoral hopeful Zac Goldsmith has promised to “look into” bringing Croydon’s two central rail stations into zone 4.

The Richmond Park and North Kingston MP acknowledged “irregularities” in Transport for London’s system meant Croydon commuters paid over the odds.

Housing and transport are key issues for London's front-running mayoral candidates as they battle it out for the borough’s votes five weeks before the election.

Labour’s Sadiq Khan and Mr Goldsmith both paid visits to Croydon this month to discuss their plans for London.

Housing could prove to be a pivotal issue in the borough with nearly half of Croydon's homeless families living in temporary accommodation for more than three years. Of the 3,125 families in temporary lodgings as of February this year, 1,120 had been waiting for a home for three to five years.

Improving transport is also a sure-fire way to secure votes. In July last year it emerged Croydon Council was preparing an ambitious bid to extend the London Underground network to the town.

A Bakerloo line station in Croydon would give the borough direct transport links to Waterloo, Charing Cross, Oxford Circus and Paddington, as well as faster connections with much of the Tube network.

While both candidates want to build more affordable homes by expanding the transport network to open up more brownfield sites, neither could commit to extending the Bakerloo line.

Mr Khan dropped in to Croydon College on March 23 to talk about how he plans to provide more jobs for Croydon's youth.

He said: “I am going to create a Skills for Londoners and that will be working with today’s employers to ensure today’s Londoners have the skills for the jobs of tomorrow."

Mr Khan wants to set up a team in City Hall that will be dedicated to ensuring half of new homes in London are genuinely affordable.

He said: “Transport for London (TfL) owns land equivalent to 16 times Hyde Park – why not use that land to build genuinely affordable homes?

“We have done some modelling around TfL land in zone three to six and with shared ownership homes you would need a deposit of £5,200 and it will cost £400 a month.”

He added: “I am certainly willing to look into the Bakerloo extension.

“I think we need to be thinking about extending the tram, we need to be talking about Crossrail 2, we need to be talking about extending the DLR line, we need to be talking about the next generation of buses that are properly hybrid or electric, and we need to make it safer and easier to cycle across London”

Mr Goldsmith held a public meeting at Clyde Hall in Addiscombe on March 17 and reaffirmed his commitment to building 50,000 new homes a year.

He said: “You can tinker around the edges, but if we don’t double the amount of homes being built then we’re not going to have any meaningful impact on prices.

“We need to get the brownfield land released by government and we need to grow the transport network.

“We need to build those homes and build them beautifully so that communities don’t campaign against them – and we need to build them for Londoners. That is the bottom line, right there.”

Mr Goldsmith said he was looking closely at extending the Bakerloo line but could not commit to the project.

He said: “I have to be very careful not to make pledges that I don’t know I can fulfil but it is a pledge that I would like to make because I think it is very important.

“The arguments are very, very strong but you will have to wait until my transport manifesto comes out in a few weeks.

“I have promised to look at bringing West and East Croydon into zone four. We have the same issue in Kingston, where there are irregularities in the zoning."

The mayoral elections will take place on May 5.