TRUE to his word, Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has revealed that for the past 15 months nobody in his house has flushed the toilet after urinating.

Last year, Mr Livingstone called on Londoners to help solve the capital's water crisis by saving the amount of water they used at home, including reducing how often they flushed the loo.

The outspoken Mayor said that his own household experiment had been a "success" and he hoped other Londoners would copy his toilet habits.

"If we continue to waste the amount of water that we do, London will run out of water," he told The Independent newspaper.

"We use about 30 per cent more water than French or German people. Londoners use more water than anyone else in Britain and mainly, we just waste it.

"A third of all the water you use you flush down the loo and actually there is no earthly reason that you need to flush the loo if you have merely urinated. That's a huge saving of water.

"The experiment in my own home, which is now into its second year, has been a success. We continued with it right through the summer, and never once did a great bluebottle come in the bathroom.

"After all, why would a bluebottle wish to slurp up a little bit of nitrogenous waste? It has no nutritional value at all.

"It's just that a lot of people have a perception that their urine is some sort of liquid form of their excreta. A lot of gardeners put their urine in a bucket and actually use it. Plant roots love it."