“Always a community champion, I have been Chair of my Tenants’ Association, Neighbourhood Housing Forum and Lambeth Tenants’ Council.

Full statement

I have brought up four children in Lambeth, and been a school governor for nearly 30 years, including Chair of Governors at a big secondary school and a local primary.

I have run a community charity in Waterloo for 25 years, appearing in dozens of public inquiries fighting numerous hostile proposals. I led a 3-year campaign to stop Boris Johnson’s ludicrous £185m Garden Bridge, personally launching a Judicial Review. I led the campaign to create a new Jubilee Gardens on Lambeth’s South Bank, raising £8m, opened by the Queen.

I’ve led on projects on libraries, on parks, on high street improvements. I currently run Just Space, which connects campaigns across London covering equality, diversity, and inclusion as well as housing, health and happiness.
I know Clapham Park well: I first met tenant leaders of the Clapham Park Project in 2000, when they were awarded £50m through New Deal for Communities. We had high hopes for one of the biggest estate projects in the UK, but the 2,000 homes were transferred to Metropolitan Housing Trust, who have made plenty of mistakes and have disengaged the community.

At one site, for example, development was originally permitted in 2006, and programmed for 2011: 48 homes were demolished in 2016 and… then nothing – a pile of rubble was just left for a decade! Last year a new application proposed to provide fewer social rent homes (45) and unnecessarily chuck 257,000 kgs of carbon into the atmosphere!

How has this happened? Because Labour councillors never bothered to dig into the detail. I will. Metropolitan Housing Trust is a £5.5bn operation with no community oversight. Councillors need to be far more active scrutinising them. I pledge to work with the Project board and local residents and businesses to get the best possible deal for the existing community and future residents.

Together we will work to create a fairer borough for everyone.”