Green Hackney Mayor Zoe Garbett: I Want Andy Burnham To Succeed
11 min read
Hackney’s new Green mayor Zoë Garbett talks to Noah Vickers about winning a Labour stronghold, taking Sir Sadiq Khan to court and why she wants Andy Burnham ‘to succeed’
Zoë Garbett had expected a good showing for the Green Party in May’s local elections, but the scale of her victory in the Hackney mayoral race came as something of a shock.
“I kept saying before the election, ‘This is going to really change politics in London,’ but I had no idea I’d be sitting here with the majority we got,” says the 39-year-old mayor.
The Greens had war-gamed for several scenarios as they sought to wrest control of the Labour stronghold, including some where they won a majority of councillors without also taking the mayoralty, which is separately elected.
“We really were planning for all eventualities. At our worst prediction, we thought we’d have 10 councillors.”
In the event, the party went from winning two of the borough’s 57 seats in 2022 – of whom Garbett was one – to 42 in 2026. Labour were reduced to nine seats, down from the 50 they won four years ago.
Garbett, raised in Somerset by teacher parents, worked in public health at Labour-run Barking and Dagenham council and later in an officer role at Conservative-run Barnet council. Non-clinical posts in the NHS followed, including in children’s mental health and as an assistant director for health inequalities.
In 2024, she took voluntary redundancy to focus on her campaign against Sir Sadiq Khan in that year’s London mayoral race. While she lost the contest by a wide margin, Siân Berry’s unexpected departure from City Hall opened up a vacancy for her on the London Assembly, where she spent the last two years with Green leader Zack Polanski.
A Green member since 2013, Garbett was an early supporter of Greens Organise, a group seeking to “build the left within the party”, which shared activists and an ethos with Polanski’s leadership campaign.
Khan texted Garbett his congratulations following her victory in Hackney. But within weeks of taking office, she is already on the warpath against him, as she has joined a legal challenge against City Hall.
Working with Lewisham’s Green mayor Liam Shrivastava and Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman – who leads his own Aspire Party – the three borough leaders are applying for a judicial review in the High Court. Their aim is to overturn Khan’s decision last year to temporarily reduce London’s affordable housing requirements.
Previously, all major developments on private land in London needed to include at least 35 per cent affordable housing in order to be ‘fast-tracked’ through the planning system, but in October 2025 Khan agreed with the government to slash the requirement to 20 per cent.
With London housebuilding having reached record lows in recent years, the change was agreed as part of a wider “emergency package” of measures to help the construction industry, which has struggled with inflated costs, high interest rates and new regulations.
Khan and the government argue that lowering the threshold will allow more affordable homes to be built, following the maxim that 20 per cent of something is better than 35 per cent of nothing.
But Garbett says there should have been more focus on building already-consented homes first.
“There’s loads of planning applications that have been approved that haven’t been built out. I think it’s thousands across London, a few hundred in Hackney. What are we doing to make sure those are being delivered?”
She’s also unconvinced that reducing the threshold to 20 per cent will actually result in more affordable homes getting started, saying: “It did very much feel like it was just developers pushing for it and it wasn’t in conversation with local authorities.”
Labour lost Hackney partly due to anger from some in the borough over the impact of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), where roads are closed to through-traffic to discourage car use. Hackney Greens have had to walk a delicate line on the issue, with their manifesto noting the “hard truth” that LTNs “have not yet delivered fair outcomes everywhere”.
The party said that “while rollout of recent schemes by the Labour-led council has been rushed, reactively scrapping schemes can recreate the original problem – bringing rat-running and road danger back”. Instead, the Greens pledged to take a fresh approach to new LTNs, with “community-led design, fair impact assessments, full data transparency, and scheme-by-scheme decisions”.
Hackney’s Labour administration, Garbett says, talked about LTNs as a way of improving air quality, but she believes road safety has been overlooked as an “absolutely paramount” factor.
“If you speak to people who are upset about some of the road changes, if I say, ‘Yeah, but school streets are all about children being able to walk to school,’ most people say they can understand that.
“We need to do some work to really be transparent about the evidence, where things are working and not working, and where we’re collectively measuring what that looks like.”
The installation of a bus gate on Chatsworth Road has proved especially controversial among locals, who made their feelings known to Garbett during the campaign.
“We had some quite robust challenge from people about the [Greens’] approach,” she admits, “but, as I said, people can find commonality around road safety.
“People do feel like it’s connected to a push against people’s freedoms to move around, and I do really hear that, so we need to really make sure that alternatives are there.”
Garbett is also pushing for a “pause” in the use of Live Facial Recognition in the borough by the Metropolitan Police. In Hackney, Garbett says the technology – which has sparked concerns about civil liberties and racial biases – is usually found in busy retail areas like the Narrow Way and Ridley Road.
“Traders report that less people come. A van sits there with its engine on for six hours, with its cameras pointed around,” she says. “Yesterday I went up to the Narrow Way and I think at one point there were 12 officers. It’s such a heavy police presence.”
In the north of the borough, Stamford Hill is home to Europe’s largest population of Charedi Orthodox Jews. The mayor says she is “really proud” of the community and has already met with its leaders a number of times.
But amid media reports of alleged antisemitic comments made by some Green candidates and councillors elsewhere in the country, did Garbett in her new role as mayor feel the need to give them any kind of assurance?
“Yes,” she says. “I did a little speech with some of the community leaders and they kind of looked a bit perplexed. They were like ‘We know that you’re local, we know that you care about our community’…
“It was interesting, because I did just want to put it on the table. I want people to talk to me – I don’t want you to feel that you can’t.”
“I had no idea I’d be sitting here with the majority we got”
In March, the Greens’ spring conference looked set to discuss a motion titled ‘Zionism is racism’, though it was not ultimately debated. Former Green leader Caroline Lucas recently told The House she was “not sure it’s a very helpful debate” as “Zionism can be interpreted in so many different ways”. Does the subject need more nuance?
“Motions are brought to conference and get debated, which is the beauty of the Green Party in the sense that any members can bring anything they want to discuss,” replies Garbett. “I think there’s been some feedback on the motion as it was written, to make sure that it’s as helpful and practical as possible.”
Would she say, straightforwardly, that Zionism is racism?
“Well, I think the framing is…” she says, finding her words. “It depends on context and who you’re speaking with and what our aim is. I think our aim has to be bringing people together and focusing on a solution.
“Like here in Hackney, we’re doing as much as possible to divest our pension funds [from companies complicit in territorial human rights violations]. That process was started off last week, which is really exciting. We know it’s going to be a long road.
“So, I think anything that helps us be practical, but I know that that framing is really important to people who are Palestinian or have family in the area, so I think it’s important that we’re able to, you know – we need to listen to them.”
Garbett speaks to The House the day after Andy Burnham has given his speech in Manchester promising “the biggest rebalancing of power our country has ever seen” through a sweeping devolution programme.
“The proof’s going to be in the pudding,” says Garbett, adding: “There is some nervousness about some of his rhetoric around moving money out of London, because I’d like there to be a focus on the issues. What are we doing about children with SEND needs? What are we doing about child poverty?
“People have got this perception that London is rich and we’re all living the best life, but 50 per cent of children in Hackney live in poverty.”
She also urges the next PM to empower her and other mayors to set rent controls on private tenancies.
Zoe Garbett celebrates with Green Party leader Zack Polanski after being elected Hackney mayor (PA Images/Alamy)
“I think it would make such a huge difference,” she says, pointing out that as long as rents remain as high as they are, billions of pounds will continue to be transferred from the government to private landlords every year in housing benefit. Notably, Burnham himself called for the then-Tory government to freeze private rents in 2023.
Nor should Burnham’s devolution vision be limited to metro mayors alone, Garbett warns.
“We don’t want the powers to just go to the Mayor of London. There needs to be powers coming to [borough] authorities.”
Garbett brushes off concern about Burnham winning back disaffected Labour voters who have drifted to the Greens.
“A lot of people support the Greens because we are pushing for things like rent controls, because we are very bold against the complicity in the genocide. We want climate action and I know he’s already making some mutterings about gas and oil drilling, and migration – him sticking to some of the horrendous migration laws… I think it will be that first 100 days, about what decisions he prioritises.”
There will remain enough distance between the parties, then, for him not to threaten the Greens?
“This is really difficult, because I don’t want people to continue to suffer,” she replies. “I want him to succeed in doing things like nationalising the railways so that people can get around more cheaply, making energy cheaper, making food cheaper. I really want to see him making those good decisions.”
While Polanski’s arrival as leader saw the Greens enjoy a sustained surge in the polls, their standing in opinion surveys appears now to be ebbing. Garbett doesn’t seem sure why.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she says. “I’ve been very focused on Hackney, where we’ve had the most amazing election, and that is in part [thanks] to Zack’s leadership. But I think it’s just changing times as well, like what happens with Andy Burnham.”
Will Polanski face a challenge in keeping the party’s momentum going?
“He’s suffered a huge amount of scrutiny. The press have been through his bins and calling everyone he’s ever known. I think that has been really difficult.
“He’s apologised where he’s needed to. Some of it wasn’t even a story, but obviously the headlines run away, don’t they. He has been really under attack recently.”
The Greens have now set their sights on the Greater Manchester mayoral by-election. Can the party win there, even with the change back to the supplementary vote system?
“No,” she blurts out, before moderating her answer: “Well, it’s a big step up, isn’t it?”
The party is pleased, she says, that the government has ditched first-past-the-post in favour of a more democratic system for mayoral contests.
“It’s going to be a big-scale [election], we’re just going to do as best as we can. It’s like here – we tried our best,” she laughs. “The polls didn’t look good for us a year ago.”
