Matt Hartley: Here in Greenwich, people just want their Council to listen

Cllr Matt Hartley is the Leader of the Conservative Group in the Royal Borough of Greenwich

As we look towards the 2026 local elections here in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, our small Local Conservative team has been knocking on doors, holding public meetings, and attending community events to ask our neighbours what they want to see change in our borough. The over-riding answer is a simple one. People here just want their Council to listen.

It doesn’t sound too much to ask, does it? But in the 3 years since the last local elections, we’ve seen anything but this approach from Greenwich’s Labour Council. The reasons are predictable – the arrogance that comes with Labour’s super-majority, an unhealthy imbalance in representation at our Town Hall, and a near-total lack of that most basic under-rated quality in politics: humility.

Our corner of the capital has so much going for it. Greenwich is famous for its rich history. It comprises strong neighbourhoods, small businesses, charities and community groups that look out for one another. It has the charm and incalculable benefit of our green spaces, which draw so many people to want to live and raise their families here (the clue is in the name).

We have all the ingredients in our borough for success. But we’re faced with a Labour Council which seems to be going out of its way to alienate local people.

Just days after winning 51 out of 55 Council seats at the last elections in 2022, there was a bloodbath in the Labour Group – behind closed doors – with a new and untested Leader of the Council deposing his predecessor by a single vote. This is the third Labour administration I have scrutinised as Leader of the Opposition at the Town Hall, and it is hard to overstate what a decline it has represented on what has gone before.

The new Labour leadership’s pitch – really, their sole distinctive policy compared to the Labour administration they replaced – is what they love to call “Community Engagement”. As a means to gain the levers of power, amidst the internal machinations of the Labour Group councillors, those two words worked. They had the central benefit, as a message, of meaning whatever the recipient wanted them to mean.

This has since led to the production of Labour’s so-called Community Engagement Pledge (a glossy, 43-page, word salad of a document, that should be Exhibit A in the trial of public sector work creation). A big expensive expansion of the PR and communications team. A perverse and quite bizarre determination to introduce taxpayer-funded Political Assistants to support with “policy and communications” (was 51 Labour councillors not enough?). All of this adds to the shocking burden being imposed on Council Taxpayers, who are now paying 17 per cent more than they were when they last cast their vote.

The central tragedy of it all is that despite this new vibe, when it comes to the actual, real, local issues that our communities care about, Greenwich Labour’s idea of ‘community engagement’ is revealed, time after time, to be a sham.

Take Labour’s chaotic Low Traffic Neighbourhood scheme in Greenwich and Blackheath, imposed on residents despite 8 in 10 people opposing it in a consultation. Or the Council’s astonishing attempt to close the much-loved Maryon Wilson Animal Park – cooked up behind the backs of community groups and then hastily abandoned after a resident-led campaign backed by Opposition Conservative councillors. Or their decision to sell off the site of our borough’s Equestrian Centre – opened just 12 years ago and meant to be a key part of our Olympic legacy.

It’s on this last controversy that Labour have fallen to a spectacular low – effectively forcing their own ward councillor to resign for “siding with the Conservatives” when she tried to speak up for her appalled local residents in Shooters Hill. On June 26th people will have their chance to cast judgment on Labour’s actions in the resulting by-election, where our Conservative candidate – local school governor, Tim Waters – has put in an incredible shift campaigning on why Shooters Hill should expect better.

By-election campaigning is becoming a reflex for the Greenwich, Eltham and Chislehurst Conservative team. We started a winning streak last year, holding a seat in the ward I represent – the most marginal in Greenwich – with a trend-bucking five per cent swing from Labour to the Conservatives secured just weeks before our national General Election drubbing. We went on to beat that with a ten per cent swing from Labour providing us with a Conservative Gain in October, which our well-deserving victor Charlie Davis wrote about for Conservative Home at the time.

These winning campaigns showed clearly just how dim a view residents are taking of the way they’ve been treated since Labour’s landslide in 2022 – as well as what we can achieve when we articulate clearly the work we are putting in to deliver strong, common sense, Opposition for residents. Useful lessons for all of us who are facing yet another challenging set of elections next May. Our campaign here is already well underway.

Standing up to a Labour super-majority can sometimes feel a thankless task – but if I’ve learned anything in 11 years on the Council it’s this: Labour only listens when we make them listen. And the more of us there are on the Opposition Conservative benches to do that, the better.