Our first meeting with Hackney’s new council leadership

On Monday 10th August, six MOPS members attended a meeting in Hackney Town Hall with Green Councillor Alastair Binnie Lubbock and Deputy Mayor Dylan Law to talk about their plans for the Tesco site in Hackney Central. Alastair has cabinet responsibility for this and other development sites. It was good to be back in the Town Hall. We used to have regular meetings with Phil Glanville when he was Mayor of Hackney but after he resigned, we have not met any elected councillors until now. For a while we met with council staff but as we became more critical of their approach, those meetings also stalled.

The meeting was very friendly, and we feel that the Greens are up for listening in a way that Labour weren’t. Alastair promised that the long-overdue report on the Council’s consultation will be published within two weeks. He explained that they want to develop the site and to find a partner to work with soon. We hope to see them sharing a timetable for this with residents so that we can be active in the process.

Before taking any big decisions, we urged Alastair and other cabinet members to look at our three reports and the records of our public meetings. These show that residents have two clear priorities for the site: to keep a big Tesco there and to have new social housing. As well as cheap housing and shopping, people want a development that benefits local residents, that matches the area, and that has a sense of space – people don’t want tightly-packed tower blocks, they want balconies, community spaces, play areas, and family-sized flats.

Alastair told us that they are talking with Tesco and we encouraged him to enable the community to engage directly with decision makers at Tesco, using the approaches developed in our meetings where residents have been involved in open, transparent dialogue with council officers and cabinet members.

We also hope to see Hackney’s new Green council addressing issues that are relevant way beyond 55 Morning Lane – how they plan to co-design developments with residents, how they are going to explore alternative methods of financing developments and assess their viability, and how they will develop sustainably.