Meet the candidates for Hackney Mayor: Amy Gray, Conservatives

Amy Gray.

Conservative mayoral candidate Amy Gray says her campaign is focusing on affordable housing, safer streets and “more and better” school places.

She told the Hackney Citizen there are “wonderful things about living in Hackney” but added: “I don’t think that planning for the future is something our council has been particularly good at.”

Citing pressure on school places, the former teacher, who is also a school governor, claimed the Labour-run Town Hall is hamstrung by ideological opposition to free schools and academies.

“The Citizen has written extensively about the Tiger Way development on the edge of the Nightingale Estate,” she said. “I live locally so that’s an issue I am very concerned about. The development isn’t right for the area. The council has said that’s the only way to fund the new primary school that is needed.

“But the reason they say that is that they are frankly not willing, not open enough, to working with new models of school, to inviting academy chains and free schools to explore working in Hackney.”

She also wants to see more affordable housing built.

“The Labour-led council has done some things, yes, and they’ve done better than other areas,” she acknowledged. But she added: “There are, frankly, huge vacant areas like the King’s Crescent estate and the area next to the Nightingale Estate, which has been vacant for 15 years after previous estates were demolished. Why has it taken so long for these areas to be redeveloped?”

Despite Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s huge mandate, Gray is upbeat about her party’s future prospects in the capital.

“Look across the number of seats where the Conservatives came second for the first time in a long time – so both Hackney seats, Islington, Bethnal Green, all sorts of places like that,” she said. “Actually in quite a lot of places the Conservative vote share sort of bucked the trend across London.”

Gray also questioned why the crime rate in Hackney was 10 per cent higher than in London as a whole, describing this as “not good news”.