The former homeless man hoping to stand for Parliament

Underdog: Hugo Sugg is raising funds for an election tilt. Photograph: Liam Kelly

Overhauling a popular local MP with a 24,000-strong majority is a big ask for any prospective parliamentary candidate.

But one Homerton resident has decided to throw caution to the wind and announce his intention to stand as an independent for Hackney South and Shoreditch at the general election on 8 June.

Hugo Sugg, originally from Worcester, said he hopes to contest Labour MP Meg Hillier’s constituency to “move away from party politics and move it back to the people”.

He currently works for a phone case company in London Fields, but is planning to quit his day job so he can devote himself to his election bid.

Sugg is crowdfunding for the £500 deposit prospective candidates need to pay to stand, and at time of writing £122 had been donated to his campaign. His manifesto remains a work in progress but has the title ‘Communities Together’, and will focus on community cohesion, young people, homelessness and mental health services.

The 26-year-old says he finds himself “agreeing with a lot of Labour”, and tweeted Meg Hillier on the day Theresa May called the election offering to help her campaign, but he subsequently decided to stand on his own platform. The reason Sugg chose to “not canvass and shadow someone else” was, he says, because “I believe that doing it yourself can sometimes bring the best experiences.”

Sugg’s passion for politics, young people and the homeless is driven by his own history. He found himself homeless at the age of 18 after a relationship breakdown, spending three months sofa-surfing and one night sleeping rough.

After what he describes as a “complete physical, mental and emotional breakdown”, a charity helped rehouse him, and after spending two years recovering he enrolled on a youth and community work degree at the University of Worcester. He graduated in November 2016, before moving to Peckham and then Homerton.

While at university, Sugg was involved with the Youth Homeless Parliament, which organises trips to Westminster for young rough sleepers and gives them the chance to speak to ministers. He also runs an awareness campaign in Worcester called Hugo’s Earthquake.

Sugg believes it is these experiences that would make him a good MP: “I’ve been there, I’ve lived it. I won’t ever say I know all the issues, but I’ve got a good idea of how it feels to live on the streets, how it feels to live in high-cost, low-quality housing and how it feels to live on the minimum wage.

“I haven’t had a privileged life. I haven’t been spoon-fed. I’ve had to work hard to get where I am. And I want to try and inspire other people to do that and make a generation of positive change,” he says.

Should Sugg pull off an upset and be elected, he has pledged to donate £15,000 of his MP’s salary to youth services in the local area, so it can be reinvested “in other people who are going to be our future”. He has also promised to lobby Hackney Council to freeze business rates in 2018/19, in the hope it would stimulate growth and prompt employers to increase staff pay.

Sugg admits he will probably not overhaul Hillier’s enormous majority on 8 June, and says that a good result for him would be getting 2,000 votes. Though he would prefer the prime minister after the election to be Jeremy Corbyn over Theresa May, he doesn’t think Labour has a chance of ousting the Tories from power.

But he warns that May’s decision to call the election “was a huge risk that, as we know from David Cameron, can backfire dramatically”. He is predicting a bigger Conservative majority “of about 25 or 30”.

For now, Sugg will continue to centre his campaign on the idea of ‘Communities Together’: “I would like to grow my campaign from that slogan, rather than have a campaign that’s defined by a slogan.”