Hackney mayoral election 2026: meet the Green party candidate Zoë Garbett

Zoë Garbett talks to reporter Patrick Cardwell. Photograph: Matt Payne

The Green party’s mayoral candidate for Hackney, Zoë Garbett, sat down for an exclusive interview with the Hackney Citizen ahead of the upcoming local elections on 7 May.

“It’s just so exciting to have this moment four weeks from the election,” she said.

Garbett was speaking at the Green party’s manifesto launch at the Old Church in Stoke Newington on Saturday 11 April. The Greens have made tackling the housing crisis central to their campaign.

Last week, chair of the Labour party, Anna Turley branded the Greens as a “band of hypocrites”, after they claimed to have a dossier of information detailing the blocking of the building of 42,000 homes by the Green party, which included the regeneration of the Woodberry Down estate in Hackney.

“The Green party is really pro house building,” Garbett told the Citizen in response to the allegations. “But it needs to be the right homes in the right places for the right price. We do not back developer led developments that just result in really expensive luxury flats.”

Speaking specifically on the Woodberry Down redevelopment, Garbett said:

“I don’t sit on [the] planning committee. I haven’t had the powers to directly block anything, but I have called out the Woodberry down development for its late phasing – it’s gone on for 20 years.

“There are people who’ve lived there through a really delayed regeneration program, and the reason it’s taken so long is so that they can drip feed the private market homes onto the market. It’s not to deliver the council homes. The latest phase that went through has very minimal council homes.

“I recently visited Woodberry Down in my role as a [London] assembly member and the later phases have really impacted people who live in council homes…

“If you speak to the residents there, the council residents are really struggling. They’re not getting the offers that they promised, and yet the whole thing doesn’t feel like the place that they had been promised. So I’m committing in the manifesto to look at all of those relationships with developers.”

The Hackney Green party’s manifesto launch in Clissold Park. Photograph: Matt Payne

The Greens’ leader Zack Polanski has pledged to implement rent controls in London if he were to be elected nationally. However, rent controls can currently only be implemented by the central Government.

Garbett is pushing for councils to have more power in controlling rent.

“We need the government to give us rent control powers,” she told the Citizen.

“We used to have them before 1980s. We haven’t had them since then and I think you can see that it’s going really badly: It’s increased homelessness by 23 per cent across the city; 70 billion pounds being transferred from the government to landlords over the last five years to help top up people’s housing benefits to help them pay their rent; hundreds of thousands of families in temporary accommodation. So I think we can see that it hasn’t gone well.”

Labour has dismissed the party’s housing strategy as more “amateurish and uncosted policies that have emerged from the Greens, including plans to ban all private landlords.”

Green party candidate for Lea Bridge ward Antoinette Fernandez was also present at the manifesto launch and defended the party’s position on housing.

“Our party needs to be given a chance to really show people what we can do,” she told the Citizen.

“In Hackney, Labour promised to build 1000 council homes and they built maybe 100, so I think they need to focus on themselves and on doing the things that deliver their promises before they start attacking a party that hasn’t really had a chance to get their foot in and do anything yet for the people.”

Garbett also gave a speech to approximately 200 supporters and volunteers, where she outlined the focal points of the manifesto which included housing, climate and workers’ rights.

She also used her speech to announce her commitment to “an investigation into who owns Hackney”, proclaiming: “The people of Hackney own Hackney and we’re taking it back.”

The event was part of the Green party’s ‘big day out’ across the London boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Lewisham and Southwark, which consisted of speeches from candidates and community groups followed by canvassing throughout the boroughs.

The speeches were due to take place in the Old Church but had to be moved to the neighbouring Clissold Park after the venue quickly reached capacity.

Speakers included Green party leader Zack Polanski, Hackney mayoral candidate Zoë Garbett and former Guardian editor-at-large Gary Younge.

The local May elections have been characterised by political analysts as a referendum on Keir Starmer’s premiership. Since taking office in 2024, opinion polling of the Labour government has fallen to historic lows, in conjunction with a surge in popularity of both the Greens and Reform UK.

The election in Hackney will take place on Thursday 7 May. The deadline to register to vote is midnight on Monday 20 April.