22MAY

Greens take Hackney and Lewisham boroughs

4 min read

10:09UTC

Zoë Garbett won the Hackney mayoralty and Liam Shrivastava won Lewisham from Labour on 7 May 2026, becoming the first Green elected mayors of any London borough; Hackney and Waltham Forest councils flipped Green outright on the same night.

← Back to Three constitutional contests open Jump to analysis ↓

PoliticsDeveloping

Key takeaway

The Greens overshot their inner-London MRP projection while Reform undershot in the suburbs, both on the same fragmentation-blind model.

Zoë Garbett (Green) won the Hackney mayoralty on Thursday 7 May 2026, defeating Labour incumbent Caroline Woodley. Liam Shrivastava (Green) won Lewisham from Labour Co-op incumbent Brenda Dacres. They are the first Green elected mayors of any London borough. On the same night, Hackney council moved from Labour 44, Greens 6 to Greens 38, Labour 6, and Waltham Forest moved from Labour 45 and zero Greens to Greens 31, Labour 12, the first Green-controlled council in the capital.

The Green Party leader Zack Polanski launched the party's London campaign in Deptford on 10 April , naming Hackney, Lewisham, Lambeth and Islington as the Labour flagships most exposed to a housing-and-planning-led Green offer. Hackney and Lewisham fell. Lambeth and Islington held with reduced Labour majorities. The Cliftonville Kent by-election on 9 April, in which a Green candidate took a Reform-held seat on a 26.7-point swing , previewed the same single-ward saturation pattern: national leaders on the doorstep, a specific local issue, week-on-week canvass discipline.

Nationally The Greens added 370 net council seats to reach 543 total and gained outright control of 4 councils, against a YouGov MRP projection of 696 seats (event-00, . Where Reform undershot its FPTP projection by 894 seats in the same model family, The Greens overshot in inner London and undershot on the south coast and around Norwich. The same uniform-swing assumption that broke Reform's projection broke The Greens' projection in the opposite direction: dense local concentration produced wins the model classified as marginal, while the model's projected south-coast gains diffused across too many wards to flip any of them.

The Green national vote share of 18 percent sits ahead of the Conservatives on 17 percent, the first time The Greens have polled ahead of the Conservatives at a national election. With the Liberal Democrats on 16 percent and 842 council seats, the three governing parties of the post-war period (Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats) have collectively been beaten on vote share by Reform UK and The Greens. Garbett and Shrivastava now run two London boroughs containing approximately 600,000 residents combined. A Green administration's first 100 days in Hackney, on planning, on bus lanes, on Local Plan housing targets, sets the template the party will run on across more boroughs in 2030.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Hackney and Lewisham are London boroughs, areas of east and south-east London each governed by an elected council and, in some cases, an elected mayor. Both were solidly Labour-controlled for decades. On 7 May, the Green Party won control of both councils and both mayoralties for the first time. Zoë Garbett became Mayor of Hackney and Liam Shrivastava became Mayor of Lewisham. These are the first Green elected mayors of any London borough. The Green Party also took control of Waltham Forest council, switching from Labour control to Green control.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Two structural causes explain the Green London breakthrough. First, Labour's planning record in inner-London boroughs created a specific voting bloc of renters and homeowners opposed to high-rise development without infrastructure investment. Hackney's approval of the Woodberry Down Phase 4 development and Lewisham's stance on the Millwall site generated sustained activist opposition that the Greens organised over three years.

Second, the YouGov London MRP (n=4,548) in the days before the election projected Greens leading in four London boroughs, this projection itself mobilised Green tactical voters who switched from Labour in wards where they calculated Green was competitive. Projected wins attract the votes needed to convert projections into actual wins, a self-fulfilling dynamic specific to competitive urban elections.

What could happen next?

Consequence
Hackney, Lewisham, and Waltham Forest councils will begin reviewing all major contracts and planning frameworks within the first 90 days; expected tensions with the GLA (Greater London Authority) over strategic planning designations.
Short term · 0.75
Risk
Green council control of Hackney and Lewisham places the party in a delivery position they have never occupied at this scale; failure on housing delivery or social care quality within two years would set back the national Green project significantly.
Medium term · 0.65
Precedent
First Green elected mayors in London provide a template for how the Green Party can convert inner-city opposition votes into council majorities, directly applicable to Lambeth, Islington, and Haringey in the 2030 cycle.
Long term · 0.8

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: The Greens' first council majority came in Brighton and Hove in 2011, when Bill Randall became the first Green council leader in the UK. Brighton 2011 offers a direct structural parallel: Labour to Green switch in a highly educated, high-density, progressive urban area on a housing and environment platform.

Brighton 2011 lasted one term; The Greens lost control in 2015 after a disputed bin strike and failed budget negotiations that left the council with a £20m deficit. Zoë Garbett inherits a Hackney budget of approximately £450m with outsourced contracts that run to 2028, the same type of structural constraint that trapped Bill Randall in Brighton a decade earlier.

Counter-parallel: Liverpool Wavertree in the 1980s saw the Liberal Democrats take a safe Labour council ward and build toward broader council influence, but never achieved full council control. The Greens' Hackney and Waltham Forest gains are more complete than any Liberal Democrat inner-London breakthrough, the counter-parallel suggests the Liberal Democrats' model of sustained opposition without full control, not The Greens' 2026 majority outcome.

Hackney council's annual budget is approximately £450m; Waltham Forest runs at approximately £280m. Both boroughs have significant outsourced contracts, including refuse collection, social care, and leisure services, that cannot be terminated without penalty clauses typically running to 7-10 years.

The Greens' manifesto commitment to in-sourcing social care will face those contract law constraints directly. Hackney's housing revenue account (approximately £85m per year) is separately managed and governed by statutory rules that limit the Green mayoralty's flexibility to redirect capital spending toward tenant repair programmes.

Consensus view: Zack Polanski (Green Party of England and Wales, London) and the Electoral Reform Society's Dr Jess Garland have both assessed that the Green London gains follow a targeted inner-city model identified in advance: high-density Labour-held boroughs where housing, planning, and cycling policy created sustained local opposition to Labour administrations.

Hackney Labour had faced internal dissent over the Woodberry Down regeneration scheme; Lewisham Labour was contested on the Millwall Football Club stadium site. The Greens' 38/44 seat switch in Hackney is not a uniform swing, it reflects ward-by-ward targeting over three years.

Counter-view: Murad Qureshi (former London Assembly Labour member) and Transport for London Labour analysts caution that Green council control is operationally very different from Green opposition: Hackney and Lewisham have large social housing estates with repair backlogs, substantial outsourced adult social care contracts, and children's services under Ofsted scrutiny.

The Greens have never managed a budget of this complexity. Their 2026 manifesto costings for £10 minimum hourly housing maintenance rates and in-house social care provision were independently assessed as aspirational rather than funded.

Key tension: Whether Zoë Garbett and Liam Shrivastava can translate Green electoral success into demonstrably improved council services, or whether the complexity of managing large inner-London council budgets exposes gaps between Green campaigning and governing.

First Reported In

Update #7 · Reform's 14 councils, 894 seats short

Wikipedia (citing BBC News and Sky News results pages)· 9 May 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

Caused by

Greens launch council assault on Labour turf

Polanski's 10 April Deptford launch targeted Hackney and Lewisham as Labour flagships for Green campaign concentration

Occurred 10 Apr 2026

Read story →

Greens flip Kent seat from Reform UK

Cliftonville Kent Green win on 26.7-point swing foreshadowed the targeted inner-London Green surge pattern

Occurred 9 Apr 2026

Read story →

Reform projected to 2,342 council seats

YouGov projected Greens to 696 seats nationally; actual 543 reflects same FPTP-fragmentation model failure as Reform undershoot

Occurred 5 May 2026

Read story →

This Event

Greens take Hackney and Lewisham boroughs

The Polanski-Deptford targeting strategy launched on 10 April delivered exactly the inner-London Labour citadel breakthrough it was designed for. The Greens now hold four English councils outright and 543 council seats nationally, and gain a council governance record to take into the 2028 cycle.

Different Perspectives

UK Government (Labour)

Westminster framed the youth justice transfer as a culmination of prior work rather than a precedent, refused a Section 30 order before the request arrived, and omitted both the Representation of the People Bill and any Wales Bill from the 13 May King's Speech. Starmer is described as open to a devolved-leaders summit in June.

Reform UK

Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk filed pre-action protocol letters framing their LGR challenge as mandate-consistent, while 22 Reform councillors departed in 14 days at an annualised rate nearly three times the 10 percent projection. Richard Tice defended the Harborne 5 million pound gift as unconditional, with no acknowledgement of Farage's two contradictory accounts on record.

SNP (Scottish Government)

Swinney submitted a Section 30 request on 14 May citing the 73-seat SNP-Greens pro-independence bloc and the 2014 Edinburgh Agreement precedent, despite the SNP finishing seven below his self-set 65-seat trigger. Downing Street's contradictory readout of their call suggests Westminster is treating the request as a holding item rather than a live constitutional negotiation.

Welsh Government (Plaid Cymru)

ap Iorwerth framed the youth justice transfer as a starting point for his six-power Wales Bill agenda, pressing demands at a phone call with Keir Starmer on 18 May and winning the first statutory function transfer to Cardiff since 1999. The Greens' unwritten confidence-and-supply arrangement gives him 45 of 96 seats, four short of a majority.

Russell Findlay (Scottish Conservatives)

Findlay refused to resign as Scottish Conservative leader after the party fell to 12 Holyrood seats and lost all five constituency MSPs. He declined Swinney's post-election talks invitation, the only major-party leader to do so.

John Swinney (SNP)

Swinney committed on 14 May to a Holyrood Section 30 vote within a week despite winning seven seats fewer than his own trigger threshold, relying on a SNP-Green majority of 73. He tabled a meeting with Starmer; Downing Street disputed that any referendum discussion was agreed.