Rachel Millward sets out Green's pitch to London

The party conference season is under way - the annual gatherings of political party leaders and activists continue with the Green Party of England and Wales in Brighton from Friday.

BBC London's political editor Karl Mercer is sitting down with leaders and other senior party figures to discuss some of the key issues facing the capital and what their party might do to tackle them.

Earlier this week he spoke to the Green Party's deputy leader Rachel Millward, and asked about their plans for housebuilding in London and the party's prospects in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election.

Karl Mercer: Good results for the party in London in May - six councils you're now in charge of. Is now the time where that hope, that expectation, that excitement, runs up against the harsh reality of local government and cuts?

Rachel Millward: I always say when people are standing to be councillors up and down the country, 'you'll be able to move the needle on the dial and do everything possible for communities and nature, within the current system - but you will also get a very sore head from banging it against the wall that is government legislation'.

Local authorities do not have the funding, the budgets, that they deserve and that they need to deliver public services. That means a level of honesty though.

Karl Mercer: The six boroughs you now run in London have something like £300m worth of debt coming over the next three years. It means that Green councils will have to take harsh decisions about cuts.

Rachel Millward: We need total transformation.

If you look at housing, we have a planning system that prioritises profit. Developers profit, over what communities need.

We need social housing at scale, but there's a limit to how much a local authority can deliver within that system.

However, the Greens are leading on things like we had an anti-austerity summit in Hackney recently, so we're leading on lobbying the government to make those changes and to really unlock funding so local authorities can be authorities.

Karl Mercer: Let's talk about housing, since you brought it up. Where are you on building on the green belt? The latest Draft London Plan says London needs to build on the green belt to deliver the homes that Londoners need.

Rachel Millward: I think the most important thing about housing is that we're prioritising social housing.

There's not even a target for social house building. What happens is that there's "build, build, build, we must build this number".

There's a target. Most of those houses are luxury and unaffordable developments that don't meet the community need.

Karl Mercer: But what about on the green belt?

Rachel Millward: Well, to be honest, there's nuance in terms of where. I don't think there's a blanket for anything.

I lead a council in rural Sussex. A lot of it is national landscape; it's very protected land. There are times when you do need to build on that, but what we want is a system.

Karl Mercer: Are you saying theGreens might support building on the green belt in London?

Rachel Millward: There is nuance in terms of where the right places are. The most important thing is that we're delivering for communities, we're delivering for nature.

I believe that people and nature can thrive together, and that's through smart development, smart planning, but it's taking the profit out of the priorities and putting the community back in.

Karl Mercer: Not sure we got to the answer on whether you're going to build on the green belt or not. We can move on to data centres - part of the Draft London Plan says data centres are crucial to London's future economic growth. Something you don't agree with?

Rachel Millward: What we don't want is hyperscale data centres that benefit US tech giants over local communities and over our own AI sovereignty.

Where we end up handing the control of services to the US - that could be catastrophic.

But also they (data centres) do have massive environmental impacts. I mean the amount of energy that some of these data centres use is as much as a small town per data centre. The temperature goes up locally, there's noise for local residents. That's not okay. There are different ways to do it. They don't have to be that scale. The technology, the chips in it can be smarter. That's what I'm looking for.

Karl Mercer: You won six councils at the May local elections. How important is it for the Greens to have an MP in London? You have an opportunity next week.

Rachel Millward: We have a wonderful opportunity next week and we've been out knocking on doors getting a really good response.

This is, I mean, we're the underdog, but we can do it. We've had hundreds of people out there. We know how effective Zack Polanski is. We know how much he's influenced this Labour government already, completely changing the narrative for the nation. We need him in Parliament, holding their feet to the fire and making sure they deliver.

Karl Mercer: What does it mean if he loses?

Rachel Millward: If he loses, that's a great shame. It's another Labour MP who'll just toe the line, you know, unnoticed, no impact on this Parliament. The impact on this Parliament is a sixth Green MP.

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