I’m a criminal barrister, current City councillor and Barbican resident. I represent Cripplegate, where I’ve lived for 8 years. Alongside my ward team colleagues, I'm working to improve services and the quality of maintenance on the Barbican and Golden Lane estates, challenge commercial overdevelopment and push for a greener, healthier City. 

 

I am currently the City’s Lead Member for Young People and sit on the Community and Children’s Services Committee, the Planning and Transportation Committee, the Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Sub-Committee and the Tackling Racism Taskforce.

 

As a councillor, I’m a strong advocate for transparency and representative democracy: I single-handedly persuaded the Council to give residents the right to speak at full council meetings; I continue to push the City to make pre-committee presentations by developers public; I’ve pushed for evening committee meetings to allow residents to attend after work; and, in my previous ward, pushed my fellow councillors to reintroduce ward surgeries. 

 

I’m a campaigner, I don’t give up easily. When the Council rejected my motion to declare a climate emergency and guarantee funding to address climate change, I led a coalition of councillors and residents to keep the pressure on the City to go further with its Climate Action Strategy: writing and coordinating an open letter calling on the City to divest from fossil fuels; and, through my seat on the planning committee, I have argued repeatedly for the impact of embodied carbon to be factored into planning applications: securing training for committee members and the development of planning guidance on embodied carbon. 

 

I also led a campaign for the City of London to become a ‘Ban the Box’ employer, giving ex-offenders a fair chance to compete for jobs by removing the tick box from application forms asking about criminal convictions – making the City of London only the third council to do so.

 

I have previously been a school governor at the City of London Academy Islington, a trained community mediator, lecturer on Transnational Criminal Justice and was a member of JUSTICE's working party on ‘Mental health and fair trial’.

​