TWENTY-NINE year old Alex Wilson was not old enough to vote when current Greenwich and Lewisham London Assembly member, Len Duvall, was first elected to City Hall. How does the Conservative candidate think he would do the job better than the incumbent, who is looking for his fourth term.
“I’m not going to criticise Len too heavily but I would say that part of the difficulty is that yes he’s a former borough leader, there’s no two ways about that, but a lot of other people would question, who is he and what has he done?”
“The main focus is, and always will be, on the mayor. I get the impression some assembly members went in to City Hall and realised because of the way the legislation was set up, they don’t have as many powers as they would like.”
Wilson was elected to Greenwich Council in 2006 and represents the Blackheath Westcombe ward. His family wasn’t political, he says, so what brought him into party politics at a young age?
“There’s always something that leads you into politics and gets you motivated and for me it was John Roan School and particularly how that school had moved down the order of things, and how it had fallen on hard times.”
He was also adamantly against the proposed move to the Greenwich Peninsula.
“If you close your eyes and imagine a secondary school anywhere in the world, it’s normally a two storey building with a playground outside. What they wanted to build was a five storey building with a playground on the roof.”
Wilson’s own time at John Roan was sandwiched between a primary education at Halstow School, and attending sixth form at Colfe’s, where one of his teachers was Spencer Drury – now his party leader on Greenwich Council.
Education is one of Wilson’s passions in politics, he says. He tells me that he is looking forward to the new free school due to open in the borough and says that he backs grammars.
“There’s nothing wrong with trying to promote excellence in all walks of school, from sports to academic.
“There are a number of Greenwich pupils that go to grammars in Bexley. That’s parents voting with their feet and sending their kids to these schools.”
But, if elected, Wilson won’t be determining education policy – that’s not a policy area covered by the GLA – he will be scrutinising the mayor. What does he think Boris Johnson’s stand-out achievements have been?
“Managing City’s Hall’s finances when the economy’s in the doldrums. He inherited a huge amount of waste that needed to be sorted out, so his biggest thing was keeping the council tax precept [rise] zero and then actually in the last year reducing it for the first time in the GLA’s history. That shows very careful stewardship.”
He adds that the mayor got a “very good deal” for London in the Coalition Government’s first Comprehensive Spending Review, and was able to safeguard Crossrail.
“In order to guarantee Crossrail, he had to get rid of a collection of other transport initiatives that had come out of TFL and say ‘Look, the one important thing we can’t miss again is Crossrail.’
“That’s going to benefit the borough with both Woolwich and Abbey Wood getting links.”
Boris Johnson has said he wants to see a new Blackwall relief tunnel built. Wouldn’t more capacity just attract even more cars – and congestion – to the area?
“I would comfortably argue two things to that, ” he begins.
“Firstly, we’re already at, or over, capacity so that’s a wonderful philosophical argument but unfortunately it’s not a very practical one. The simple fact is we need this tunnel.
“Secondly, it always amazes me that London is the place that generates more income for the country than any other part of the country and yet some wards in Greenwich and Lewisham are definitely in the poorest ten per cent and we could definitely improve the lives of the people that live there if we had better transport connectivity.”
Would he support introducing tolling at the tunnels?
“With the financial situation as it would appear to be, that’s one of the only ways we could pay for another tunnel. The difficulty of that though is that I don’t think that’s entirely fair to the residents of Greenwich, Lewisham and the rest of south-east London. It should only be for a short space of time as a means to pay for it, and then it should be free to use again”
At the last election, Boris said he would relieve traffic by reintroducing the contraflow at Blackwall but this never happened. Why?
“Unfortunately the legal situation was pretty clear cut and because it had been turned off, and the police had given advice on why it should be turned off, to turn it back on again became incredibly difficult so that’s why you need to find other schemes.”
Shouldn’t the mayor have sought that “clear cut advice” before making it an election commitment?
“Possibly, but a lot of it is bogged down in the minutiae of commitee reports and other difficulties.”
One of the most visible legacies in Greenwich of the current mayoralty is the erection of a new cable car spanning the Thames. Will this benefit Greenwich?
“What Greenwich does very well, and here we are sat in the National Maritime Museum under this amazing roof, is capture the tourist market and I very much see the cable car as feeding into that.”
But is the journey from North Greenwich to Royal Docks likely to attract many tourists?
“My background is in urban planning. When you’re doing these things, you’re looking at the long term, not the immediate year or six months after it opens.
“If you build something like a cable car, it joins up the connections. You’re building a connection that makes additional developments on the Peninsula and at Royal Docks possible and attracts footfall which is vital to them. All these small changes add up over time.
“With something like the cable car, maybe not immediately, but in the long term it should add up,” he says.
Another way to cross the Thames is through the Greenwich and Woolwich foot tunnels. What does the candidate think of the way the refurbishment has been carried out by the council?
“It’s taken far too long. I do appreciate that, a bit like doing a house up, when you take something down you uncover more problems that need solving. But there’s been two particular difficulties: its taken too long and the communication of problems has been frustrating.”
The mayor’s bicycle hire scheme reached Tower Hamlets earlier this year. If elected, would Wilson lobby the mayor to extend it to Greenwich?
“I would particularly like to see the bicycles come to where we are now, which is Greenwich town centre.
“But if you have those cycle hire schemes anywhere near a hill, everyone gets on them and cycles down the hill and you end up with all the bikes down the bottom and none at the top. So there are certain practical difficulties about spreading the bike hire scheme across the entirety of London.
With his councillor’s hat back on, I ask him what he makes of the recent Democracy Greenwich campaign, which aims to return council to the old Committee System.
“We put forward a motion at the last council meeting saying we want to go back to the committee system. Chris Roberts [Leader of the Council] said, ‘Look, let’s not do a motion here, let’s have a conversation between both groups and then we’ll come back and look at it in the autumn.’
“We thought that sounded fine and prudent and then what then seems to have happened is that certain members of the Labour group thought they weren’t going to get the hearing they deserved so started this campaign and jumped on the bandwagon we’d started.
“What’s depressing is that they knew about this motion but didn’t come and talk to us at any point, they decided to go off and do their thing.”
One of the issues that the Conservative group on the council raised in the run up to the election, and since, is Greenwich Time. Local Government Secretary of State, Eric Pickles, tried to clamp down on council newspapers but still Greenwich Time keeps going. Is Wilson surprised?
“No, because I know Greenwich Council, they will cling on tooth and nail. Every other council, with one exception, have got rid of theirs and moved to less frequent editions.
“It is a source of frustration but I don’t think Greenwich Council is going to get rid of it any time soon – not if they can cling on to it.”
Councillor Wilson was elected as the Deputy Leader of the Conservative group on Greenwich Council at their recent internal elections.
Slightly guarded about what he can or can’t say, he merely says of his elevation to a leadership role, “I’m looking forward to the opportunity.”
The Conservative group lost seats on the council in 2010, which he puts down to it coinciding with a General Election. Does he expect them to improve next time around? “Hopefully. I would like to see a few more seats going the Conservative way.”
He will assume his new responsibilities as Deputy Leader following the council’s Annual Meeting on May 16th. Whether or not Alex Wilson is to get two new jobs this month or one remains in the hands of the electors on May 3rd
Alex Wilson is one of eight candidates for the London Assembly member for Greenwich and Lewisham. Find out more at London Elects.
See our interviews with Len Duvall, John Russell and Roger Sedgley here.
So with his third Blackwall Tunnel, Alex wants to pollute the air around Halstow School some more? Nice.