Camden London Borough Council

Okay.

In our one minute left, I want to ask you about your own, uh, uh, I, I guess experiment, but certainly effort in your own local council here in, in, in London, Camden Council.

Yeah.

And I'm going to read what you did.

So I decided to go travelling.

And before I left to go travelling, I had a temp job at Camden Council collecting rent arrears.

I mean, I'm not using that as an example of starting off in real estate.

It was very much an administrative council job and it could have been in any department, could have been in the refuse department, could have been anywhere.

So which order did that all happen in though? Just for those listening, you did your degree in politics.

You came out into the workplace in the middle of the GFC.

Yeah, so 2009 was when I went to work at Camden and I thought I was really lucky to have a temp job at Camden Council.

and that was that was solely to just raise some funds to go traveling and then we you know I think me and two mates were just looking at the state of the world and being like it's really hard to get a job let's save up some money go away and see if things have improved when we get back and then when I got back my my you know almost the day I got back my My father made me go out on building sites for him.

So for us, some of those stories and those journeys that we've enabled through taking a different approach to the sector has unlocked some significant positive gains, not just for the individuals, but for the organisations we're working with.

And, you know, before we do take a breather, like that's then led to our most recent kind of step increase where we've just had Camden Council invest £112k into one hive to roll it out into 10 charities in one go so that this is a very specific intentional thing that's happened because what we're now starting to see are the commissioners off programs and you know that delivery supply chain of charity doing the employability the mental well-being the supporting um skills the additional tutoring all those services are that are delivered by the social and public sector are all delivered at the end by these charities.

And the commissioners now, the ones deploying the trillions that we spend on our social, on our kind of public sector in the UK, into investing in these organizations so look we need you to become more robust and we need you to build capacity and resilience and scale because we know that how we're going to be pushed on how much budget we can deploy into you to deliver so no longer is it okay to spend 100k on 10 young people no no we need to see better results we need to see great But to achieve that, like in the business world, you need to capitalize some form of investment.

So that's where Camden Council have taken the leap.

And we're seeing other foundations, trusts, in a sort of suit where they are interested in exploring how deploying infrastructure and tech to pull together those fragmented systems of charities is starting to become a very, very good play, not only because then you get better transparency and data from those organizations.

We're going to go for a break, but when we come back, I want to know more about the nuts and bolts of how it works.

That was the highest.

but it would be wrong to take that data and make a direct comparison with other councils who are reporting and reported many less because if you actually speak to those councils on the extreme end of the trend what seems to be happening is that they're really encouraging a strong reporting culture among their staff so to take Camden Council as an example Camden saw reports of reports of assaults almost quadruple between 2024 and 2025 from 12 to 40 but the council says this is basically showing a growing confidence among staff that abuse won't be tolerated so Anna Wright who's cabinet member for better homes and homelessness prevention at Camden said we're actively encouraging staff to report any incidents they experience at work no incident is too small

We'll come back to what's happening in a few moments, but when you asked for data on assaults, you asked councils and housing associations to send a breakdown of assaults which included abuse that was verbal, physical, sexual or relating to a protected characteristic.

One of these categories saw a much bigger increase than others this year.

Well, how about a Somali? How about a Somali migrant? Yeah, she's the one.

And leader of Camden Council.

She's got very interesting history.

I'll not go into that for libel reasons, but very interesting history.

You're an unforgivable bunch.

I saw the leader of Camden Council.

She slinked out of the chamber when pro-Palestinians were chanting or protesting in the gallery.

Anyone in Hoban and St Pancras, vote for Zach Polanski.

Ha! This time, sorry, that's a typo, I think.

This time, the key battle is between the Green leader, Zach Polanski, and Labour's candidate, Camden Council leader, Sagal Abdiwali.

The contest, sparked by former PM Keir Starmer giving up the seat, is an early test for Andy Burnham and also a potential opportunity for the Greens to show the strength of their appeal versus Labour in a traditionally safe Labour seat.

So, what are going to be the key issues and what will the result actually mean? So, Rachel, this is being seen as a major test for two party leaders, Polanski and Burnham.

Rachel, turning to the front runner now, what do we know about Labour's candidate, Sagar Abdi Wali? What is she campaigning on?

Well, firstly, she is a very well-known and indeed well-liked in the constituency.

She's a leader of Camden Council and unlike both...

George Galloway and Zach Polanski and whoever it was who lives in Beaconsfield.

So Labour has held the seat in Hoban and St Pancras since 1983.

And Camden Council has selected their leader, Sehgal Abdiwali, as its candidate.

It's basically a smiley, smiley lady.

I've seen some of her, have you seen some of her clips? I have, I have.

Or at least they've done enough work to be able to be imprinted on the minds of residents in Camden.

So much so that, for example, even in Hoban and St. Pancras, you have all the revenue that comes from the Google headquarters and other tech headquarters, I believe, just outside of King's Cross, which means that they are actually really well funded for things like youth services.

The Camden Council, I believe, has one of the highest budgets in the country as well.

And so... it's really easy to take on labor in the areas where there's actual resentment but even still i mean this is how north star came about we literally tried to run pro-palestine candidates in the areas which would have most resentment for labor and we weren't we weren't successful the only