Georgia Gould on a new generation of Labour MPs

The new member for Queen’s Park and Maida Vale brings years of local-government experience to Westminster.

Shortly after Georgia Gould became the leader of Camden Council in 2017, a fire broke out at Grenfell Tower, a social housing high-rise in the nearby borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Seventy-two people were killed, and 800 others rendered homeless. Highly flammable cladding had been used in a renovation of the building, meaning that when a fire broke out at 1am on 14 June, the flames engulfed the block within minutes.

Two weeks after the tragedy, Camden officials oversaw the evacuation of five high-rise tower blocks featuring the same deadly materials on the Chalcots Estate in Swiss Cottage. The evacuation, affecting almost 800 households, was the largest in Britain since the World War Two, and it was the first major crisis Gould dealt with as leader of the council. It has stuck with her ever since.

“I think that had a profound impact on me, because clearly as a council we hadn’t been listening to residents,” Gould, now a Labour MP, told me when we met at her ministerial office at London’s 70 Whitehall. As a minister in the Cabinet Office, Gould, 38, hopes to translate what she learned in her 14 years in local government (seven of which she spent leading the council) into improving central government. “A guiding thread for me and how to deliver public services is that we hear from the users of those services… It’s important for me that the government stays listening and delivers services in a way that has people at its heart.”

When I arrived at Gould’s office, she gave me an enthusiastic hug. This was not the first time I had interviewed her – we met to discuss devolution two years ago when she was still at Camden Council and I was a reporter for the Local Government Chronicle – and she remembered me. “I absolutely loved local government,” Gould said. “You’re really close to communities and you run a lot of public services. I learned a lot in that time.” But after 14 years as a councillor, she began to feel “increasing frustration” about its limitations. “There were some challenges that you just couldn’t solve from running a council… I think the opportunity to make national change is an enormous one.”

When the election was called in May this year, Gould decided to run, and was selected as the Labour candidate for the newly formed north-west London seat of Queen’s Park and Maida Vale. Her campaign was eventful: she had a broken elbow and an eight-month-old baby. But she prevailed, winning the seat with a 14,913-vote majority, and entering parliament alongside 203 other new Labour MPs, whom she describes as having an “amazing energy”.

“I think we all feel a real sense of responsibility. After 14 years of Conservative government, when you’re talking to people, there are a lot who don’t have faith in politics but have put their trust in us to change things.” She said her cohort “feel that trust really deeply to deliver for the communities that put us there”.

One of the ways Gould hopes to do this is through her new ministerial position in the Cabinet Office, under the leadership of Pat McFadden, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and a close ally of Keir Starmer. She was appointed to the post almost immediately after being elected and was handed a brief that includes public sector reform. At Camden, Gould worked with the University College London economist Mariana Mazzucato on a mission-led approach, setting measurable goals for government. Starmer has adopted this approach: his five missions formed the basis of the Labour manifesto and have now been embedded into his programme for government.

Camden’s four missions, which were designed to apply “not just for us as a council, but for delivery for the whole community”, were: diversity in power; economic opportunity for young people; sustainable food, and sustainable estates. Each had a key indicator for success and they were designed to bring together stakeholders from across the borough to achieve them. “The purpose of a mission is to inspire long-term action and end sticking-plaster politics,” Gould said. For example, “one of our missions in Camden was that everyone in the borough would have free, healthy, sustainable and affordable meals every day. That is something we can measure; we know if we have achieved it.”

Gould was born in May 1986 at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, just outside of her new constituency. Her father was the late Philip Gould, an architect of New Labour, and her mother is Gail Rebuck, the chair of Penguin Random House and a Labour peer. Gould lived on the edge of her now-constituency in Notting Hill until she was “about nine or ten”. The family then moved to Kentish Town, where she now lives with her husband and their child.

Gould grew up in a firmly political household. Her father was close to Tony Blair and worked as his chief pollster alongside Alastair Campbell while the Labour Party was last in government. In our previous interview she told me she was “out delivering Labour Party leaflets” before she could speak.

Her first attempt at parliament was in 2009, aged 23, when she unsuccessfully ran to be selected as the Labour Party candidate for Erith and Thamesmead. Today, she describes the attempt as “ill-judged”. Gould was selected to represent Kentish Town ward (its residents then included the Starmers) on Camden Council later that year and won in a tricky by-election.

“I really loved it. I was passionate about the change you can make and very committed to the work I was doing there,” she said. In her 14 years of local government, she said she gained “a huge amount of experience”, and has seen “firsthand how public services have been run down”. Local government finances are in a notoriously poor state, having been cut in real terms by 55 per cent between 2010 and 2020. Central government, too, is in a similar position, with a £22bn black hole in the public finances and a “constrained fiscal environment” – the issue of the day. “I’ve seen how cuts have meant that things that were previously invested in, like early intervention, have reduced over time,” Gould said. “It is a sector under extreme pressure.”

Gould intends to bring this in-depth knowledge of running government within tight financial constraints to her new job in Westminster. A review of how central government might work more harmoniously with councils and other local and community bodies is already underway. She has also been working with Jim McMahon, the new local government minister, on getting government departments to collaborate better. “Part of our role [in the Cabinet Office] is convening different government departments, local authorities and places to develop approaches together”, she said. This is where mission-led government is useful, “because you have a shared outcome… you need to work across different departments and levels of government to achieve it”.

“We could do this differently,” Gould said, “we could have a better partnership between the centre and communities, and the opportunity to put some of that into practice is incredibly exciting.” Throughout our conversation, she exuded enthusiasm for the possibility of change – a quality that a dreary Keir Starmer could learn from.