This article was originally published as an edition of the Green Transition, New Statesman Spotlight’s weekly newsletter on the economics of net zero. To see more editions and subscribe, click here.
The average age of councillors at Westminster City Council is 52 years old. That’s eight years younger than the national average for our local representatives, according to the Local Government Association. Ryan Jude, the Labour-run council’s cabinet member for climate, ecology, and culture, is bringing down the average more than most: he is just 29. First elected in 2022, Jude represents Lancaster Gate ward and is the youngest cabinet member in the council’s history.
Alongside his Westminster duties, he works part time for the Green Finance Institute (GFI) where he leads on the their built environment programme (regular GT readers will know that the UK’s leaky, poorly insulated housing stock contributes more than its fair share to UK emissions). His GFI work clearly complements his Westminster council brief, but for Jude it also comes in handy because a councillors’ allowance alone would not be enough to live off, especially in a central London borough like Westminster with skyrocketing rents. The 29-year-old is clearly aware that not everyone could make this delicate double life work.
“For a young person, as a councillor, it can be a bit of a balance,” he told me on a chilly day in November at the council’s central offices. “As a Labour councillor, you’ve got to live in the borough you represent, which I absolutely think is the right thing to do”. But in Westminster, as of October 2024, the average monthly cost of a private rental property is £3,131; this constitutes an 8.7 per cent increase on the previous year. As a cabinet member, Jude receives an allowance of £17,668 per annum. “If you’re a councillor in a place like Westminster, Camden, or inner London, then you have got to live in that area. And given the way that councillors’ allowances function, you have to work alongside it. That means that we restrict the pool of people that are able to run,” he told me.
For those with an existing, less flexible full-time job, or those with childcare or other caring commitments, the idea of becoming a councillor becomes inaccessible. So it’s no wonder that the average age of a councillor in Westminster is 52. “There are residents I meet every day who I think would be absolutely brilliant as councillors,” he said, “but given the nature of their job – maybe they do shift work, or multiple different jobs – in the current system, they would find it incredibly difficult to become one.” Jude is adamant that things must change. “We should be building a system which enables more people to be councillors.”
Jude himself got into local politics by accident. Working in environmental policy at the GFI, Jude had spent a lot of time looking at councils’ climate action across the country. As a resident of the then Conservative-run council, he began looking at how things were operating closer to home, and wasn’t very enamoured with what he saw. “We have an outsized influence in Westminster. The borough contributes more to UK GDP than any other council,” he explained, “so I thought, why aren’t they doing more on this?” He began getting involved in his local Labour group and was soon tapped up as a potential candidate.
In 2022, he was elected to Lancaster Gate in a historic changing of the guard from blue to red – previously, the council had never been Labour-run. Sitting alongside him on the new Labour cabinet is veteran Labour councillor Paul Dimoldenberg (his daughter Amelia is of Chicken Shop Date fame) who later wrote a book about this unprecedented victory.
Since then, Jude has been heavily involved in the council’s climate and nature policy – initially as deputy cabinet member, and now as a member of full cabinet. Westminster currently ranks number one on Climate Emergency UK’s leaderboard (that’s a nationwide organisation helping local council-led climate action).
But like all local authorities in England, the council is not without its challenges. Its work promoting net zero and its climate committments are often forced to take a back seat by the sheer volume of social problems faced by the borough, which are part of its statutory responsibilities. “Westminster is a tale of two cities,” Jude explained. Even though it covers one of the wealthiest areas both in the capital and the country, the borough has pockets of deep deprivation. And this is exacerbated by the UK’s existing and persistent housing crisis. The council has seen demand for temporary accommodation rising by 15 per cent year on year. “In 2023, we had to allocate an additional £30m to prevent an increase in the number of households becoming homeless,” Jude told me, “we’ve invested £85m to purchase an additional 270 properties which we can use for temporary accommodation.” This crisis comes off the back of 10 years of austerity in local government; over the past decade, councils’ core spending power has been cut by 26 per cent. All the while, demand for services has increased in a vicious cycle.
There’s a human cost to this crisis. During our interview, Jude receives a phone call from a distressed resident; a mother with two children who has been living in temporary accommodation in a hotel in his Lancaster Gate ward. She had been told that her family needs to leave the hotel as their use of the room had come to an end but as she they are homeless, they have nowhere else to go. Jude has been fighting her corner. Still, this case is not unique. “There are a few residents who stick in my mind,” Jude said, “they’re at the end of their tether. They come to see their councillor because they don’t know where to go next.”
This – it seems – is all too often becoming the tricky reality. Many local politicians, like Jude, run for election because they want to enact visible changes to their local areas. But when they get in, they find this appetite for change is curtailed by the sector’s rocky financial outlook. Action on climate, or cultural regeneration are not statutory services; therefore, councils are not legally required to deliver them. This often means making difficult trade-offs. “No one goes into local government to make cuts,” Jude said.
It is for that reason he believes that action on climate should be placed on a more statutory footing, and that funding for local government is bolstered so that such essential work becomes less vulnerable to cuts. “If we don’t properly support councils to invest in climate action, then we’re never going to meet our national targets,” Jude said, “local government needs to be factored in a lot more to the way we talk about climate in the country.”
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