CROYDON ELECTION QUESTIONS
For this General Election, Inside Croydon has been offering a platform to candidates from across the political spectrum, from across the borough’s four constituencies. Much the same questions, their answers published at length.
Our first interview is with CLAIRE BONHAM, the Liberal Democrat candidate in Streatham and Croydon North
Interviews by VIMAL VIVEGANANDA
Q Why should we trust you, or your party?
Well, you should trust both. And there’s a couple of reasons for that.
I think firstly, one of the main things about Liberal Democrats in general and the way that we set policy is it’s very democratic. It’s very much done by listening to people in my consultation at local level. So we’re not funded by trade unions or feel like we need to prioritise policies for older people because they’re the people who vote for us.
We have a much more diverse voter base and we don’t rely on a specific kind of constituency group in order to give us funding or votes. So I think that means that our policies are much more thought-through. They are evidence-based by and large and they are not trying to please a particular group of people.
You may have seen the party political broadcast that we did that Ed [Davey, the LibDem party leader] put out the other week. I think it just goes to show that we’re a little bit different. I know lots of people were moved to tears by him talking about his personal experiences as a carer.
Different mood: the LibDems’ party political broadcast, showing Ed Davey at home as a carer for his disabled son, set him apart from Starmer and Sunak
And I think that just goes to show we’re very down to earth. We are passionate about the things that actually matter to people. And we know that because we listen to people and we knock on doors and we hear what people are saying to us.
And that’s how we make our policy.
So I think there’s reasons to trust us as a party because we’ve got more of that sort of grassroots feel. And we’re very strong local campaigners.
On a personal level, I would say that I’ve been a really strong local champion as a local councillor in Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood. I’ve championed lots of causes. I stood up against the 15% rise in Council Tax, which only myself and the Greens actually voted against over the last year or two.
I’ve championed the cause of housing. I’ve tried to get my residents who are in Brick by Brick-built housing a better deal, and I’ve challenged unfair service charge hikes and things like that.
I’m working incredibly hard for my local community. And hopefully that shows. In fact quite a lot of people have stopped me in the streets and said, “We’re really happy that you’re standing for us. We’re going to vote for you because you’re really good local councillor.”
So I think there’s reasons to trust both the LibDems and me as the candidate because of everything I’ve shown over the last couple of years as a councillor.
Q What is the single most important issue for you at this General Election?
For me, it’s the NHS and in general social care.
You’ll be aware that lots of people can’t get a doctor’s appointment or a dentist’s appointment. I haven’t actually been to the dentist for a really long time because I can’t get back on the waiting list. So for me that’s kind of really important.
So we would do a few things like giving everybody the right to see their GP within seven days. We would train a thousand more GPs. We’d also introduce a cancer guarantee so that 100% of patients will actually be able to start treatment within two months of referral.
Guarantees: the LibDems are promising prompt and available GPs’ and dentists’ appointments
And we would guarantee access to NHS dentists.
On the social care side, we would be introducing free personal care like we’ve done in Scotland. Well, the LibDems in Scotland have brought that in. We would really want to establish a cross-party commission on sustainable funding for social care.
And we’d increasing the carers’ allowance because I think it’s really, really important that you’ve got to have the basics right.
We would be able to have the basic things in order to then move on with society, because if people are worrying about those basic things and basic needs, then they’re not they’re not getting on with the rest of their lives and being productive and being creative parts of our economy.
So I think getting things like the NHS and schools right is really, really important at the election. Tackling the cost of living crisis is also really important. But again, the way that we do that is by fundamentally fixing the social services in this country that are not working very well.
Q What will you and your party do to improve education in our schools and for our students?
I think there’s a few things around in terms of the building blocks that need to go in place before we actually look at things like the curriculum. So one of the major things we would be looking at is child welfare and making sure that children are in a good place when they get to school to learn. So we would extend free school meals for all children who are in poverty and who need it, because that might be the only meal they get all day and if you send them to school hungry they’re not learning because they’re not able to concentrate.
And we would also put a mental health professional in every primary and secondary school. The mental health epidemic in this country is frightening and the earlier you tackle it, and provide coping strategies for the rest of their lives, the better.
I run a youth charity working with young people age 14 to 25 and one of the things that they’ve said is that most feel like they’ve caught up academically after covid, but one of the things they haven’t caught up with is just the mental health side of things and the feelings of isolation.
They all miss big milestones in their lives so fixing the basics in terms of giving them the ability to see a mental health professional when needed is really important.
We would also invest in teachers and professional development for teachers and we’d also create a school teachers review so that it was properly independent so that teachers were getting a fair deal on pay as well. If you can’t bring in the teachers and then retain the teachers then you’re not going to have a good education system.
Q After 14 years of austerity, England’s local councils, social care, local services, are in a state of collapse. Including here in Croydon.
What would you, and your party, do to fix Croydon?
Yeah, absolutely, and Croydon isn’t the only place and Lambeth are suffering similar issues around housing matters.
Consistent: Claire Bonham is one of only three councillors in Croydon to have voted against Council Tax increases
So as someone who sits on the council’s audit and governance committee I can see with my own eyes the effect of a lack of government funding is having in Croydon and I think one of the challenging things, which is a bit nerdy, but one of the challenging things is that Croydon is an outer London borough but we’ve got the largest number of young people and the second highest number of care homes, but we are getting less money to deal with more problems.
Having fair funding is definitely the first thing that needs to be in place.
The LibDems have also committed to multi-year settlement for local councils: there’s nothing more frustrating than not hearing from government until December when your next budget has to start in March. It’s the same every year and every year it makes it harder for councils to set the budgets because they don’t know what money is going to come in in terms of grants.
It also makes it hard for us as councillors to actually scrutinise those budgets and really dig into the details because they’re coming so late. So giving multi-year settlements is really important.
Social care is a huge hole in in local government funding, so reforming social care and putting together a cross-party agreement on how we deal with social care is massive because that is one of the biggest drain of resources.
The other thing that is another massive drain on resources for councils is special educational needs and disabilities, because it costs so much money. And so again we’ve pledged to have extra funding for local authorities to reduce the amount that schools have to pay towards people who are on an EHCP, education health and care plan.
Housing promise: the LibDems promise 150,000 social homes per year
The other big issue – even though they’re all really important – is housing. Again, there’s just not enough housing.
London Councils put out some reporting the other day that said that London’s boroughs are spending £90million a month on temporary accommodation, which is absolutely ridiculous. It just cannot be allowed to continue because that is a such a scandal.
So one of the things that the LibDems would do would commit to building 150,000 new social houses a year.
I think that they’re the main areas where local government needs some help, because at the moment it’s not a pretty picture. Some places like Croydon have gone into the red through their own incompetence and folly, but many other councils across the country which are well-run are now in a very similar situation, where they are looking at bankruptcy through no fault of their own really.
Q Brexit?
It’s been a disaster, hasn’t it?
As I say, I work with young people and with that and the climate emergency, they’re devastated about the way that the country has just sold their future down the river by taking us out of Europe. So it’s still something that makes me incredibly angry today.
We would obviously want to have closer ties with Europe and our aim is to go back into the single market, and we would try and do that as quickly as possible.
But I don’t think it’s going to be a quick or easy fix, to be honest. So in the meantime, it’s about rebuilding that relationship because, even if we wanted to go back in tomorrow, it’s not entirely clear that the European Union would want us back, particularly in the way that we’ve behaved over the last few years. So we need to start by rebuilding that relationship and fix the relationship first.
We want to do that by things like going in on other kind of cross-national agreements like Erasmus, which is also something that we left. We need to pay in for those schemes in order to show that we’re serious about rejoining the single market and about going back in. But it’s a tricky one because much as I and many of my residents and people I speak to on the street want to push hard and fast, it’s not going to happen that way.
But yeah, what we are committed to joining the single market as soon as we would be able to.
Q Gaza?
A solution is a very tough thing, but the Liberal Democrats have long been calling for immediate bilateral ceasefire. What’s going on currently is not helping anybody. We need to get the hostages out, but we also need to stop the incredible humanitarian crisis that’s happening in Gaza and it is absolutely heartbreaking to see what’s happening because the response has not been proportionate in any way.
Dehumanising: Claire Bonham and the LibDems want an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and a return of all the Oct 7 hostages
I’ve been to the West Bank, I haven’t been to Gaza. I used to work for an international charity and I’ve seen it with my own eyes and I think the thing that I find most difficult is it’s utterly dehumanising and the only way that there is ever going to be a solution is to bring humanity back into the situation and not to treat people as enemies but to get people around the table talking, which is incredibly easier said than done obviously, but that’s why we need an immediate ceasefire because otherwise we need to rebuild trust otherwise nothing is going to happen.
The LibDems have also said that they would immediately recognise Palestine as a state, which I think is the first thing that needs to happen in order for us to be able to get towards a two-state solution.
I would say it’s very hard for people who aren’t there to really understand what it’s like on the ground and when I went there I was told by everybody, “You just don’t really understand it. You coming for a week, you coming for a few days, you can’t really understand.”
I think it does have to be led by Israelis and Palestinians themselves, but there are things that we as an international community can do, including recognising Palestine as a state and making sure that we do whatever we can to help create that space for the two-state solution, starting with the ceasefire.
Q For all Ed Davey’s stunts in this campaign, the LibDems are still the ‘austerity enablers’, aren’t they?
We have to live with some of the things that we did in government and I think one of the things I would say is that that’s partly the grown-up stuff of being in government and other parties who can sit on the sidelines, small parties and shout about all these things.
When you’re actually getting to govern, you have to make compromises. We made some that were really bad, like tuition fees. Obviously, I was not part it then, but I feel really bad because it still comes up on the doorstep and that was something that we should never have promised in the first place because it wasn’t deliverable.
One of the things we did do was fight the Tories every day while we were actually in coalition government and I think you’ll find it wasn’t until 2015 when they started doing the some of the stuff that we would never, ever have signed up to.
Austerity enablers: LibDem Claire Bonham claims her party stopped the worst excesses of the Tory government… no, we don’t remember that, either
Unfortunately, the voters were unable to distinguish that and I understand why completely but it’s tough but there are things that we’re doing now that no one else is calling for, such as wanting to end the two-child benefit cap which Labour aren’t offering to do, so I think there’s opportunities now for us to do more in order to reverse some of the things that happened while we were in government.
But as I said most of the things that were really rubbish that happened were after we left government and that’s when people realise that we had actually been holding them back for five years – you know the Brexit referendum is one of the things they did once we were out of office.
Yeah its tough, we have to move beyond that now and what we are offering is a fair deal for everybody and we just got to move forward from here and that is all we can do
Q What have you achieved as a councillor in Crystal Palace that shows what kind of MP you might be?
Good question. I think there’s a few areas that I really care about that I’ve managed to make some headway, one of them is housing. I’ve supported lots of our council tenants in order to sort out their housing repairs and things like that.
I’ve been working really closely with those people who have been affected by Brick by Brick, including working with Inside Croydon to get some publicity out there, which has been fantastic actually because as a result of that, more people who have been affected by Brick by Brick outside of my area have contacted me and asked for help.
So I’ve managed to agree with the Mayor that he will meet with residents who have been affected by Brick by Brick in various ways – that might be ridiculous increases in service charges or it’s repairs that have never been done or, in one case, a block of flats that had had not had their fire safety certificates signed off because Brick by Brick hadn’t acted on recommendations. So I managed to get the London Fire Brigade to go down the other week and do an assessment, and that’s all being sorted out.
Slow down: police have been conducting speed checks in Crystal Palace, after urgings from Cllr Claire Bonham
So I think there’s things around housing that I’ve done.
Our green spaces and parks are getting really important to me. I’ve managed to get the Friends of Westow Park group restarted and worked really hard to champion the kind of people who are working in our green spaces.
I think the other thing that worries people a lot is crime and just feeling safe in their areas. I’ve been working really hard with our local safe neighbourhood team, including getting speed watch sessions on some of the notorious roads where people go speeding a lot and I’ve brought residents into that conversation and had that kind of opportunity to work with residents and the police to try and come up with some better solutions.
Obviously, in an area where we don’t have any money, we have to come up with better solutions and one of the things that I have done is just to try to engage the community as much as possible in making those decisions.
I am incredibly hard working… well, Inside Croydon itself reported that I had done more casework by 15 times than one of my councillor colleagues.
Iif you use those statistics, and I know they are not foolproof, but you know that is an indication of how hard working I am. But also, it just shows that I would champion the sort of issues around housing, around our green spaces, around crime, but also listen to local residents and engaging with local residents.
It’s been actually lovely because lots of people have stopped me in the street and said, “We’re so happy to see a councillor who’s visible, we’re really happy you’re standing for parliament,” so hopefully the people in my ward have seen that.
But it will be great to be able to get that message out to the rest of the Streatham and Croydon North as well.
- This is the first of a series of interviews, which include questions submitted by our readers, with a range of candidates from across all four of Croydon’s constituencies that we shall be publishing between now and the General Election on July 4
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Read more: The New Yorker’s take on the damage of 14 years of Tory rule
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
I like many of the LibDem policies and candidates, but am rather put off by the proposal to give the vote to 16 year olds: who is mature enough at that age to participate in the election of a government?
Don’t be ageist Bernie