Labour Party Manifesto from your Harringay Labour team!

Hi everyone,

I’m Olly Bennathan. I’ve been a Ladder resident since 2019, I’ve previously worked with the Cabinet and senior officers in Haringey Council, and I’m delighted to be one of your Labour candidates in the local elections on the 7^th of May.

I’m very proud to be standing for election alongside two of our serving councillors, Anna Abela and Zena Brabazon.

Our manifesto for 2026-2030 outlines what Haringey’s Labour group will deliver if we are elected on the 7^th of May. Please follow this link to see it in full: Haringey Manifesto

From next month, we will start to feel some of the changes the national Labour government is delivering, including uplifts to National Minimum and Living Wages, £1.5 million of Pride in Place funding for Haringey, a generational upgrade to workers’ rights, and new rights to protect renters from bad landlords.

Haringey Labour has had a longer time in government, and we have achieved so much for local people. To cite just a few achievements, we have:

• Built 1,300 council homes, the third highest level in the country.
• Received an outstanding rating for our Children’s Services for the first time ever, on top of our 98% ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ schools and nurseries, and £5 million investment into the two schools in our ward! (I will quickly add that Cllr Brabazon is our Cabinet Member for Children and must take substantial credit for all of this.)
• Invested in our local parks and green spaces across the borough – Ducketts Common has just been earmarked for £150k Pride in Place funding to transform its play area.
• Reduced rough sleeping by almost 50%, despite levels rising nationally.
• Brought our leisure services in house so that we can ensure our different communities across the borough have the best possible leisure offer to suit their interests and needs.
• Won Borough of Culture 2027 – through our Rebel Borough bid (which I supported as a council officer). This will be a year of events across the borough, shining a light on local culture, and bringing enormous benefits to our communities and local economy.
• Grown community networks so that every community in Haringey has a venue to raise issues with Council officers, and a direct voice into the Council’s decision-making process.
• Worked with our Multi-faith Forum to protect the community cohesion that is stronger in Haringey than anywhere else.

Our new manifesto builds on these achievements.

One of our most important pledges is to build 3,000 council homes at council rent by 2031, alongside at least 500 genuinely affordable homes for key workers - teachers, nurses, firefighters, ambulance workers, social workers. This will make us the biggest builder of council housing in the country – that is so important for the thousands of people living in temporary accommodation across our borough.

But we also fought for pledges to be included in this manifesto which will deliver for Harringay ward. Some of the ones we are most excited about are:

• Establishing a Renters' Rights Enforcement Team, which will be proactive in turning the Government’s Renters Rights Act into practical support for renters in our borough.
• Engaging with local restaurants – including through regular spot checks – to reduce pollution from ovens, including on Green Lanes (Cllr Abela is working hard to tackle air pollution in our ward). We will also install Green Living Walls in all our schools to filter classroom air and create a right to apply for affordable home electric vehicle charging.
• Making our borough more green by planting 4,000 street trees and another 5,000 in parks and green spaces, and creating two new nature reserves and ten wildflower meadows in Haringey.
• Investing in new segregated cycle lanes on dangerous main roads, installing 300 additional bike hangars in the Borough, and strengthening the Council’s waste contract to make our streets cleaner.

These are just some snapshots of what you will see in our full manifesto – please do have a look at the full document: Haringey Manifesto

Thank you for reading, and do get in touch with any of us by email if you have any questions about this or anything else.

Thanks for reading,

Olly Bennathan