Egham — In just two weeks’ time, the local elections will see thousands of councillors elected across the country. In what is likely to be a tough defeat for incumbent Labour councillors, the battle truly is between independents, Greens and far-right Reform UK.
Nevertheless, community-focused candidates have rolled their sleeves up, determined to change the way that local politics is done in their hometowns.
One such Independent is Damien Biggs who is standing for Egham in Surrey. Telling us that he recognises how the political system is broken, Biggs explained that he intends to change things for his local community.
‘They’ve really latched on to what I’ve been saying’
Firstly, we asked Biggs how he has been finding it in such a polarised election race:
It’s been pretty good to be fair. For my own sort of peace of mind, I wanted to be an alternative on [the] ballot paper, and then gradually got a bit more involved and that’s all been spurred on a lot by speaking to neighbours down the street and they have been bringing up issues like the HMOs, that have been trying to be set up down the road, and then the next thing I knew, I had a lot of information to campaign on.
And then it’s listening to that. There’s a massive, not quite hatred, but, yeah, no one’s really a big fan of the HMOs across the whole of Egham. That definitely seems to have been something that’s worked really well in my favour. That was the first thing that I started researching. That’s definitely been helpful, especially within Facebook groups of people who don’t even know me personally. They’ve really latched on to what I’ve been saying about them.
Biggs informed this isn’t his first foray into local politics, telling us:
No, I’ve stood quite a few times. I previously stood for the Socialist Labour Party. My big focus now is on being an Independent. I’ve stood in Brentwood Council elections in 2014. I was a Parish councillor in 2015. I stood in Pontypridd in South Wales for the Socialist Labour Party (SLP).
I was in the SLP for a good couple of years. And then, yeah, the 2015 election, that was then when I realised the whole system just doesn’t work because we had this was at the height of UKIP in 2015 and we had hustings pretty much every week right the way through the whole time.
Being a family man, we asked whether this factored into his desire to stand up for his community?
Other people want to then try and drag the area down and say how it’s not as great as it actually is. It’s not a ‘terrible’ area. We have certain issues that the council neglect and that’s the main thing that I’m sort of campaigning on, those areas of neglect or issues that the council has just spent too long dealing with. They’ve also got landlords in their pockets so it’s those more minor issues that then get latched onto. I mean, the area is great for kids in general. We’ve got decent schools. We’ve got amazing after-school stuff. My two girls, they do dance. There’s loads of great stuff for kids.
We asked if door knocking has been an option without a party machine and wealth of resources behind him, with Biggs stating:
No, my main campaign has been purely online, through Instagram and then the local community Facebook group. I’ve spoken to a few people who’ve stopped me on the school runs and stuff. But in terms of actually going and knocking on doors, I’ve hardly had the time to do that.
Also, I don’t have leaflets or anything like that to go hand to people. It’s very difficult to knock on a door and go, ‘oh, These are my policies, let me just tell you all of them now, I hope you remember in a couple of weeks’.
‘I’m not a face of a party. I’m just your neighbour.’
Curious as to the feeling in more rural communities, we asked if local voters have been receptive to an independent candidate on the ballot:
We’ve been here since 2020, so it’s mostly just been about me personally, like ‘oh, I know you, good for you’, ‘oh, yeah, you’ve got my vote,’ because so many people have felt so disconnected. Ask them to name who their local councillor is and they rarely know. Instead, I’m hearing ‘good for you giving it a go, you’ve got my vote’, without me even saying what I’m proposing, because they’ve seen me – we’ve been here since 2020.
And so, they prefer me because they’ve seen me for years up and down the road and the school run. They know me as a neighbour. And again, that’s something I then latch onto online, definitely.
I’m not a politician. I’m not a face of a party. I’m just your neighbour, and I want to give my community a voice.
Asked about the competition he is facing, Biggs told us:
Every party has listed two people except for the Greens. The Greens have only got one candidate on the ballot. I did hear that they were struggling across Surrey, in general, to get candidates together. And that was another reason why I looked to stand in myself.
Prior local elections had literally just been Labour, Tory and Reform. Sometimes the Lib Dems don’t even stand. If it does become a toss-up of just those three parties, well then I’m just gonna scribble across the ballot like I’ve done before, none of the above.
The Greens did get one candidate so that leaves most people with two votes and an option for their other vote.
Most people across the board would have a party preference. So, I tell people to use their first vote for the party and then use their second vote for their area. And that’s been my strapline through it all.
Biggs then told us about how far-right parties have typically performed in his area, which raises concerns about Reform UK’s potential to whip up protest votes:
The UKIP candidate didn’t attend a single event, he never knocked on doors, never put leaflets through the door anything and they then came second. I had to ask myself, how is this working?
They were supposed to be voting for their representative, but then they just voted blindly for someone who nobody saw until he turned up at the count.
It was just ridiculous.
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‘we’re left in fight for egos.’
We then asked whether Biggs felt Labour had a fighting chance on polling day:
I don’t think this area has ever really been pro-Labour anyway, it’s just been made worse. Egham is a small middle-class Surrey village. We’ve got Windsor five minutes down the road, so any kind of Labour, whether that’s Starmer, Corbyn or Miliband, I don’t think this area was ever going to be receptive to. And I think Starmer’s just made it worse because he’s just not all there at all.
At least with someone like Corbyn, there was someone who they could hate. Whereas with Starmer, they just don’t like him. Not necessarily his policies or anything like that, because he hasn’t got any, they just don’t like him. And that completely then throws people into that whole personality thing. And it just becomes personality over policies.
And we’re left in fight for egos. That’s why I think independence really, really breaks through.
Subsequently, Biggs then told us what he intends to focus on first, if elected:
The HMOs are the biggest first task. You get an Article 4 directive to cover the whole of it straight away. And funnily enough, I had a semi-public debate in one of the groups with the current councillor who was saying,
‘Oh no, you can’t do it straight away, the plans currently going through its five-year review. You can’t implement anything new while the review is in place.’
Then I did a bit of digging, because I wanted to give people an alternative so I’m going through council records at midnight looking for what could be done.
I found a little loophole in the current plan; there’s a legislation saying that you can’t do an Article 4 because it requires planning permission and there’s nothing in the current plan for planning permission for HMOs. Then I went through it further and in the current plan, there is planning permission for HMOs, but it’s specifically for student HMO accommodation.
So, then can do a supplementary planning document to enlarge that current policy to encompass all of HMOs, not just the student accommodation, and that can be enacted now while the review is taking place because the legislation is already there, we just have to expand it with a supplementary planning document.
She didn’t reply to any of that. So, getting that Article 4 put in will be number one on my agenda.
‘We have major issues with the train lines’ in Egham
When asked about any major issues in the area that he wished to address, Biggs highlighted:
We have major issues with the train lines here. We’ve got four level crossings pretty much in a row. Sometimes you’re waiting at the barriers for easily half an hour, just waiting for these trains to go through. If there is an issue with it, it is down to Network Rail and South Western Railway but again is the council actually intending on doing anything.
We’ve never had a public consultation with Network Rail, we’ve never had a chance to actually speak to them and ask what’s going on. I saw that they are doing automated digital signalling, which is apparently supposed to speed up barrier opens and closes. And by summer, 70-odd percent of the trains that run through our line are capable of using that signal.
So then why are you not upgrading that line? We’re a direct line that goes straight into the middle of London. These are questions that either have been asked and they’ve just been quietly answered, or they’ve just never been asked at all.
I definitely want public meetings to be set up with Network Rail so we can ask residents what they think and they can actually know where residents stand.
Speaking about why current ‘solutions’ just do not work for his local community, Biggs informed:
They’ll always put signs up and say, ‘turn your engine off’. But It’s not quite working like that, people just want to be able to go. You know, so yeah, you know, they could have easily put a bridge in. I mean, I don’t think we’ve got, we’ve not got enough where the crossings are located. There’s not really enough room to put up and over bridge.
And that’s something where the Greens have not properly thought it out for whatever reason. Because the Green, when we’ve been talking about it in groups, the Green candidate’s answer is always, ‘well, we can look at putting in a foot and bicycle bridge’. And then everyone is just saying, ‘See, the Greens just want to take away your cars and want to get everyone walking’. Which is, to one extent, really extreme.
That’s not what she’s insinuating, but it is also that other side of it. I care about pollution and local environment. But at nine o’clock in the morning, when I’ve got to take my two girls to dance on the other side of Egham, I’m not going to be walking for 40 minutes, I’m just going to have to jump in the car and get them to dance. And then when we’re sat at the barriers, well, that’s not me being not mindful of the environment or choosing to drive rather than walk. It’s because actually you have to drive sometimes.
Giving people in Egham a choice
For me, the short-term plan would be to get smart signage put in along the main roads before you get into the centre of the town itself. Then when the barriers are down, it will tell people that the barriers closed, with an estimated wait time. Because the amount of times I actually have gotten down the road, I realise I should have gone down the other way, but now I’m stuck.
That will alleviate some of it by having those signs and that’s something that we don’t really have to work a lot with Network Rail to do and it just gives people a choice.
Mid-term solution would be to propose to Southwestern or Network Rail to implement LED lighting on the platform. I don’t know if you’ve seen in Germany, they have LED lights on the platform. But before the train comes, you’ll have like a red, green and yellow light along the platform. And if the carriages are full, the lights are red. And everyone lines up where the greens are because that’s where the doors are going to open and the carriage is empty. And they found that that can speed up boarding by around 40-odd seconds, which means that the train can leave 40 seconds sooner, the barriers can come up 40 seconds quicker, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but on our line, that would work out to like nearly an hour and a half a day of the barriers being up for longer.
Proving he is in this for the long term and means business for his local community, Biggs told us:
The long term solution is to get digital signalling installed to make the barriers far more automated. I think it was going to be rolled out across everywhere but then, for whatever reason, whether it was money or whatever, they decided not to and have done it on a case-by-case basis.
But apparently these digital signalling were supposed to be the ‘great saviour’ for level crossings because the automated crossing would know exactly when the train’s coming and how fast it’s approaching. Then you can open and close the barriers efficiently, rather than it being estimated.
But that requires Network Rail to actually listen to us and tell us if they’re going to do it, when they’re going to do it, and if they’re not, why not? That’s where the public consultation can come in.
We at the Canary urge local voters to follow Biggs’ advice. By all means, give one vote to a party machine of your choosing. However, give the other to a neighbour who truly cares about making things better for Egham.
Featured image supplied via author
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