My patch - Brent
C'llr – November2009

Mark Smulian meets Hayley Matthews who holds the distinction of being the country's youngest cabinet member

One local newspaper called Hayley Matthews "the official baby within the council chamber", when she was elected to Brent in 2006 aged only 22.

A year later she became the country's youngest local government cabinet member, taking the crime prevention and public safety portfolio. It was sudden rise for someone who had only been in politics for a year. But the local government bug has since bitten her hard.

Hayley won Mapesbury ward as part of a sudden advance by the Liberal Democrats in the borough after Sarah Teather had captured the Brent East parliamentary seat for them from Labour in a 2003 by-election.

"I was interested in politics but had never associated it with becoming a politician," Hayley says. "I'd intended to become a psychologist. Then I found myself thinking about whether to do postgraduate work, but politics was in the back of my mind so I decided to introduce myself to the local Liberal Democrats. I'd voted for them in the past and been attracted by their policies on the Iraq war, tuition fees and civil liberty."

She initially helped with Ms Teather's work as a volunteer, "with a view to becoming perhaps a researcher or caseworker", but this happened just as her party was gearing up for the local elections. "I got involved and enjoyed the team sprit, so I agreed to stand and seven months later I found I was a councillor. It all happened quite quickly."

Hayley was born and grew up in Mapesbury. "This is my area and I'm trying to achieve things for my area," she says. "I only left to go to university in Manchester, and came straight back. I think it is important in a councillor to have that tie and care about an area."

After a year as a backbencher, Hayley successfully contested a postal ballot among fellow Liberal Democrat councillors for a vacancy for the cabinet post. Her party splits the cabinet seats 6-4 with the Conservatives in the borough's joint administration.

She says: "I had fallen in love with being a councillor and I wanted to get everything out of the experience and felt I had something more to offer." Crime prevention and public safety is a wide brief which Hayley says allows her to get involved with many council policies and activities, but the core is partnership work with the police to both reduce crime and perceptions of crime. "Borough priorities are gun and knife crime, domestic violence and antisocial behaviour and we want to improve community confidence and make people feel safe," she says. "That is a huge challenge as there has been a downward trend in crime in Brent in last few years but fear of crime remains stubbornly high, though I don't think that is unusual to us."

She is supportive of the ward level police teams introduced by former London mayor Ken Livingstone, and says, "People do like to recognise and know police officers and put face to names better, though it works better in some areas than others". Brent's policing problems have deep roots, going back to controversies in the 1980s about perceived racism towards members of ethnic minorities, and the legacy continues to create difficulties.

"There are problems from 20 years ago in the more deprived areas with an ethnic mix and there is still a feeling of mistrust of the police, even though I think the police have changed," she says. "It's a matter of building community confidence and it has been more difficult dealing with people who had genuinely troubling experiences in the past. "We are gradually changing attitudes, but some people whose parents experienced racism remain reluctant to approach the police and there are still contentious issues because black people are still stopped and searched more often. It's improving, but it will not happen overnight."

One fruit of better relations is the Not Another Drop campaign, launched within the Afro-Caribbean community after a series of gun murders, during one of which a seven-year-old girl was killed in crossfire. "Not Another Drop is a campaign against gun and knife crime which involves the police and the council, but the community leads on it to identify projects that we support them in delivering." The campaign's highest profile event is a peace march held each September as "a community statement that it does not want violence on the streets". It also seeks to help children at risk of involvement in crime and to resettle ex-offenders.

Like many councillors, Hayley receives regular complaints about antisocial behaviour and feels this could be reduced were more spent o nmental health. Although that is not directly a council responsibility, she feels society would save money by investing more in this service. "When you look into antisocial behaviour complaints it's often happened where someone is not getting the mental health support they need, and understandably their behaviour can be pretty difficult to live next door to," she says. "If more were spent on mental health, we could save money down the line."

She intends to stand again in Mapesbury next May. The ward comprises a prosperous-looking conservation area in which a residents' association zealously protects the environment, areas of terraced and semi-detached homes built in the first half of the twentieth century and a small cluster of social housing estates. It is a fairly well defined ward, being bounded by the A5 at Cricklewood Broadway one side, a railway on another, and a park on most of the third.

Hayley has helped launch a second residents' association, in the Cricklewood area, which "started with a couple of members and has now ballooned into several hundred. "They have a real community spirit and I helped organise a community planting day, where I face-painted all day for the kids. "There is a real positive attitude towards getting involved, which is a pleasure to work with because as a councillor you get a lot of residents who want to work with you."

Cricklewood Broadway, a typical inner London main drag of small shops, used car emporia, lorries and buses, is a priority for improvement but it has long suffered from being split between Brent and neighbouring Camden and Barnet.

"We've tried to get the basics right, we invested in street cleaning and it's been repaved, but you can't just improve one side of a road because the public do not think in terms of borough boundaries and do not expect different sides of the road to get different services," she says.

As one of relatively few councillors aged in their twenties Hayley is often asked to speak at events designed to widen the age range from which council candidates are drawn. She was working in television production when elected and found this difficult to balance with her council work. "I was finding there were always work deadlines to meet and if you have to be at a council or ward meeting you can't be in two places and something has to give," she says.

Hayley feels the problem of councillors being "largely male, pale and stale", will not be solved until employers are convinced they will benefit from staff serving in local government. "It's partly for local government to communicate to employers the benefits of being a councillor for staff development, because the skills are transferable and I have gained a huge amount of diverse experience," Hayley says. "A lot of young councillors I know are involved in politics to some degree, as researchers for example, where their employers are better able to see the benefits, but it does put off young people and they say they have not got the time to be a councillor because they are building their career and have to work into the evening in their day job. "I'd like to see flexible working arrangements that allow people to pursue both."

She adds that any move to single-councillor wards would exacerbate this problem, since all the work would fall on one councillors rather than be shared three ways as in Mapesbury.

When elected, Hayley went through Brent's councillor induction programme and had support from long-serving councillors, but says "to a degree you're thrown in the deep end, one day you are not a councillor and the next you are, and it was a bit of a surprise to fin dmyself suddenly giving advice to people".

She concludes: "I've got so much from being a councillor - practical skills like scrutiny and strategy, being involved in policy making, interpersonal skills dealing with the range of people you meet, and in campaigning and public relations. "It's a huge time commitment and hard work but you really do learn a lot and my advice to young people thinking of becoming councillor is 'just do it'."