Liam Shrivastava romped to victory in May as the borough’s first ever Green Mayor, and he’s had nearly 4 months to show voters they were right to back him
It’s fair to say Liam Shrivastava has had quite the year.
Just over a year ago, he was a backbench Labour councillor for New Cross Gate ward in Lewisham. Today, he is the borough’s first ever Green Mayor and earlier this month passed the milestone of 100 days in charge.
Reflecting on the first few weeks of settling into his new role as Mayor of Lewisham, Shrivastava recalls how it was “quite the shift” and “sort of like pinching yourself, of being like, is this actually happening?”.
One of the earliest “pinch me” moments was when he was out celebrating at the Fox & Firkin with family and friends and a few Green Party members on the day he won the election.
“I got a round of applause from the beer garden and from everyone there,” he tells the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS). “That was quite a surreal moment.”
Shrivastava not only made history as the borough’s first directly-elected Green Mayor, he was also the first to lead a major landslide victory for the party in Lewisham, with 40 Green councillors winning seats and going on to represent 18 out of 19 electoral wards.
As a directly-elected mayor, Shrivastava is in charge of leading the council, directing the council’s strategy, and is responsible for proposing the annual budget. He also chairs the Cabinet, which is made up entirely of Green councillors. Together, their democratic decisions affect more than 300,000 residents who call Lewisham their home.
Wanting to hit the ground running, the former Labour Party defector said: “We’ve made it very clear that we want to work at pace, that we’re very ambitious and obviously we’re bringing a different sort of style of working and a different culture as well. That is quite a lot to ask of officers, but the response has been really positive.”
So how have those first 100 days and beyond panned out and what significant changes have we seen?
Resisting immigration raids
Since taking office, the council has become the first in the UK to pass a motion that will review its work with Home Office immigration enforcement and refuse to assist on raids wherever “legally possible”.
The council will carry out a “comprehensive review” of its systems and processes, with an aim of refusing to assist the Home Office or Immigration Enforcement teams during raids.
After the motion was passed in July, Shrivastava said other council leaders have got in touch expressing their interest, adding there’s a “broader kind of ambition to have an anti-raids corridor”.
He said: “We’re very keen to collaborate and work with other councils on lots of different things. I’m not sure how much of that collaboration we’ve seen in London previously, so I think that could be quite interesting.”
Tackling fly-tipping
Elsewhere, the council says it has been making progress with its Love Lewisham campaign, which aims to crack down on fly-tipping.
According to data from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the number of fly-tipping incidents reported in Lewisham has dramatically increased over the past few years. In 2024/25, Lewisham was the third worst hit London borough with 33,471 fly-tips reported – this was despite Labour launching its own crackdown in 2025.
The Greens say their campaign has delivered local action days, introduced additional crews to speed up the collection of £5 bulky waste bookings, and increased the use of CCTV to identify offenders, plus support community litter picks across the borough.
Since May, the council says it has cleared over 11,000 fly-tips and issued over 65 fines to people caught fly-tipping. As the financial year progresses we’ll get a better picture of whether the action has brought down that overall number of incidents.
Affordable housing and preparing for extreme weather
Shrivastava has made it clear that he wants more genuinely affordable housing in Lewisham and across London, and has joined forces with Tower Hamlets Mayor, Lutfur Rahman, and the Mayor of Hackney, Zoë Garbett, to challenge Sadiq Khan’s emergency housing measures in the High Court. These were billed as “targeted planning changes designed to cut through bureaucracy and viability constraints holding back new homes across every borough”.
The changes included fast tracking developments that deliver 20 per cent affordable housing, marking a significant drop from the previous 35 per cent target.
“We were very happy to join that legal challenge, it very much reflects our sort of principles when it comes to housing, and particularly affordable housing,” he says. “We think that the Mayor of London has got it wrong and that isn’t the answer to the question around ‘how do we deliver more affordable housing?’”
The recent spate of heatwaves has also left him concerned over the extreme temperatures some residents have had to endure in their homes as the weather intensifies due to climate change.
“It’s something that we do have to address,” he says. “We do have to invest in our existing buildings. And as part of that retrofit process, we need to be thinking about heating and cooling [systems].”
He went on to say: “We definitely will need to start thinking about our preparedness for the climate crisis.
“There’s a number of things we need to be looking at around not just emergency planning but also future-proofing, making sure that our policies and our plans are fit for purpose – we are definitely keen to make some announcements and bring forward some plans around that.”
Food justice and tackling poverty
The conversation leads to Shrivastava talking about his work towards supporting food justice and tackling poverty.
One way he is showing his commitment to the issue is by donating 20 per cent of his mayoral allowance to local food justice organisations, with the first donation supporting the Community Meal at All Saints Community Centre in New Cross.
He said: “I would really like us to create a food justice hub, a physical space that acts as a social supermarket, but it’s also a community kitchen and also a commercial kitchen space that, for example, small food businesses can use and can access.
“I think there is definitely enough food to go around, but we need to work with food justice partners to ensure that all that food gets to the people that need it. They’re already doing an incredible amount of great work, we just need to support that work and to ensure that absolutely no-one goes hungry.”
Separate to this the new Sydenham Night Market, which showcases local food and drink businesses every Friday until September 17, has been recently launched.
Elsewhere, the council has launched a new Rogue Landlord Taskforce to strengthen enforcement, hold landlords to account and fully enforce the Renters’ Rights Act.
The council has announced plans to buy back 74 homes previously lost through Right to Buy, to move people off the council’s housing waiting list.
It has also reversed £200,000 of proposed cuts to children’s services, and launched a campaign calling on the government to give local authorities greater powers to refuse betting shops and gambling centre applications where communities believe they are inappropriate – though Brent Council could be argued to have been leading the charge on this for some time. The government has already announced plans to review the ‘aim to permit’ rule that makes it harder for councils to refuse gambling premises applications.
Shrivastava added: “One thing we’ve also found with this very significant change in Lewisham is that people have voted for change, they’ve voted for hope, but they want to see action – they want to see things happen.
“[I think] we’ve really recognised that we need to deliver, and I think that’s reflected in the first 100 days.”
Lewisham Council is made up of Mayor Shrivastava and 54 ward councillors – they consist of 40 Green councillors and 14 Labour councillors.
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