Meg Hillier: 'Hackney may be achingly cool but it’s also achingly poor'

Imagine this: you are a London MP with an expansive constituency that borders the centre of wealth creation, the City, but which also covers some of the capital’s most financially and socially challenged areas; which is inhabited by a diverse population from those born and bred in the neighbourhood to those who have flocked here from all points of the globe; from the rich and thriving to the poor and struggling, across a huge range of ethnicities and nationalities. And then imagine that, just as you were figuring out how best to represent this roiling stew of humanity, your patch also became both a site and symbol of rapidly advancing technological change, a constantly evolving industrial hub and a bright, shiny road sign to the future. What then?

As I spoke to Meg Hillier, Labour and Co-operative MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, whose Hydra-headed task this is, I began to fathom how she does it. Obviously, there’s energy: she talks a mile a minute and packs her schedule out, sitting on numerous parliamentary committees and groups as well as adopting a more hands-on approach to her day job than many of her Westminster colleagues. There’s an ability to look backwards and forwards simultaneously; her conversation darts from Silicon Roundabout innovation to a frequently repeated imperative that people — the elderly, the educationally disenfranchised — must not be left behind by change. And there’s an impressive lack of blather; her politics might be underpinned by ideology, but more than anything she seems intensely practical.

Take, for example, her persistent efforts to deal with Shoreditch’s superfast broadband problem — a third of Tech City’s businesses, she says, do not have access to it. Why? There is, she explains, the complicated business of BT and OpenReach’s monopoly and of the convoluted sub-contracts they then make with other providers; and there is also the often prohibitive cost of connecting up elderly buildings such as warehouses, to which many new businesses are attracted. ‘If you’re a small start-up, paying £30,000 for a connection to broadband is horrendous. And yet, what’s interesting is, if you take it wider, the government has focused on fibre optics around the country for its rural broadband roll-out. Loads of money went to BT to deliver this, and already in Shoreditch there are models of how to deliver broadband through different routes; you don’t have to rely on one technology. But somehow we’ve created a system which is focused much more on physical fibre optics.’

And so, she asks awkward questions in Parliament and hassles away in follow-ups, and builds links with the entrepreneurs and whizzkids arriving in the area even when that requires adopting a quite different style. She notes, with some approval, that when she talks to tech companies about issues from connectivity to immigrant employment rights, ‘they want to tell you once and then move on. So things like broadband, gathering the evidence, they will try to find a way of solving it, and once they’ve solved it, they’re on to the next thing because they’re businesses trying to grow at a certain pace.’ In general, though, the Silicon Roundabout businesses are receptive, with companies such as Google providing co-working spaces for local residents, which means that they can ask for advice and gain expertise: ‘There’s a real willingness in that community — if I ask, I don’t get a no.’ And neither is it a one-way street; one of her current ‘missions’ is to open up government procurement, for example in IT contracts, to smaller businesses.

At the same time, she’s pragmatic about maintaining a positive attitude toward the level of government interest in Tech City. Recently, she says, she was speaking at a local awards dinner, and mentioned David Cameron in her speech, ‘and a boo went round, and I was a bit shocked, actually, because I didn’t think it was that political an audience. I found myself saying, “Look, don’t knock, ever, prime ministerial involvement, because it can have its ups and downs — I’ve worked under three prime ministers, and when they have a focus on something it can cause difficulties as well as benefits — but on the whole it opens doors for you that wouldn’t otherwise perhaps open.” So I always welcome any high-level involvement. But despite the fact that we’ve got the Prime Minister, we’ve got the Mayor of London, I’ve still not solved the broadband problem in Shoreditch.’ You sense, however, that she probably will.

Despite their profound impact on the productivity and profitability of London’s newly emergent tech sector, many of these issues are technical and procedural. But as seriously as Hillier will talk about exchange-only lines and the importance of e-democracy and recommend that I visit Hackney’s University Technical College — the first in London — and so on and so forth, she becomes even more animated when she’s talking about her work in a more personal vein. When I spoke to her on the phone to arrange our meeting — with minimal intermediaries — she rang off with the cheery words, ‘always happy to talk about Hackney’. She has represented her constituency for nearly a decade. Now 45, she was born in London, but her family left early on and she grew up in Portsmouth; after graduating from Oxford’s St Hilda’s College, she moved to the capital and worked for a housing association and as a journalist; the latter meant that she was careful not to align herself politically. Then, in the early 1990s, ‘I thought, I can’t sit by and be idle.’ She became a Councillor in Islington, then its youngest ever mayor and thereafter the Member for Northeast London on the newly created London Assembly in 2000, and thence to Westminster in 2005.

We meet in a café opposite Hackney Town Hall on Mare Street, immediately after Hillier has held a surgery, and fall quickly to talking about how much the area has — and hasn’t — changed. Most obvious, of course is, the rampant hipsterisation of recent times, just as obviously only one side of the story: ‘Hackney may be achingly cool if you read the Sunday supplements,’ Hillier points out, ‘but it’s also achingly poor.’ She laughs at the bars so trendy they have no name (‘I still need an address to go places’), but there’s a real issue here. For all the humour in her five-year-old daughter (the youngest of the three children she has with husband Joe Simpson) wanting to have pink hair because of the dip-dyed hairdos she sees around her, you’re still left with a ‘mix of the haves and the have-nots: people who can afford to spend £3.60 on a loaf of bread and people who don’t have £3.60 left at the end of the week’. That morning, Hillier had seen a woman who had been evicted from her privately rented accommodation and had to wait until her next flat became free; every night she slept in the block’s hallway with all her possessions and those of her two children — until one day, her guard dropped. Her things were deemed a fire risk, taken away and destroyed. Hillier is vehement, too, on the subject of Hackney’s unacceptably high level of child poverty, telling me about a boy whose non-attendance at school attracted educational welfare. They discovered that the boy and his brother, whose mother was an alcoholic, were sharing a pair of school trousers; if they alternated days at school, they reckoned, they could get through their education.

But Hillier is not down on the hipsters — whom, after all, she also represents. Many of them, she says, have come here because they like the fact that it’s ‘a real place with real people’; and she points to a burgeoning world of crowdfunding and community projects as evidence that people of all types really do want to commit to the area. Another of her missions is ‘to make sure I help people understand where they live. You don’t move to Hackney and have, if you like, a West London home at a Hackney price, and not understand who you’re living among.’ She adds the caveat that Hackney prices are hardly low — which is why, in the rental sector, she also backs proposals for price controls and initiatives to make landlords commit to an area for a longer period.

Another way to make the various bits of the jigsaw puzzle join up is to integrate new generations of local young people with new generations of businesses setting up shop on their home turf. Hackney, says Hillier, could lay claim to being the Ellis Island of the UK, given how many people arrive here and end up either passing through or staying. There’s a message that she keeps hammering home to tech companies: ‘The world is on your doorstep, multilingual, multicultural young people, many of them with a foot in the camp of their parents’ country or the country they were born in, as well as the street culture of the young person who is living off their mobile phone. These are the people who are your tomorrow, and you need to be talking to them. And they’re not stupid. They get that.’

She’s savvy enough to know that this kind of blue-sky thinking doesn’t become reality overnight; that there’s a jump from the North Hoxton estates to the moneyed buzz of Old Street, and that many — such as low-skilled men in their forties and fifties — can quickly fall behind the curve. She understands that frustration has fuelled much of UKIP’s recent rise, and that despite their lack of traction in London, it mustn’t be forgotten that the BNP gained a foothold in Shoreditch not that long before she was elected. She argues that politicians have a responsibility to explain why they do what they do: ‘I try to go out on doorsteps every week or two, because if you don’t see people where they are, you don’t remind yourself of what you’re really here for.’

Next year, she will contest her seat for the third time. ‘I never treat my seat like a safe seat,’ she insists. What about the national picture? ‘Remember, at the last election, nobody won, and we now have very fractured politics. Although most people aren’t following Westminster, I think it’s the lack of strong politics — other politicians in Parliament are telling me that now nothing gets agreed even in the quad [the decision-making foursome of David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander]... There is a terrible inertia now in government, there isn’t strong government, it doesn’t help give people confidence. So there’s everything to play for.’