On 7th May, those living in Southampton and above 18yrs old will be able to vote in the local elections. I sat down with the Labour Party’s Candidate for Bevois, Paul Kenny, to ask him questions about housing, public transport, crime, community, and Gaza.
B: Tell me a bit about yourself.
P: Hello, my name’s Paul Kenny, I’ve been involved in the Labour Party for 50 years, and I’ve been a councillor on and off for the last 40 years. In the 1990s, I was Chair of the Education Committee in Lincolnshire, and I have been mayor of Boston in Lincolnshire, so I have a lot of experience delivering services. I moved to Southampton about 6 years ago to be closer to my grandchildren. The key areas of policy I have a lot of experience with are education and housing. I’ve been a social worker, community worker, and housing officer, and I worked in Parliament for shelter. I spent many years working with the homeless in London. So, I’ve been involved in a lot of different projects.
The reason why I’m standing is that I really like Southampton and I’ve been involved in politics for a long time – I love it and find it fascinating. The most important thing to me as a councillor is listening – too many don’t listen. A lot of politicians will give you the answers but don’t know the questions. So, for me, it’s about understanding the questions. But at the end of the day, the role of a councillor is a facilitator.
I didn’t start my career in politics; I started as a gardener. I went to university in Birmingham to study social care, and that gave me a real understanding of the diversity of lives and experiences, and listening and understanding were central to that.
B: Your wife is a councillor in Southampton, for Freemantle, and you’ve stood for council in Southampton 3 times before in Harefield and Sholing. Why have you stood in multiple places in Southampton?
P: The reason I stood for council in 2024 was that I wanted a Labour MP in Southampton Itchen, and to do that, I needed to use my expertise in community development. At one stage, we were about 1000 votes behind, so when I stood in 2024, it helped narrow that gap to help Darren Paffey win the seat. Southampton Itchen hadn’t been a Labour seat for 20 years, so for some reason we hadn’t done a very good campaign there in the past, so I was interested in taking the campaign and listening to people to act as a springboard for Darren, and now we’ve got a really good MP in Darren, and he’s doing an excellent job. Sadly, we don’t have any Labour councillors in Harefield, but what we do have is someone who understands the game and listens to people.
When Bevois became available after the current councillor who would be up for election this year decided to stand down at the election, I thought that I could be a really good candidate – bringing my experience in politics and community development together.
B: One student asked, “What are your thoughts on the current Labour government, and would you do anything differently?”
P: Because I’ve been in the Labour Party for 50 years and a councillor on-and-off for 40 years, I’ve seen people come and go. You might not believe me on this, but we’ve got the most radical left-wing government we’ve had in 30 years. [Note: this would only include the Blair and Brown governments, which we’re on the right of the Labour Party]
B: Really? More radical than Callaghan?
P: Yes. The problem we have is that, if you look at Keir Starmer’s background, he’s made a lot of enemies over the years as a human rights lawyer and the Head of Public Prosecutions. The press hates him because of the cases he’s overseen. People say that there have been too many U-turns, but he actually listens to the government. Not many Prime Ministers listen to their cabinet, and this government has a lot of challenges. One challenge is economic development and where we take it. When we decided to leave Europe, we were sold some concepts that were not true.
The most difficult area for the government is benefits. How do you build a fair welfare system? Like any system, there will be people who will try to beat the system. So what we need to do is work with those people and work around them.
B: You said yourself that housing is one of your key priorities. How would you ensure quality housing and good landlordism?
P: I know you were going to ask this, so I brought this [a guide to the Renters Rights Bill], and I will take you through it. There are two sets of housing: council tenants and private tenants. I think we’ve done a reasonably good job with local authorities and council tenants. I’ll give you some figures: in Southampton, we’ve got about 16,000 council tenants and 20,000 private tenants. I’ve been very involved in the development of this bill. I’ve been talking to a member of the national housing group within the Labour Party. I would say, genuinely, most landlords are pretty good, but there are some who test their luck. So what this new bill will do is squeeze landlords. If I move into a rental house, what it means is that they will have a specially dedicated part of the council to discuss any worries. What we need to do is work with landlords to make sure that they’re good to their tenants, and I think there are some really important factors. One is about fair rents because now you cannot raise rent by more than 5%. Not only does this stop landlords from exploiting tenants for money, but it also stops landlords from being landlords purely to make money. One of the other rights is the right to a pet. That was never a right before, so now you have that right, and that helps tackle loneliness.
B: I think most students would say that the Renters’ Rights Act is a good Bill, but your answer is just this Bill. Is that enough to solve the crisis?
P: It’s the best answer we’ve had in 50 years. If we didn’t have this Bill, we would have a load of bad landlords. All I would say is this is a start, not the end. Now, I’m sure, as time goes past, we’ll find loopholes. But now we’ve got a framework where most people should have decent houses where their landlord is there and listens to concerns. There will be tensions, and where there are tensions, it’s usually the student. In houses with 5 or 6 students, some will bring their car with them, and so parking is an issue. The other issue can be the amount of rubbish – the amount and how they’re disposing of their rubbish. Not everyone is interested in disposing of rubbish properly, and so there’s a real problem of contaminated bins. I’m working with the residents group in Bevois and they welcome students – and I welcome students – but within that, we need to support them within the Renters’ Rights Act, but at the same time, where there are instances where we need to do a bit of self education, I suspect a lot of students renting for the first time is a whole new world and so we need to support them into this new way of living. What it’s about is giving people a decent house, where they can live independently, without being exploited.
B: You mentioned earlier that the Renters’ Rights Act is the first step. What should be the next step?
P: I think it’s a lot of things. In the next 2 years, we need to check if it’s working and what kind of response we are getting. And this is why I’m talking to students, and I’ve been talking to Andy, the housing minister, about whether we should have meetings at the university where people can talk to us about their landlords. So at the end of the day, it’s about sharing experiences.
One of the issues that comes up a lot in Bevois is that there are a lot of Houses of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs). If you’re a local tenant there, sometimes, it can feel a bit like the area is being changed. Residents genuinely think students are a good thing, but occasionally, they are concerned about the recycling issue. And this is why we need to talk to students about recycling. But this is fine-tuning – helping people adapt to their new lives and embedding those practices.
B: The council is currently selling off some council houses because they are too expensive to repair themselves. The Daily Echo found that the total auctioning off of the houses would create £375,000 – £500,000, but the cumulative net revenue loss after 40 years of selling those houses would be £400,000. Isn’t this short-sighted?
P: No. Sometimes, it is better to redesign the stock, and what this is about is redesigning the stock. So it might seem draconian, but a lot of local authorities do this; because it’s new to Southampton, it seems alien, but it’s not. I can send over your question to Andy to get a clearer answer.
There are a few councillors who are trying to play with this, and I don’t think they understand why we’ve done this, but I do, because I’ve worked in housing development, and it is about improving the stock. And the other thing we are doing is buying houses that were empty and putting them back into use.
B: You are selling more houses than buying, though
P: I’ll get Andy to give you the answer.
B: There is a £75m gap between the cost of improving the council’s stock of housing and the funding available. How is selling council houses a functional way of improving the stock?
P: Right, I will send over the questions to Andy because he is on the portfolio. I am only running for council, and I understand the reasons for things, but I don’t have all the information because I’m not the portfolio holder, but I will get you the answers. I don’t want to give you the wrong answers or half-baked answers – I want to give you the facts.
B: There’s quite a high drug and violence rate in Bevois. The Daily Echo recently reported on a drug raid in Bevois, finding £10,000 of cannabis. How are you going to tackle drugs and violence in Bevois?
P: This has been an issue for some time. I’m pleased to tell you, we’ve got the biggest ever operation that’s ever happened in Southampton in Bevois and St Mary’s, where the issue is. We’ve got a specialist team that is gonna be there for two years, working with the local community to tackle crime. But that cannot stand alone – we need to do other things. One of the other things that will be happening is Police and Communities Together (PACT) meetings. This is important because we need to involve the community to tackle this problem. But we need to go even further. We need to go to the local religious groups and schools.
B: You mention community, but what specifically will this mean?
P: This means different methods of engagement. We need to engage with the community, who know their streets, to help us understand what needs to be done. This could be leafletting and speaking to residents in the streets.
B: Moving on from crime, students often rely on public transport, and many students feel like the public transport in Southampton isn’t up to scratch. How would you improve public transport in Southampton?
P: I would agree, and I’ve been speaking to my colleagues about this. The Tories tried to regulate it, and now we’re trying to deregulate it. But importantly, to improve the services, we need to know where the demand is and what you want. There’s no point just saying “we want more buses” because we don’t want empty buses. What we need to know is where and when the demands are. I do think the buses in Southampton are better than some, but they need fine-tuning.
The other thing we need to do is a greater focus on integrated transport. We shouldn’t just talk about buses, but also bikes. Do we need better bike facilities? Do we need more bike lanes? But also, there’s the question of cars. Do all students need to bring their cars? We shouldn’t stop them, but with an integrated transportation system, there should be less need for it.
B: Would you like to see Southampton City Council divest from Israel?
P: Tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you what I know
B: So there’s the Hampshire Pension Fund, which the Council invests in, and which has reportedly invested £36m in more than fifty arms companies and other companies which are complicit in Israel’s genocide, according to Palestine Solidarity Campaign in Southampton.
P: We, in Southampton, only have one seat on the committee for the Hampshire Pension Fund. We have made clear that we do not agree with the investments being made in this regard, but we only have one vote, so we cannot control where that money is invested.
B: You do have influence, though.
P: No, we only have one vote, and it’s a Conservative-led council.
B: I think a lot of students are very upset about how the current Labour government is dealing with the situation in Palestine.
P: We recognise that Palestine should be a state in its own right.
B: That’s not a zero-sum game to prevent Palestinians from being killed and oppressed, though.
P: At the end of the day, at the United Nations, we have had a lot of conversations about what we should do with Palestine, and we know that the Israelis and the Americans have vetoed those. We have already put a lot of embargoes on arms to Israel.
B: We are still selling arms to Israel, though, notably components for F-35s, which are routinely used in Gaza.
P: The problem is they’re all done through the American cybernetic.
B: But our government is the one that licenses those components, allowing for the planes to be used. Leonardos in Southampton is selling weapons to Israel…
P: But what can we do about that? What can Southampton City Council do about that? If you can tell me a way to stop that, then I’ll do that, but we cannot stop what a company makes and what happens with the Hampshire Pension Fund. All I can say is that every week,
I go on the march and I’m fully committed to a world with peace, and that’s where I am. But I am a small voice in a big cog, and I will always speak up against injustices, and when I see the atrocities that are happening in Palestine, it horrifies me!
B: I do think it’s a bit reductive to say that we cannot do anything and it’s all because of America and Israel. We are a major power, and we do sell weapons.
P: We are an important country and we do sit on some important committees in the UN, but I think some people think we can do more than we can, and that’s not to say we shouldn’t work hard to stop the atrocities, but I know Hamish Falconer [the Under-Secretary of State for the Middle-East]keeps reminding the Americans that they have a responsibility for peace, but sometimes they don’t listen. And when it comes to the UN, they just ignore it, and that’s saddening. But I want to live in a better world, but unfortunately, it’s getting a bit toxic, and it’s sad. And I understand people have different opinions, but we need to get around to working with people, and I would love to do more, and if there are any demonstrations, I’ll be there, but we cannot do everything we want to.
B: Going back towards local issues, you said in an interview with the Daily Echo, “Since the election of the New Labour government, we have seen them make a serious attempt to improve local government services by increasing their funding and allowing the council to set a balanced budget.” But I feel like a lot of people haven’t felt that funding yet.
P: Well, we’ve got to let that funding bed in. It’s only just happened.
B: They’ve been in power for 18 months, though.
P: But we only just got the new budget. Change doesn’t happen as quickly as we would like – look at housing, for example. It took over a year to get the Employers’ Rights Bill through Parliament because the Tories tried to stop it. I’m confident that some of the changes we’re going to see, and we only passed it two months ago, so for the first time, we’re going to see low cuts. And the other issue, some people are saying that the council is going to go bankrupt, but councils cannot go bankrupt. What happens is that when a council gets into a state of financial difficulty, the government helps out. What happened in Southampton’s case when we got into financial difficulty during COVID was that the costs of everything became higher and higher, and we were spending more on social care and children’s services. What we need is a proper social care budget. Fortunately, the council has just produced a policy document, which I’m fairly confident will start to come together in the next 12 months. We have a statutory duty to fund social care and children’s services, so what we’ve done is work with some consultants to bring the cost down and make it more manageable.
B: Is that through deregulation?
P: No.
B: How has the price been brought down then?
P: We were the highest spender on social care in the country. So what we’ve done is look at good practices in other councils and used those as a model as a way forward.
B: As a wrap-up question, why should people vote for you?
P: What I pride myself on is my preparedness to listen to different people’s views. I have a lot of experience working within communities, and I genuinely have a passion for people. I think people are important. People should vote for me because I want to be their voice on the council, and all I would say is that if I’m doing something wrong, tell me! I know if I get elected on May 7th, I’ll be spending 5/6 days a week working for Bevois. There are a lot of issues that we need to sort out – the crime issue is a big one – but hopefully with the new police initiative, it will improve. We need to sort out the issue regarding the fly-tipping. We need to ensure the new Renters’ Rights Act is operational. We then need to look at whether we’ve got an integrated transport network. We also need to make sure that if anyone has any issues, they will be heard. I cannot promise to always satisfy, but what I can promise is to listen, and that’s what being a councillor is all about.
If you want to ask Paul Kenny any further questions, you can email him here: paulkenny55@outlook.com
You can read the interviews for the Green Party and the TUSC candidates on the Wessex Scene page.
