Hau-Yu Tam, who was elected in 2022, will sit as Lewisham Council’s only Green councillor.
She has been Lewisham’s only opposition councillor since resigning from Labour in July 2022.
Cllr Tam announced her defection to the Greens outside Lewisham Town Hall in Catford on Monday (March 17).
She was joined by Green Party Deputy Leader Zack Polanski and other party members outside the building.
Cllr Tam said: “I’m very excited. Since leaving Labour, it has been a whole journey with lots of different emotions.
“But I’ve found a lot of peace with this decision and I feel very happy today to be joining the Greens. Their policies and manifesto align a lot more closely with my values, [and] my beliefs.
“I was an anti-racism campaigner when I was elected [for Labour] back in 2022. I was elected on a manifesto that was progressive on paper. But when you get down to it, the Labour Party have sold out so many of their principles.
“We’re now looking at the barrel of huge local government cuts, huge increases in defence at the expense of welfare, we’re looking at demonising migrants.
“I was very explicit I would push against [these policies]. I’m an activist and community worker before all else.”
Zack Polanski, who is also a London Assembly member, said he was ‘delighted’ to see Cllr Tam join the Greens.
He said: “I always want to see passionate, motivated individuals joining the Green Party. And to speak to her residents, I know she has been a brilliant councillor who has already been demonstrating the values of the Green Party.”
Polanski declined to put a figure to the number of councillors the Greens hoped to have in Lewisham after next year’s local elections, but said the party had plans to run its ‘most ambitious campaign ever’ in the capital in 2026.
He added: “We got record breaking results at the last general election and last London elections and since then we’ve seen a Labour government that has become increasingly unpopular. We’ve got another year to see them continuing building on that unpopularity.”
Lewisham Council now has 53 Labour councillors, one Green councillor, and a Labour Mayor.
At the last local elections in May 2022, Cllr Tam was elected to Evelyn ward in Deptford with 1,224 votes (18 per cent), alongside two other Labour councillors.
The Green Party’s top performing candidate in the ward finished fourth with 523 votes (8 per cent). Cllr Tam was suspended from Labour in late 2023 after she was investigated by the party for allegedly organising a pro-Palestine protest.
She has always denied the allegations, branding them as ‘absurd’ and claiming they were concocted by people who wanted to expel her from Labour.
Following the end of the internal investigation in February 2024, she was given a formal warning and reinstated to the party. She revoked her Labour membership five months later on the day of the 2024 general election.
