×

Zac Goldsmith visits WSM

Mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith and local MP Stephen Hammond visited the Wimbledon office on Friday to meet up with some of the WSM team together with representatives from a few local companies for a detailed discussion on issues facing businesses in the area.

Zac’s top three strategic priorities as a new mayor of London would be to tackle the severe housing crisis for Londoners, to ensure that transportation infrastructure decisions facing the capital are made and that the security of London’s 10 million occupants is assured.

On more immediate and local level the Crossrail 2 plans, which involve demolishing numerous buildings including Centre Court shopping centre in Wimbledon, were discussed at length and strong representations about better communication of plans were made by Suzy Wood the Centre Court Manager. Zac is a strong supporter of this important infrastructure project but seemed keen to understand the issues from a local perspective and hear suggestions for improving the plan.

Other topics included the debate over the expansion of Heathrow with a third runway, London’s digital infrastructure and its poor ranking in the league of ‘digital’ world cities as well as sharing interesting arguments in support of the Black Cabs and their current battle with Uber drivers.

As you would expect the WSM team raised the issue of the new taxation of private landlords and the Chancellors overall taxation of hard working business owners but this is largely outside the remit of the Mayor and he could only comment on the huge contribution that Londoner’s make to the overall tax revenues of the country.

It was an interesting discussion and a great opportunity to meet Zac and hear first hand some of his thoughts and ideas. We would like to express our thanks to him for making the effort to visit us in SW19.

Amanda Menassa

Amanda graduated from Brunel University, with a joint honours degree, achieving a BSC and BA degree in Leisure Management and Television and film studies. Amanda started her career in a customer service role before joining the hotel group Le Meridien as an Events coordinator, she was in the hotel industry for seven years and during her time won an award from a major international airline for her outstanding attitude and dedication to customer service, which she achieved while working for the Rezidor hotel group in the position of Airline Crew Manager. Amanda has over 20 years experience in customer relations and event management.

Show More...