Five candidates are standing in a by-election in Queen’s Park ward for a seat on Brighton and Hove City Council (BHCC) next Thursday (24 September).
The seat became vacant when former Labour councillor Milla Gauge resigned.
The five candidates are Stefan Speckesser (Conservative), Mark Strong (Green), Steve Gladwin (Labour), Rüdiger Dikty-Daudiyan (Liberal Democrat) and John Shepherd (Reform UK).
Each candidate has answered questions about local issues and why electors should vote for them.
Here are the responses from Conservative and Unionist Party candidate Dr Stefan Speckesser, 53, an economist and principal lecturer.
Why do you want to be a councillor?
I am standing to be a councillor because I want to use my experience to make a tangible difference in our local community.
I am not here to play national politics. My focus is firmly on bringing common sense to the table to get things done locally.
I want to be an active voice who ensures we get the basics right.
This means bringing Queen’s Park back to life, delivering clean streets for Craven Vale and championing affordable housing, protected green spaces and excellent local schools.
Why do you want to stand in this ward?
My family and I have lived in Brighton since 2010 and Queen’s Park has always been a favourite weekend spot for us.
Seeing its current state of neglect is deeply saddening and it is reflecting a broader decline in our public spaces.
I am standing in this ward because our community deserves better.
I will put relentless pressure on the council to fix basic maintenance immediately.
Longer term, I will fight for cost-effective, long-term solutions like rainwater collection and sustainable drainage to ensure our essential green spaces thrive for local families.
What are the key issues specific to this ward?
Beyond the continued neglect of Queen’s Park, residents are being let down by a failure in basic council services.
The most pressing issues include overflowing communal bins, potholed roads and visible anti-social behaviour, such as open drug dealing and graffiti.
We also face urgent community safety concerns, from dangerous traffic on steep corridors like Carlton Hill to vulnerable tenants feeling intimidated in Craven Vale.
I am committed to addressing these everyday failures, supporting our struggling independent businesses and ensuring robust child safeguarding accountability across our local schools.
Falling birth rates are affecting pupil numbers in primary and secondary schools. How should this issue be managed?
To support our schools and protect pupil numbers, we must ensure families can afford to stay in our city.
I am deeply committed to helping our community remain a welcoming, affordable place where young families can build a lasting future.
I will champion genuinely affordable housing, work collaboratively to bring empty properties back into use and help sustain a healthy local rental supply.
Furthermore, I want to actively support our local schools and youth services in upholding the highest possible safeguarding standards, ensuring every parent has absolute confidence in their children’s education and wellbeing.
Temporary and emergency housing is a huge cost to the council. What measures should be taken to reduce this cost?
To reduce the immense costs of temporary housing, we must address the root pressures driving our housing crisis.
I will advocate for stricter HMO planning rules to protect vital family homes and ease infrastructure strain.
Crucially, we must prioritise our limited housing stock for local families.
This means ensuring asylum accommodation does not displace residents or overwhelm neighbourhood capacity.
I will push the council to seek alternative, dedicated facilities outside our core residential areas, ensuring our community is always properly consulted and local needs come first.
How would you improve and maintain roads in the ward?
I am determined to ensure our roads and pavements receive the high-quality maintenance residents deserve.
Too often, residential areas like Queen’s Park miss out on vital infrastructure funding.
I will advocate strongly for our fair share of the budget, prioritising pavement safety for older residents, wheelchair users and parents with prams.
Additionally, I will champion accountability, ensuring contractors deliver lasting repairs rather than temporary patches.
Finally, I will be active on our streets daily, relentlessly reporting every pothole and broken slab until they are fixed.
Given the reasons for the by-election, what steps will you take to ensure the council complies with its legal obligations to protect children including those who may be confused about their gender?
I support an independent review to understand how gaps in local oversight allowed vulnerable children to receive un-safeguarded medical treatments and whether statutory scrutiny duties by the council were met.
The inquiry should further examine hormone prescriptions affecting children who were under the care of social and youth workers.
We also need to better understand current school practice. Finally, external organisations delivering lessons in schools should also be reviewed and removed where necessary.
Some of them receive several tens of thousands of pounds per year from the council and openly campaign against national child protection guidelines that restrict irreversible medical interventions.
Polling stations will be open from 7am to 10pm. Valid photographic ID is required to vote.
If Stefan wanted to understand the gaps, perhaps we could gently refer him to the independent review that has already happened?
I think there’s an important distinction being missed by you, by Steve Gladwin/Bella Sankey and numerus others who hope to sweep the safeguarding scandal under the carpet.
Nobody is suggesting that the Council was directly responsible for the clinical failures at WellBN. The key question is what responsibility it had for its own safeguarding arrangements, its work with schools and partners, and its health-scrutiny role following what happened.
Milla’s resignation statement was actually very clear about this: she asked the Council to consider whether its own policies, safeguarding arrangements between services and health-scrutiny arrangements were safe and sufficiently robust.
And these concerns haven’t simply disappeared because the NHS investigation is finished. Residents have raised them through the Council’s Health Overview & Scrutiny Committee (HOSC).
So the talking point ‘it was an NHS failure and the NHS has dealt with it’ doesn’t really answer the question being asked. The question is whether the Council has asked itself what, if anything, it should learn from it — and if so, what it has actually done. Indeed, if it takes the Safeguarding First ethos seriously, it should own up to its knowledge of multiple complaints from affected families (including evidence of a classroom to clinic pipeline) and commission an independent review.
I mean, we’ve done this song and dance a few times now, Adrian; I’d think you know the steps: you say something inaccurate, I correct you, you get offended, etc.
You’ve accused the council multiple times, and several councillors, of being responsible and conspiring. You’ve written that on this website several times.
Once again, your personal incredulity, failing to understand that there IS an independent review on top of the investigation, seems to persist. Equally puzzling is your apparent failure to grasp that relevant policy has undergone, is undergoing, and will continue to undergo improvements, as is the natural order of things.
After losing your political momentum to friends and family members over this topic, you’re in a position to educate people, not to scaremonger with misinformation. It’s disappointing that you shirk this opportunity.
WellBN should have stuck to being a normal GP surgery. They are not exactly short of customers in that location!
Interestingly they apparently make sick adult patients who urgently need appointments wait up to a fortnight for an appointment, but any depressed child deemed to be “confused about their gender identity” gets fast tracked for an appointment and without their parents’ knowledge, even though they are underage!
Could WELLBN be getting funding for specialising in and prioritising this area from somewhere?
Did you read the report on WellBN, Tracy? There’s a few answers to your questions there, outside of your whataboutism statements, at least.
One question for this candidate, why do you associate with a party that has got us into the mess we have today?