Walpole ward Liberal Democrat councillor Ksenia Maximova reflects on her first months on Ealing Council since being elected on 7 May 2026. Councillor Maximova shares some of the issues residents have brought to her and explains why she believes every case should be investigated first-hand.
“My first weeks as a new councillor for Walpole Ward have been less about learning the ropes and more about learning how much of the twisted and coiled ropework was already broken. Within days I was dealing with a resident facing what looked like an unlawful eviction, a street where bollards had been installed off the approved line, a lime tree left unpruned outside the home of an 81-year-old with COPD1 and a family stuck on a housing waiting list (despite documented medical need).
“None of these arrived neatly. They arrived the way real problems do: overlapping, urgent, and rarely with all the facts to hand. It is my role as a local councillor to help these local residents in need.
“What’s struck me most is how important it is to establish facts and explore situations by actually going and looking for myself. For example, on Seaford Road, residents and businesses had opposite complaints about the same new scheme, one about safety, the other about lost trade.
“It was only by walking to the site myself that I could see both were right, and that the fix Ealing Highways eventually agreed (moving the bollards back to the approved line and investigating proper loading provision on Hessel Road) served both without pitting one against the other. I’ve tried to hold that principle across every case since: don’t take the first explanation as the whole picture, go and check the situation and the facts.
“That’s the closest thing I have to a unique approach so far: treat casework the way I’d treat any piece of research, verify before you advocate. Residents deserve a councillor who checks the underlying facts rather than simply forwarding their email to an officer and hoping. It’s slower. It also means that when I do raise something with the council, I’m doing it from a position of having seen the problem, not just heard about it!
“Walpole is a ward with real pressure points right now – on housing, on road safety schemes that don’t quite match their own approved plans, on ageing trees under climate stress and on security issues in some of our larger housing developments.
“None of that gets fixed by a single article. But I’d rather residents know that when they write to me that someone reads it, checks it and comes back with an honest answer, even when that answer is “this will take longer than it should!” That’s the standard I’m trying to hold myself to, one case at a time.”
