Hampstead Heath's bathing ponds will remain open to trans people under the existing policy, after a public consultation found that the people who actually use the ponds want things to stay exactly as they are. The City of London Corporation, which manages the ponds, has confirmed that trans women can continue to use Kenwood Ladies' Pond and trans men Highgate Men's Pond. The policy stands. I am genuinely delighted.

What strikes me most about this outcome is the part that so often gets buried in these debates: when you ask real people, the answer is rarely what the loudest voices in the room claim it will be. The campaign to exclude trans people from these ponds was vociferous and well-organised. It attracted significant media attention and framed itself as representing the silent majority of women who swim there. The consultation found something rather different. The swimmers, the regulars, the people who pull on their costumes in all weathers and slide into that dark, cold water, they said they want everyone welcome. That is not a surprise to me, but it is worth saying out loud.

This has been a long, hard fight for the trans swimmers who use these ponds. Some of them have spoken publicly about what the ponds mean to them: the freedom of open water, the community of women who swim together through every season, the particular peace of a place that asks nothing of you except that you get in. To have that place threatened, to have your right to be there turned into a political controversy, is exhausting and painful in ways that are hard to overstate. The fact that the consultation came back so clearly in their favour will, I hope, give them something solid to stand on.

The exclusion campaign rested on a familiar set of claims: that trans women make other women uncomfortable, that single-sex spaces require the removal of trans people to function, that safety depends on it. None of those claims held up, because they never do when you look at the evidence rather than the assertion. Trans women have been swimming at the Ladies' Pond for years. There is no record of harm. There is a record of community, of friendship, of people getting on with the ordinary business of swimming. The discomfort that drove the campaign was not the discomfort of the swimmers; it was the discomfort of people who had decided, on ideological grounds, that trans women do not belong.

I want to name what the City of London Corporation did here, because it matters. They ran a proper consultation. They listened to the people most affected. They did not capitulate to the loudest voices or the most aggressive lobbying. They came back with a clear answer and they stuck to it. That is what good governance looks like, and it is rarer than it should be. Too many institutions, when faced with organised anti-trans pressure, have buckled quietly, changed policies without consultation, or hidden behind legal uncertainty to avoid making a decision. The Corporation did the opposite.

There will be people who are unhappy with this outcome, and some of them will continue to campaign. That is their right. But the consultation has spoken, and the people who swim at these ponds have been heard. Trans swimmers belong at Hampstead Heath. They always did.