My Congratulations
My congratulations to Damien Egan on his victory in the
Kingswood by-election. I think that he
will much prefer the role of a backbench MP to that of a directly elected
Mayor. I think that his personality and
skill set suit him much better to the role of civic Mayor and a people’s
advocate, as opposed to the job of a directly elected Mayor which involves the
exercise of executive power. My friend,
Councillor Paul Bell, once reminded me of the words of Tony Blair, ‘when you
decide, you divide’. For someone like
Damien, who wants to be popular, the seat of power is an uncomfortable place to
be. Now that his tenure as Executive
Mayor of Lewisham is at an end and he has moved on to the next stage of his
political career, the time seems right to look at what he did whilst in
office. I am uniquely placed to do
this. I was a Councillor when he was
first elected to Lewisham Council in 2010.
I was one of his Cabinet colleagues between 2010-2018 when we served
under Mayor Sir Steve Bullock. I was a
candidate, along with him, in the selection contest to succeed Bullock and
become the Labour Mayoral candidate in Lewisham for the 2018 Mayoral election. I was a member of the Council for the whole
of his first term as Mayor. I was the
Chair of Overview & Scrutiny during the last year of that term, 2021-22, and
a Labour Group Officer for that year.
Part Time Cabinet Members
His Mayoralty got off to an interesting start. After his election, he announced that he was
going to introduce part-time, or job share, Cabinet members. It was argued that this was because he wanted
to demonstrate the Council’s commitment to flexible working. I think that many of the Labour Group
cognoscenti were of the view that this decision, which increased the size of
the Cabinet from 9 under Bullock, to 11, 7 to be full time and 4 to be 50% job
shares, was based on the fact that he had made more promises to Councillors to
ensure their support in the Mayoral selection race, than it turned out that he
had jobs to give once in office. The
view that the creation of these part-time Cabinet posts were a post-election
idea rather than a plan that preceded the election was given some credence when
the Head of Law seemed to surprise Mayor & Cabinet alike when she ruled on
what a job share Cabinet post would mean in practice. Instead of part-time Cabinet members going on
to the equivalent of a 50% contract and being paid monthly pro rata, she ruled
that 50% meant being paid for 6 months then having 6 months without pay. However, part-time Cabinet members would have
to work for the whole year. That is, the
2 part-time Cabinet members would have to continue to go to meetings, present
papers and answer questions etc., even during the 6 month period when they were
not being paid.
Not A Mayor Like Steve Bullock
Having won an election to be Lewisham’s directly elected
Mayor and, therefore, empowered to exercise that power in his own right, one of
Damien’s first acts as Executive Mayor was to give that power away to his
Cabinet. The Mayor would no longer
‘decide in Cabinet’, rather, the Mayor & Cabinet would ‘decide
together’. Henceforth, when Cabinet met,
you would not have, as under Bullock, the Mayor saying on his own account, ‘I
decide this’. Instead, a vote would be
taken at Mayor & Cabinet to determine a decision. From then on Lewisham no longer had an
Executive Mayor as previously understood.
Rather, the Mayor was now the Chair on the Executive Committee of the
Council and was one vote among many.
There was some disappointment and surprise amongst Councillors when the
first time that we became aware of these proposed changes was when they
appeared on the agenda for the forthcoming Full Council meeting. At the Group meeting following the
publication of this agenda, my recollection is that the strongest argument for
this proposed change was that it would be embarrassing to withdraw it now that
it was in the public domain.
Damien’s creation of part-time Cabinet Members and his
giving away of his power to the Cabinet were noteworthy in 2 ways. Firstly, they came with no warning. He had not flagged his intention to take
these actions in his pitch to become Labour’s Mayoral candidate during the
selection campaign in 2017. Nor were
they outlined in his manifesto for the actual Mayoral election in 2018. Secondly, they provided clues as to the kind
of Mayor he really wanted to be. 6 years
on, I think it is fair to say that many of the Lewisham Labour Party hierarchy,
Councillors, activists and office holders, have been able to observe Mayor Egan
and contrast his time in office with that of his 4 term predecessor, Steve
Bullock. They, myself included, have
been forced to conclude that unlike Bullock, Damien wanted to be a kind of old-style
civic Mayor as opposed to a decision making Executive Mayor, albeit on the directly
elected Mayor’s salary. In fairness to
his Cabinet members to whom he gave much of his power, they, despite their
added responsibilities, had to labour on, on the same pay as under Mayor Bullock.
A Constitutional Confusion
The decision to appoint part-time Cabinet Members was shown
to create a further Constitutional complication once the decision by the Mayor
to share his power with the Cabinet began to be interrogated and its
implications understood. It was explained
to us that, in the private briefing that would take place before the meeting in
public of the Mayor & Cabinet, all 11 Cabinet members and the Mayor,
including the 2 part-timers who were not being paid at that time, would vote on
the business to be determined formally at the Mayor & Cabinet meeting that
followed. However, at that Mayor &
Cabinet meeting, these 2 unpaid part time Cabinet Members were not allowed to
vote. It seemed to come as some surprise
to people when it was pointed out that under these arrangements it was possible
for the vote at the formal Mayor & Cabinet meeting to yield a different
result to the vote that had taken place at the prior briefing meeting.
A Part-Time Cabinet Member For Finance
Once the job share Cabinet proposal was agreed and
implemented, Damien was free to pick his first Cabinet. Some eyebrows were raised when he decided
that he wanted a full-time Cabinet member for ‘Democracy, Refugees & Accountability’
and for ‘Safer Communities’, yet the Cabinet member for Finance, who had to
lead on the Budget, was to be a part-time post.
This was at a time, 2018, when the Council still had major cuts to make
and the damaging effects of Tory-imposed Austerity on the Council had been a
major plank of Damien’s Mayoral manifesto.
The impression of lopsided priorities that Damien’s first stab at
picking a Cabinet presented was corrected shortly afterwards when he had a mini
reshuffle and the Cabinet Member for Finance was made a full-time post.
The Departure Of Ian Thomas
The matters above can be dismissed as teething problems as a
new Mayor goes up a steep learning curve and merely of interest to those who
lack understanding, goodwill and perspective.
But they pale into insignificance when compared to Damien’s decision to
dispense with the services of the newly appointed Chief Executive, Ian Thomas,
after only 7 months in post. I will just
say the following about this. Damien had
been selected as the Labour candidate to run for Mayor of Lewisham in 2018,
following Bullock’s decision to stand down, when he sat on the panel that
appointed Thomas in 2017. Shortly after
Thomas left, he was awarded a CBE for services to Local Government in
recognition of the work he had done prior to coming to Lewisham as Strategic
Director of Children & Young People’s Services at Rotherham Borough Council. He was then appointed Chief Executive of
Kingston upon Thames Council, where he served until he was appointed Town Clerk
of the Corporation of the City of London in February 2023. Following the exit of Thomas, who is black,
from Lewisham, Damien let it be widely known within the Labour Group that he
wanted a black Labour candidate to stand in every ward in the borough. Further, he let it be known that when he stood
down as Mayor after serving 2 terms as he had pledged to do, he wanted to be
succeeded by a black woman Mayor. It is
worth noting that what has precipitated Damien’s resignation as Mayor of
Lewisham was his success in the contest to choose the Labour candidate for the
new Parliamentary constituency of Bristol North East. His strongest opponent for the seat was the
sitting Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees.
The editor of The Voice was strongly critical of the local Labour
Party for failing to select Rees, a black man.
Exit Of Senior Officers
Thomas was not an isolated case. Following his departure, an interim Chief
Executive was appointed. She had served
as interim prior to Thomas taking up the post.
Kim Wright, formally the Group Director of Neighbourhoods & Housing
at Hackney Council, was appointed the new Chief Executive in late 2019. She stayed for about 2 years before moving to
become Chief Executive of Brent Council.
This led to the appointment of another, new, interim who was recently
appointed as the replacement Chief Executive.
This means that, in 6 years as Mayor, Damien has had 3 Chief Executives
and 3 interims, albeit that 2 were the same person and the last one was
appointed Chief Executive. During his
time as Mayor, all the Executive Management Committee that he inherited left,
as did the Deputy Chief Executive and the long serving Head of Planning. A new Head of Law, Director of Resources
(Finance) and Director of Public Realm all came and went, the latter staying
for less than 2 years.
A Democracy Review
In 2018, Lewisham had a Governance structure that made it an
outlier as far as the rest of London was concerned. Our structure which included 6 Scrutiny Committees
and 4 Planning Committees, meant that our Councillors had to spend far more
time at the Town Hall in meetings than their counterparts in other
boroughs. For example, while Lewisham had 37
councillors serving on its 4 Planning Committees, the London Borough of Waltham
Forest found itself able to function with one committee made up of just 5
Councillors. There was a
feeling amongst some that we were ‘over committeed’. Councillors were
complaining that they just did not have enough time to fulfil their contractual
attendance requirements and engage with residents and community groups in their
wards. The situation was exacerbated
when Damien increased the Cabinet from 9 to 11.
This reduced the number of ‘Scrutiny’ Councillors eligible to sit on
Scrutiny Committees which meant that some now had to sit on 2 committees rather
than just one as was previously the case.
Damien set up the Democracy Review to address this issue. Having sat for 3 years, it failed to come up
with proposals for meaningful change that commanded broad-based support. Instead, it reduced the number of members of
scrutiny committees from 8 to 5. This
had the unintended result that it became much more difficult to get a quorum to
enable scrutiny committees to sit.
Officers and Chairs or committees now had to spend hours before a
meeting contacting members to try and get enough people to attend a meeting. For the year that I was Chair of Overview
& Scrutiny, I was constantly being prevailed upon turn up to scrutiny
committees to ensure a quorum. Two years
on and I don’t think that much has changed.
It is worth pointing out that all these Committees have to be serviced by officers at public expense. Reducing the membership doesn’t reduce this cost very much if at all. In addition, 11 Cabinet members cost more to support than 9. After 14 years of Tory Austerity that has seen cuts to all Council services, including things like street cleaning, the Governance function of the Council appears to have emerged largely unscathed.
Insourcing
Damien was elected on a manifesto that promised to insource many
Council services that had previously been outsourced to private sector
providers. I believe that there was
success with cleaners, Town Hall concierge staff and possibly some Adult Social
Care workers. But the Council gave up on
its plan to bring the School Meals contract in-house and away from
Chartwells. Likewise, it had to agree to
allow Glendales to keep its contract to manage Lewisham’s Parks and Green
Spaces. There just was not the in-house
capacity to take on these responsibilities and the investment required to build
it was prohibitive. Rather than bring in-house
the contract to manage the borough’s leisure centres, the Council had to agree
to let the contract to a different outside provider at considerable increased
cost.
School Academisation
Under Steve Bullock, we had a pragmatic approach to the
Academisation of our schools. We
expressed our view that we would rather the Leathersellers not proceed with
their plans to form their 3 schools that they ran in Lewisham into a Multi-Academy
Trust (MAT). In the end, they decided
not to proceed. We found an academy
partner to run a primary school that was experiencing governance problems. We found a new Academy partner to help one of
our Academy schools which needed to improve.
Having decided to intervene in Sedgehill school because we judged it to
be failing, and having hit a number of bumps in the road on that journey,
including receipt of an Academy order from the Regional Schools’ Commissioner,
we found an Academy chain willing to take on the challenge of running the
school. It has improved its performance
since then.
Damien came into office in 2018 with an oppositionist
position towards Academies. When the
Leathersellers announced their new plans to proceed to convert to a MAT, there
were some strong public statements criticising and expressing opposition to the
decision. Likewise, when the Regional
Schools’ commissioner issued an Academy Order on Conisborough College, a
Lewisham secondary school, following another critical Ofsted report. These petered out as the administration
realised that they had little if any agency in these matters and that it would
have to bow to the inevitable.
The Information Commissioner
In his Mayoral Manifesto in 2018, Damien committed to making
governance in Lewisham more open and transparent. The following is taken directly from the
website of the Information Commissioner’s Office:
‘The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued an enforcement notice to the London Borough of Lewisham Council for failing to respond to hundreds of overdue requests made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000.
The Council revealed the true
extent of its poor performance on information access requests to the ICO, which
was much worse than statistics it recently published online.
At the end of 2022, the Council
had a total number of 338 overdue requests for information, 221 of which were
over 12 months old. The oldest unanswered request was submitted over two years
ago on 3 December 2020.
While the Council was focusing
on new requests to improve its compliance with the statutory time limit of 20
working days for a response, this was at the expense of tackling its backlog of
older requests. Following enquiries by the ICO, it became clear that the
Council had no concrete plans to address this issue.
The enforcement notice requires
the Council to respond to all outstanding requests over 20 working days old, no
later than six months from the date of the notice. It is also required to
devise and publish an action plan to mitigate any future delays to FOI
requests, within 35 days from the date of the notice.
“By failing to respond to these
requests, Lewisham Council is keeping hundreds of people in the dark about
information they have a right to ask for. People need to have confidence in the
decisions being made
by their local authority and this Council’s failure to comply with the law
erodes trust in democracy and open government’’
Warren Seddon, Director of
FOI (Freedom of Information) and Transparency at the ICO’
The Lee Green LTN
In the aftermath of the COVID lockdown, Damien introduced what
was described at the time as the largest Low Traffic Neighbourhood (LTN) in
London, in Lee Green, one of the wealthiest parts of one of the wealthiest
wards in Lewisham, according to the Council’s deprivation data. The opposition to this was loud and the complaints
resounded for months, including from many Councillors. The part of the LTN that was in Blackheath had
to be removed almost immediately, such was the outcry, including from neighbouring
Greenwich Council who complained that they had not been consulted prior to its
introduction. The reason given for the
rapid volte face was that the road closure was preventing deliveries getting to
a care home that was in the middle of a building project.
It is generally accepted that the installation of the LTN
was unsatisfactory. Signage was often
poor or non-existent. Penalty notices
took weeks or longer to arrive. This
meant that many people were not aware that, by taking their previous regular
routes, especially to Lewisham Hopistal for treatment, appointments and visits,
they were now committing an offence. The
first they were aware of this was when dozens of notices of fines dropped onto
their doormats. This caused a blizzard
of complaints to be made to Councillors from previously law-abiding residents
who, in some cases, had received, literally, thousands of pounds worth of
fines. Councillors were told to bring
these cases to the Mayor so that they could be quietly dealt with.
Such was the outcry, that the LTN had to be scaled back for
a trial period. During this time a
consultation was held to get people’s views about the new, modified
scheme. I was Chair of the Council’s
Overview & Scrutiny Committee at the time.
I wrote to Damien pointing out his manifesto commitment to make the
Council more open and transparent and asking him, in consequence of this, to
publish the results of the consultation as soon as possible and inviting him to
a meeting of the Committee to answer questions on the matter. Weeks went by without a reply, despite me
chasing this a number of times. When the
reply finally arrived, it was less informative than I had hoped. Damien told me that other commitments meant
that he was unable to accept the Committee’s invitation to attend and answer
members’ questions. It is moot to ask if
his schedule would ever have allowed him to attend the Committee to enable
members to scrutinise him on the subject.
7 days in advance of the meeting of the Mayor & Cabinet that
would decide whether or not to make the temporarily reduced Lee Green LTN
permanent, the results of the consultation were published. This showed that a clear majority of
respondents did not support the pared-down, trial scheme. Mayor & Cabinet voted to retain the
scheme. It promised that the scheme
would be monitored to see what effect it was having on traffic within it and on
the boundary roads around it. This
monitoring report would be published so people could see the results. When this report was recently presented at a
Full Council meeting, the Council had to admit that it did not have the
baseline data to assess the impact that either the original scheme or the now
permanent scaled-back scheme had had on traffic either within the LTN or
outside it.
Housing
Sir Steve Bullock started his fourth and final term as Mayor
in 2014, having pledged to build 500 new Council homes by 2018. Bullock appointed Damien to be his Cabinet
Member for Housing straight after his election victory and charged him with
delivering on this manifesto commitment.
During his campaign to be selected as Labour’s candidate in Lewisham’s
Mayoral election in 2018, following Bullock’s decision to stand down, Damien’s
campaign team adopted a wide and all-encompassing definition of ‘delivered’ so
as to claim that he had fulfilled Bullock’s pledge. His team has continued to
pursue this approach during his six years as Mayor when it comes to making claims
about homes ‘delivered’. In short,
whereas most people would think that a home that was claimed to have been delivered
was a home that had actually been built, the Council seemed to believe that
delivered meant built, anything that could be said to be anywhere near the
planning process and everything in between.
This approach has been well critiqued by the X, formally known as
Twitter, account @LewishamWatch. It was
also the subject of a recent Public Question to Full Council where the Council
had to admit to using a wider definition of ‘delivered’ than meaning actually
built.
The Council’s attempts to actually build homes have not been without difficulties. @LewishamWatch posted on X that the Council’s Auditors, Grant Thornton, had raised concerns in its Audit Report about,
‘the collapse of the ‘higher risk’ housing project for Home Park and Edward Street.’
These were
2 schemes to build a total of 65 new affordable homes. This followed the collapse into administration
of the Council’s appointed contractor, Caledonian Modular Ltd. The contract was for £27m. The Council has started cost recovery
work. It is assumed that regardless of
this, this episode will cause the Council to incur a substantial financial
loss. @LewishamWatch, in my experience a
very reliable and accurate reporter of Lewisham Council’s travails, believes that:
‘The Council is unlikely to recover the costs of the £27m
scheme.’
Lewisham Homes
Damien recently decided that he wanted to bring Lewisham
Homes in-house. Lewisham Homes was an
Arms-Length Management Organisation (ALMO), effectively the Council’s wholly
owned subsidiary, with responsibility for managing its housing stock. That is, it ran Council housing in Lewisham. It reported to the Council and Councillors
sat on its Management Board. The reason
for bringing it in-house was to improve its performance. The justification for doing this ran to just
over half a page of A4 which was contained in the report that went to Mayor
& Cabinet that recommended the change.
No improvement plan was produced so no-one knew what the Council
proposed to do to improve the performance of the service. It was claimed that the change would save £300,000
in efficiencies. In fact, the Council
reported soon after it announced the change, that it would in fact cost the
Council over £6m. Subsequent to the in-house
transfer, Lewisham entered itself into the Affordable Housing Awards where it
won an award for being Contractor of the year for the quality of its Repairs
Service. About a month later it referred
itself to the Regulator of Social Housing because of the poor quality of its
housing stock and concerns it had about the adequacy of its repairs service and
its fire safety measures. This again has
been well critiqued online by @LewishamWatch.
Regeneration
Whilst all around us and across London, Labour Councils
build new homes and regenerate their communities, Lewisham seems to suffer from
an exceptionalism that prevents much needed redevelopment taking place. Damien was one of the Cabinet Members who
supported the abandoning of the Millwall Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) in
2017. I will not rehash the arguments
about this here. In brief, the Council
proposed to use a CPO to take back ownership of the land it owned, not
including the stadium, and had leased to Millwall Football Club in order that
the land around the stadium could be redeveloped by a property developer,
Renewal, who owned a lot of the surrounding land. The proposed sports village, New Bermondsey,
would contain over 3,000 new homes. The
Council believed that the developer and the Football Club were cooperating on
this scheme. The decision by the Club to
withdraw support led to a chain of events that brought the project to an
acrimonious end and an enquiry, followed by a report, led by the former Master
of the Rolls, Lord Dyson.
Following Damien’s election as Mayor in 2018, he announced
that he was taking personal charge of the dispute between Renewal and Millwall
with a view to securing an agreement between the parties that would see a new
scheme brought forward on the New Bermondsey site. Consequently, when Damien gave the Cabinet Regeneration
brief to Councillor Paul Bell, it contained all Regeneration in the borough
save New Bermondsey. Damien embarked on
an intense programme of shuttle diplomacy between Renewal and the Club. Such was the sensitivity of these
negotiations that an omertà was imposed on all
Councillors. No Councillor was permitted
to speak publicly about the issue under threat of disciplinary action. This included the Councillors in whose ward
the proposed development sat.
Six years on, no work has started on the site. Renewal are still required to come back to
the Council for another planning consent before it can begin work on the land it
owns, that is, not the site that Millwall leases from the Council. Millwall have not submitted a planning
application to redevelop this land. It
appears that they are not in any meaningful discussions with the Council to do
so any time soon. After six years of
negotiations, as far as I am aware, the Council has not been able to agree terms
with the Club so that the lease it has on the Council land it occupies can be
renewed. I believe that the omertà is still in place.
But the Millwall/New Bermondsey scheme is not an isolated
case of development not taking place.
What follows is a list of Lewisham schemes that appear to have run into
the sand:
Convoys Wharf
Lewisham Precinct
Catford Town Centre/Milford Towers
Catford Island Site
New Cross Sainsburys Site
Leegate Centre
Achilles Street New Cross
Whilst Millwall/New Bermondsey is not an isolated case, it poses
a very visible question that crystalises the problem. If you travel down Ilderton Road you can look
to the West and there you see cranes and development a plenty. This is Southwark. But look to the East and you see nothing
happening on the Millwall/New Bermondsey site.
This is Lewisham. Why?
Conclusion
What I have written is not balanced. I feel that the space for celebrating the
achievements of Damien’s 6 years as Lewisham’s Mayor is well populated. I have written this piece in an attempt to prompt
discussion about Lewisham and the challenges it faces and as an invitation to
Councillors who were on the Council from 2018 to date to explain what scrutiny
was taking place during this period. It
has to be remembered that Overview & Scrutiny is a statutory responsibility
of all Councillors who are not members of the Executive, that is, the
Cabinet. They have a legal duty to carry
out this function formally, in public and in the public interest. They are paid public money to do this. They are not paid these allowances to discuss
difficult issues confidentially in private in the Labour Group, where to
divulge what has been discussed risks disciplinary action from the Party. Neither are they paid by the public to attend
Labour Party ward and constituency meetings, nor to go canvassing or
campaigning. They are paid to hold the
Mayor & Cabinet publicly to account for the decisions they have made and
their consequences. If the residents
were well informed, if all the information was in the public domain, would they
judge that this job has been done well?
I congratulate Damien once again on his victory in Kingswood. He has considerable talents. He is photogenic and charismatic which enables
him to win support and bring people together.
He can learn a script and deliver it well. To some, this may sound like damning with
faint praise. I do not mean for it to be
taken so. In today’s world, be it in
politics, or business or even things like sport and the arts, these skills are
important. My business partner has them. My team constantly remind me of the importance
of optics, as they gently direct me away from cameras and microphones. So, I genuinely wish Damien well as a new MP,
and I express the hope that he will find a niche that makes the most of his
talents both for himself and the people he serves. I also hope that, if Labour win the next
General Election, there will be enough Labour MPs who understand the cost of
exercising executive political power and are willing to pay the price required,
in unpopularity and self-sacrifice, to wield it in the public interest to
maximum effect. The next Labour
Government will not be the success we hope it will without them.