Why Did Labour Lose So Badly To The Greens In Lewisham At The Recent Council Elections?: A Point of View

The scale of Labour’s loss to the Greens in Lewisham at May’s local elections was devastating.  I have heard it described within the local Labour Party as a rout.  One can hardly argue with this assessment when one looks at the facts.  Labour lost the Mayoralty that it had held since it was established in 2002.  Labour won all 54 seats on the Council at the previous election in 2022 as it did at the election in 2018 and went into the 2026 elections holding 50 seats, having suffered 4 defections to the Greens during the administration.  Labour lost a further 36 seats in May leaving the overall result as Greens 40 seats and Labour 14.  The results meant the end of Labour’s 55 year reign in Lewisham.

One would have thought that any organisation that experienced such a wholescale rejection by the people it was supposed to serve, whatever sector it operated in, would set aside time for sober reflection as to why such a failure occurred.  One would think that a pause for thought would be the order of the day as the organisation allowed time for the dust to settle, the shock to subside and for objective dispassionate analysis to take place.  However, this has not been the reaction of many local Labour leaders.  Instead, many came out straight after the results were announced to claim that residents were very happy with how Labour had been running the Council and that the outcome was all to do with the ‘national picture’, this being code for dissatisfaction with the Starmer Government.  It appears that this is an attempt to establish this narrative as some kind of received wisdom, thereby filling the space that any post mortem would occupy and requiring dissenters to critique it, rather than allow a completely open debate where there are no predetermined battle lines.

In fairness, I received an email from my local ward Labour Party letting me know that our next meeting would be taking place next week at which people would be invited to give their view as to what went wrong and what we need to do to win again in Lewisham.  What follows is my contribution to that debate.

Clearly, we saw a huge swing away from Labour towards the Greens across the country, together with a swing towards Reform.  But this swing wasn’t uniform, even it we just look at London.  I have to be honest and say that I haven’t looked at the data in the way you would expect Sir John Curtice or Tony Travers to examine it.  Here I just offer a personal view.  But any observer can see that the Greens did better in some London boroughs than they did in others.

The Greens won three boroughs outright in London in May: Hackney, Lewisham and Waltham Forest.  But if you look at Lewisham’s Labour neighbours, Southwark, Greenwich and Lambeth, the picture is different.  It is worth pointing out that when I was on the Council, these boroughs used to be referred to in reports as Lewisham’s statistical neighbours as they were so similar to us demographically and geographically and therefore provided useful comparisons.  Examining performance in these 4 boroughs was seen as comparing organisations in similar situations and facing similar challenges.  Whereas in Lewisham, Labour was routed, in Greenwich it retained control of the Council, albeit with a much reduced majority. In Southwark the result meant that Labour lost control of the Council but the Greens did not win enough seats to take control, so Labour remained the largest party on the Council with no party having enough seats to secure overall control.  In Lambeth, Labour lost control of the Council with the Greens winning enough seats to become the largest party but not enough to have a majority, leaving a situation where no party had overall control.  Given this set of results, I think that it is quite hard to argue that they were due to a general protest vote against the national Labour Government as to do so would be to claim that Lewisham has more in common with Hackney and Waltham Forest (which is an outer, as opposed to an inner, London borough) than it does with its South London neighbours.

So let us look at some local factors which may help to explain why Lewisham did so badly in May.  One is the presence of Goldsmiths College in the borough, situated in New Cross in the centre of the old Deptford Parliamentary constituency, now renamed North Lewisham.  In the early mid 1990s, Goldsmiths took the decision to development a campus around its site.  At the time, it had halls of residence across the borough and as far afield as Sidcup in Bexley Borough which is on the other side of Greenwich.  This plan, supported by the Council and public development bodies like Deptford City Challenge, led to a very large amount of student accommodation being built close to the College.  This concentration of students provided a strong basis of support for the Greens and a ready pool of potential activists.  This led to Deptford (I find it very hard to think of this area as Lewisham North) along with Lewisham West, or so I have been told, becoming target areas for the Greens in the campaigning for the May elections.  This meant that these areas were subject to greater levels of activity than other parts of London and this concentration of effort by the Greens appears to have borne much fruit.

Lewisham is covered by the constituencies of Lewisham North, Lewisham East and half of Lewisham West and East Dulwich. North returns 23 Councillors to the Council, East 19 and the Lewisham half of West 12.  The Greens won 22 seats in North and Labour held on to 1.  The Greens took 7 seats in East with Labour holding on to 12.  The Greens took 11 of the seats in West with Labour only managing to hold on to one.  Labour in East clearly did better than it did in the other constituencies.  Can this all be explained by the fact that North and West were Green targets while East was not and therefore subject to more a greater level of campaigning?  Possibly.  But if should be pointed out that Labour campaigning was organised on a constituency basis.  There were different campaign coordinators in different constituencies and they, along with other local party leaders, devised different campaign strategies.  Therefore, it seems plausible that the campaign in East was more effective than that run in North and West. 

Another matter that was raised by some residents, which is particular to Lewisham, was the recent history of incumbent Mayors.  The first Mayor of Lewisham, Sir Steve Bullock served 4 full terms before standing down in 2018.  He continued to be involved in public service but did not seek elected office elsewhere.  He was succeeded by Damien Egan, who stood down in 2024 to fight and win a by-election, thus becoming an MP in Bristol.  This necessitated a by-election, which cost the Council around £600,000 to run, which was won by the Labour candidate, Brenda Dacres.  She was made a peer in January 2026 and then announced her intention not to run for the Lewisham Mayoralty in May.  This meant that Lewisham had to select another Mayoral candidate.  Amanda de Ryk, who had narrowly failed to beat Dacres in the previous selection contest, was selected following the withdrawal of the other candidate, Will Cooper.

What some residents did say was that they felt that Damien Egan and Brenda Dacres’ decision to give up the Mayoralty, demonstrated that they were only interested in Lewisham for as long as it suited them, that is, until a better offer came along.  There was a sense that other Labour candidates who were presenting themselves as committed to serving in Lewisham at elections, were really hoping to move on to higher things elsewhere.  Recent experience had dented people’s trust in Labour.  It had undermined the belief that local Labour politicians saw Lewisham as a long-term priority and were consequently genuinely committed to serving the local area.  In short, what they had experienced in Lewisham had re-enforced an underlying feeling of cynicism about politics and politicians.

It is hard to quantify the effect that this attitude had on the overall outcome.  A few weeks after the elections I was talking to a Labour Councillor from another borough.  They made the point to me that Lewisham was well-known amongst London boroughs for having a lot of Councillors who wanted to become MPs in other parts of the country.  They mentioned to me that they thought that recently 10 had sought to do so.  I am not sure whether 10 is right or not.  I think that the point is that this was the perception of another Labour Councillor, that they thought that this portrayed Lewisham Labour in a poor light and that this perception is probably quite widely shared within the regional Labour Party.

I was part of Amanda de Ryk’s campaign team when she sought selection to become Labour’s Mayoral candidate in Lewisham in 2024 when she competed against Brenda Dacres.  I supported her when she sought to become the candidate in 2026 following Brenda’s ennoblement.  I campaigned for her in the May elections.  I think that she would have made an excellent Mayor.  However, it is inconceivable to me that Brenda would not have done better in the Mayoral election than Amanda given her higher public profile, particularly in Deptford and New Cross.  It should be remembered that Amanda lost by less than 5000 votes, or 6% of the total number of votes cast.  It is plausible that with Brenda’s higher level of public recognition Labour could have held on to the Mayoralty even though it lost overall control of the Council, as happened in Newham.

If we are looking at possible local factors that contributed to the scale of Labour’s defeat to the Greens, then we should look at Labour’s record in office.

A big part of Labour’s campaign in the elections in May was to claim that Lewisham had the most improved secondary schools in the country based on GCSE results.  This claim, by their own admission, was enough to bring @LewishamWatch, Lewisham Council’s very own online apolitical scrutineer out of retirement to provide some explanatory context.  You can read his analysis of the facts for yourself on X here  He makes the point that this claim is based on Progress 8 scores.  These are the ‘difference between pupils GCSEs and what similar pupils would be expected to get based on primary school SATS.’  He points out that progress has been made when you compare performance during the year before COVID, which was particularly bad for Lewisham, and the most recent performance.  But they provide a table which shows that, even so, Lewisham still has one of the worst scores in London, coming 24 out of 32 London boroughs.

When you look at actual GSCE results, that is, Attainment 8 scores, then the performance of Lewisham secondary schools ranks them 29^th out of 32 London boroughs.  In other words, Lewisham has the 4^th worst secondary schools in London.  Scores for black pupils are the second worst in London.

I have written at some length about the failures of the Lewisham Labour over the last 8 years.  If you are interested you can find examples here and here.  I will restrict myself to highlighting a few of them.

In March 2023, the Information Commissioner’s Office issued an enforcement notice to Lewisham Council for failing to respond to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.  The notice stated that Lewisham’s failure to comply with the law  ‘erodes trust in democracy and open government.’

Also, in 2023, the Council referred itself to the Housing Ombudsman for the poor quality of its housing stock and its fire safety measures.  The Ombudsman launched an investigation and published its report last year.  You can view all this online as it is a matter of public record.  I think to say that it was highly critical of the performance of the Council is putting it as mildly as possible.

Despite the Council claims, particularly in the run up to the election, that they were investing more resources to deal with it, rising complaints about fly tipping, littering and dog poo have been a feature of Labour’s last 4 years in power in Lewisham.  This together with a prevalence of weeds on the pavements have led to a perception of a general deterioration of the quality of the public realm under Labour.  Add to this, people’s experience of missed bin collections and receiving parking fines in error, and you can understand why many residents feel that the Council is no longer getting the basics right in the way that it used to.

Lewisham used to have the RingGo Parking App that you could use to get visitor and residents’ parking permits if you lived one of the borough’s controlled parking zones (CPZs).  Now there is no App and you have to do everything online on a website which is far more complicated, confusing and time consuming.  Are we the only London borough without an App that works for its CPZs?

Lewisham, according to the latest Government figures, not only failed its housing test, but has the worst record of house building in London.  At a time when Housing is a major issue for people in London, especially amongst the demographic that the Greens were targeting, it seems plausible that Lewisham’s poor record would have a negative impact electorally.  Certainly, it featured in one of the Green Mayoral candidates campaigning videos that I saw.  Moreover, Lewisham failed its housing test by such a substantial amount that it essentially lost its role as the local planning authority that it once had.  The fact that its housing building performance was so poor meant that Lewisham has to operate under the presumption of consent, or to give it its less dramatic and some might say less alarming name, ‘the presumption in favour of sustainable development.’  You can look up what this means and make your own judgement.  To my mind it means that the Council’s role in planning in the case of large schemes has been reduced to being little more than rubber stamping the applications that developers submit.  The role of residents to influence the planning process via representations to the Council that they used to have and have grown used to exercising, has been pretty much eliminated to my mind.

Lewisham’s extremely poor record on house building is driven by its extremely poor record of regeneration.  Whilst other Labour led London Boroughs are renewing their town centres and communities, sites in Lewisham designated for redevelopment languish untouched.  Convoys Wharf, located on Lewisham’s small section of desirable Thames waterfront has remained undeveloped despite receiving an outline planning consent in 2005.  New Bermondsey/Millwall, Achilles Street, Lewisham Precinct, Catford Town Centre, Catford Island site – all these sites remain likewise undeveloped.  Thousands of new homes are locked up in these moribund sites, together with the millions of pounds of Business Rates and Council tax that they would yield to the Council for it to spend on vital services.

Some of the items I have listed above may seem trivial when looked at in isolation.  To suggest that criticism by the Information Commissioner could contribute to an electoral rout seems designed to invite ridicule.  I accept that.  However, what I am putting forward is the claim that all these areas of poor performance taken together speak to a malaise, a complacency, a lethargy at the heart of the Labour led Council.  They are evidence of a lack of dynamism, a lack of urgency and purpose down at the Town Hall.  In short, they demonstrate a lack of vision and a lack of leadership. 

I have mentioned Lewisham’s poor record and house building.  The thing about regeneration is that it generates a lot of opposition to begin with, but this tend to fade over time as the schemes are built out.  These feelings of negativity are then replaced with a sense of positivity and of optimism and a sense that an area is improving.  New people come in who are untroubled by the previous history of opposition.  People want to see and be part of progress.  If you travel through Greenwich regularly, one is struck by the contrast between the regeneration that has taken place there and the state of Lewisham’s Town Centres.  If you go down Ilderton Road similarly the contrast between the regeneration that has taken place on the Southwark side and the untouched nature of the Lewisham side can only invite unfavourable comparisons between the two Councils.

Most of my life is spent outside of Labour Party events.  It is spent engaging with family members, neighbours and friends and with work colleagues, a number of whom live in Lewisham.  Most of these people are not engaged in active party politics although they are politically and socially aware.  Many used to moan a bit to me about the Council from time to time, but they used to say that on balance they felt that Lewisham was doing a reasonable job in the circumstances.  A year ago this started to change.  The catalyst may have been different for different people, but there was a growing articulation of a feeling that all was not well in Labour Lewisham.  People felt that Labour was having it too easy.  A lack of any Opposition to Labour on the Council for such a long time had led to complacency.  Labour needed a bit of a shake-up.  Many people started to say, more in sadness than in anger, that they felt it was time for a change.

My view is that the strongest force in British politics and may be in the politics of all democratic countries, is that when the electorate feel its time for a change.  Ideology doesn’t win elections.  This is something that, too often, victors inflict on people after they have won.  Voters do not decide who to vote for on the basis of a deep dive analysis of party manifestos.  The decision of to whom to give your cross is often just something visceral.  And there is nothing more visceral that a feeling that its time for a change.  It was this feeling that propelled Thatcher into Downing Street in 1979.  It was this feeling that saw Blair through to victory in 1998.  It sadly did for Brown in 2010. And it saw Starmer home in 2024.

I don’t think that Labour will be coming back to power in Lewisham until people think that its time for another change.  I think that it will take much longer to win back people’s trust if Lewisham Labour merely says defeat was all due to Starmer and that it has nothing to reproach itself for and has no need to change its ways or its words.

Whilst I am glad for the opportunity to participate in an internal Labour debate about why we lost so badly to the Greens in May, it is questionable whether we are capable of the engaging in the dispassionate rigorous scrutiny necessary to make this a useful, illuminating exercise.  Indeed a lack of effective scrutiny by Labour Councillors of their Mayor and Cabinet colleagues is arguably a contributing cause of Labour’s failure and why we are asking the questions we are asking now.  This being the case, if we really want to know why people voted Green, particularly those who switched from voting Labour in 2018, maybe we should just ask them.

Lewisham Needs Another Woman Mayor: A Point Of View

The Labour Party has a commitment to Equal Opportunities.  This commitment has led it to work tirelessly to promote Gender balance when it comes to selecting candidates.  But the Party realised that strong words and good intentions were not enough.

This is why all woman shortlists were introduced for Parliamentary selections.

It is why in Lewisham Labour has been committed to ensuring that it has at least one woman candidate standing in every ward in Council elections.

And, when in Office, Labour in Lewisham has sought to have Gender balance on the Group, in the Mayor’s Cabinet and amongst elected Chairs and Vice Chairs of Council Committees.

Steve Bullock was the first Labour Mayor of Lewisham.  He served for 16 years

He was followed by Damien Egan who served for 6 years.

Lewisham had it’s first woman Mayor when Brenda Dacres succeeded Mayor Egan.

She will serve for 2 years.

In the 24 years that Lewisham has had a Mayor, it has only had a woman Mayor for 2.

If the Party selects a male candidate to replace Mayor Dacres and that candidate goes on to win in May and serves a full term, then Lewisham will have had a male Mayor for 26 years.

The earliest opportunity for Lewisham to have a woman Mayor would then probably be in 2030.  2034 if he serves for 2 terms.

In a few weeks' time Labour Party Members have the chance to choose their candidate to be the next Mayor of Lewisham.

This will be an opportunity for all those who have advocated strongly for Gender balance to stand up and be counted.

I’ll be voting for Amanda de Ryk.

She is a fantastic candidate.

She has the experience and track record to show that she can make Lewisham the best place to live, work and learn.

She will deliver for all of Lewisham’s people.

Please give her your support.

Is Lewisham Council In Trouble?

Some months ago I wrote a post giving my opinion of former Lewisham Mayor (and now MP for Bristol North East) Damien Egan’s, record in office.  I made a number of points about what had happened, or rather not happened on his watch, both as Mayor between 2018-2024 and as Cabinet Member for Housing in the 4 years before that, in the area of housing.  Essentially these highlighted a failure to build new homes, particularly on longstanding designated redevelopment sites, and the inadequacy of the Repair Service of the Council’s now in-house Council House manager, Lewisham Homes.  Recent events have provided a postscript to my blog-post about these failings.

In July it was reported to Lewisham’s Mayor & Cabinet that Lewisham had failed to build the number of homes it was required by the Government to build and had consequently failed what is known as its Housing Test.  It built 2,111 homes fewer than it should.  It achieved on 51% of its target.  It was the second worst performer out of all 32 London Boroughs, having just been able to avoid last place by beating Redbridge who managed to build only 50% of its target.  Lewisham was the 21^st worst performing local authority in the country.  One of the consequences of failing its Housing Test by so much is that it is now subject to a presumption in favour of sustainable development.  I am not a lawyer but it seems that, in short, because Lewisham has built far too few homes, it will essentially have to grant permission to developers that apply with schemes that meet the sustainability criteria.  The Council, as the Planning Authority, will have little if any discretion to exercise when determining these applications and little power to influence them.  Arguably it has lost its planning powers and is now merely a rubber stamp.

Last year, the Council referred itself to the Housing Ombudsman for the poor quality of its housing stock and concerns it had about the adequacy of its Repairs Service and its fire safety measures.  A month before, it had entered itself into the Affordable Housing Awards where it won an award for being Contractor of the year for the quality of this service.

About a week ago the BBC reported that:

‘Lewisham Council is to be investigated by the Housing Ombudsman over "repeated failings" within its housing services.

The ombudsman, which deals with complaints about social housing providers, said it had found failings in 85% of housing complaints about the south-east London authority in the last 12 months. 

It said failings were found in 90% of cases related to leaks, damp and mould, and there were 16 "serious failings" in how the borough council dealt with housing issues in the past year.’

It seems reasonable to assume that this situation would have been alleviated if the Council had built more homes.  The proposed Achilles Street development is a case in point.  It involved the demolition and rebuilding of two Council Housing Estates in New Cross, the ward I used to represent.  While the scheme was being touted as early as 2016, to date, nothing has happened on the site.  I could go on.

In my previous post, I mentioned Education, but only in the context of Academisation.  What I did not say was that despite claims that 90 odd % of Lewisham Schools are either Good or Outstanding as judged by Ofsted, Lewisham has the worst to second to worst performing secondary schools in London.  One of these, Conisborough College, recently essentially failed its Ofsted inspection and was then subject to an Academy Order issued by the Regional Schools Commissioner.  This situation does not get a public mention from the Council, and if there is a political commitment to improve our secondary schools and a delivery plan to go with it, I am unaware of it.

Whilst the previous Mayor made little or no progress in these areas as well as in others, as I outlined in my post, during his six years in office, the point I really want to make here is that there have been serious deficiencies at the Council for many decades.

Lewisham Secondary Schools have been poor performers for many years.  We have Ofsted to thank for making this and their underperformance relative to other London schools transparent.  This situation even predates my time on the Council.  When I was first elected to the Council in 1998 the then Leader, Dave Sullivan, established an Education Select Committee (I think that this was its title) to investigate the poor performance of our secondary schools.  At the time three of our secondaries were in Ofsted Special Measures.  The Committee comprised mainly Councillors, of which I was one, and a number of independent people.  It took evidence from witnesses and came up with recommendations for improvement.  Various initiatives have been tried since then.  Our secondary schools have improved dramatically since this time.  However, the schools in neighbouring boroughs have improved as well, leaving Lewisham still with the worst or second worst secondary offer in London, depending on what year you look at. I get the impression that since 2018, the Council has decided, in effect, to accept the situation and move on.  If there is evidence to the contrary, as I say, I am yet to see it.

When it comes to Council Housing, be it when it was managed in-house by the Housing Directorate or subsequently by the Lewisham Homes, an Arm’s Length Management Organisation (ALMO) which was always effectively under the control of the Council, the performance of the Repairs Service has always been questionable.  You did not have to be a Councillor for very long before you encountered the fruits of its labours via tenants’ visits to your surgeries or home visits you went on.  The experience was a litany of no repairs for weeks and months, ignored requests for repairs from tenants, missed visits, poor quality repairs when they were done and poor management of sub-contractors, some of them very large companies, when to say that they lacked a public service ethos and commitment to customer service would be something of an understatement. In short, the service has been failing for decades.

In 2006 the then Home Secretary, John, now Lord, Reid famously described the Home Office as ‘not fit for purpose’.  The phrase caught on and has been used regularly since then to describe many different things.  Consequently, it has lost some of its force so I will not use it.  However, I think that it is well understood amongst the cognoscenti, Officers and Members, within the Council, that the phone system, the IT system and the Financial Control Systems just do not work and haven’t done so for many decades.  This is a very big issue and I will not go into it in depth now.

My conclusion, based on having spent twenty-four years as a Councillor trying to improve its performance for the benefit of its residents, many of those in senior roles, together with other committed and hardworking Councillors, is that the Council is in deep trouble.  It is broken.  Its basic functionality is fundamentally impaired.  Sadly, it is taking outside bodies whose judgments can not be dismissed as wrong or the product of vexatious personally motivated vendettas – the Government regarding the Housing Test, The Information Commissioner, The Housing Ombudsman, Ofsted – to bring this to public notice.  Nor can all this be blamed on Tory Cuts, although without a doubt this has exacerbated the situation and made improvement very difficult.  The failures are deep-seated and predate the 2010 Osborne Austerity regime.  Turning things around is going to prove extremely difficult in my view.  A necessary first step is going to be an admission of the nature and scale of the problems that the Council faces. Apologies alone will not suffice.  The Council will need to demonstrate credibility in the eyes of the public and independent outside bodies so as to generate confidence that it is up to the task.

Mayor Dacres was my Co-Councillor in New Cross for 8 years.  I know many Councillors, including some Cabinet Members, very well.  Many are my friends.  I wish them all the very best at this very challenging time.

Salus Populi Suprema Lex.

 

Lewisham Council Members' Allowances: A Change Of Heart?

Sadly, it would appear that Mayor Dacres' Administration has got off to the same less than surefooted start as that of her predecessor 6 years ago.  I planned to go to this week's Council AGM so was waiting for the Council to publish the papers for the meeting online.  This they duly did and I took a look.  I was surprised to see, when I read the report on Members' Allowances, that the Council was proposing to make some very substantial increases to these.  One of the big standout proposals, recommendation 3, was to increase the basic allowance by 32.85%, from £12,014 to £15,960, backdated to April last year.  I put a link to the report on the Council's website on X, formally known as Twitter.  A few days later when I wanted to share the link to the report to others I noticed that the original report had been changed.  The proposal to raise the basic allowance had been 'revised'.  Now recommendation 3 says that the basic allowance is to be raised by 3.88%, from £12,014 to £12,480, backdated to April last year.  Happily, I had downloaded the report so I could check that I hadn't gone mad:

The new report still contains some substantial increases to exiting allowances and introduces some new ones, in particular for the newly created Executive-Scrutiny hybrid role of Cabinet Advisers.  But in all other respects the new report appears to be the same as the original one.  The Mayor must have been a change of heart after she had agreed the increase and signed off the report.  Perhaps she will let us know why at the AGM on Wednesday if not before?

For ease of reference, here is a link to the Agenda for the AGM.  The new Members' Allowances report is item 14, at the end.

Damien Egan - Mayor Of Lewisham 2018-2024: A Point Of View

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.

Compassion Competence Confidence - Why I Am Backing Amanda De Ryk To Be The Next Mayor Of Lewisham

‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans’.  So goes the old Jewish proverb.  Having been selected to be the Labour candidate in the newly-created Bristol North East constituency, Lewisham’s Mayor, Damien Egan was beginning to gear up to fight this newly created seat at the next General Election.  This wasn’t going to be until May at the earliest and probably not until October.  Then, out of the blue, Chris Skidmore, the Conservative MP for Kingswood, one of the old Bristol seats that is disappearing, resigns.  The Labour High Command select Mayor Egan as the Party’s candidate for the resulting by-election in around a month’s time.  This necessitates Damien’s resignation as Mayor of Lewisham which, in turn, requires a by-election to be held to replace him.  So, all of a sudden, what was thought to be a gentle jog towards a transition to a new Mayoralty for Lewisham, has been turned into a full-on sprint to an unexpectedly early finish line around a month from now.  And to be ready to run in that race, the Labour Party, along with other political parties, will have to select its candidate. 

The sound of the gun going off to signal the start of a race months earlier than many had expected caused me to reflect upon my own kamikaze run to be Labour’s candidate for Mayor back in 2017.  I came last by some considerable margin behind the front runners.  One of my lasting memories of that campaign was to have my manifesto described as like ‘War and Peace’ on social media (apologies to Tolstoy fans everywhere).  The other was when my business partner came back from a meeting with Tom Watson, then Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and told me that someone had described my campaign as ‘rather uninspiring’.  Politics can be a brutal business.

Thinking about that contest, which seems like a lifetime ago now, I went back and had a look at my hustings speech.  One of the things I said stands out for me:

The selection process is the means by which we choose our candidate to run a billion pound organisation and be its public face. You're not being asked to select some kind of super community campaigner or civic mayor. It's a real job. For a real leader. 

This is truer now that it was then, following an additional 6 years of Tory Austerity.

I think that people still do not appreciate this fact.  The job of a directly elected Mayor is not what most people seem to imagine.  When they think of a Mayor, they tend to think of someone, perhaps of advancing years, who, following a lifetime of service on the Council, exercises ceremonial role within the borough and an ambassadorial role outside it.  When performing this function, they imagine the Mayor as always resplendent in their robes and chain of office.

The role of a directly-elected Mayor is very different.  Which is why, incidentally, they are paid far more than the civic Mayors which most other boroughs have, currently £80,759 in Lewisham.  Directly-elected Mayors have to exercise executive political power.  In short, they have to run a multi-billion pound business in the public interest.  This is not just about repairing roads, emptying the bins and managing parks.  It’s about running huge service areas like social services for both adults and children, services that it is no exaggeration to say are a matter of life and death for some people.

I think that the role of a directly elected, or executive, Mayor has best been described by my friend, long-time colleague and Lewisham Labour Legend, Cllr John Muldoon:

Being an executive Mayor demands a skillset unlike any other role. Someone who can and will lead, not someone who says they lead. Our local leader. Someone with vision. Someone with integrity. Someone respected by and who respects all our communities. Someone with the competence to steer Lewisham over the coming years, years of great austerity for Lewisham Council. Someone with the agility to deliver great change for Lewisham, whilst never forgetting our duty to the weak, the vulnerable, the poor. Someone ready to seize the opportunities the next Labour Government will bring, whenever that may be.

When deciding who to vote for in the forthcoming election to select Labour’s candidate for the up-and-coming Lewisham Mayoral by-election, Labour Party members should have this is mind.  I believe that members should approach this decision as they would the decision of what school to send their child.  In whom do you have the most confidence to deliver the best outcome for you, your loved ones and your community.  Ultimately, you have to make a hard-headed decision about trust and competence.

This is why, as a former Cabinet Member for Resources, I am backing Amanda De Ryk to be our next Labour Mayor of Lewisham.  As well as having the empathy and compassion to be a great civic leader and champion of the people, she has the operational competence to run the Council to deliver for the residents of our borough.  I believe that she has the qualities that will inspire our people to have confidence, both in their Mayor, and in the Council she leads.

Compassion. Competence. Confidence