Opinion Piece by Cllr Scott Ainslie
5 March 2025
The Labour administration is doing all it can to avoid owning up to their part in Lambeth council’s dire financial position.
Many councils have been starved of resources by central government austerity, but Lambeth’s circumstances are different. Decades of mismanagement and unscrupulous practices by the Labour administration are the real reason for its financial woes.
Green opposition councillors have been warning of Labour’s recklessness, particularly over their terrible business plan for Homes for Lambeth (HfL), for as long as the current leader of the council has been a councillor.
Labour’s attitude of defensiveness and self-preservation is stymying honest reform. If the leadership’s denial and steamrolling over dissent with half-truths continues, they are not equipped to lead this council out of the financial crisis.
Lambeth’s external auditors have taken the unprecedented step of issuing statutory recommendations for corrective action, as previous warnings by them have failed to be acted upon. The Labour administration has responded, as it has done for years, without genuine humility, acknowledgment of their part in failures or commitment to change.
Lambeth Labour are trying to say ‘there is nothing to see here, many other councils across London are in the same position’ – self-righteously trying to swerve blame instead of taking a grip of corporate governance.
The simple truth is, the only other London boroughs to receive such an intervention by auditors are bankrupt Croydon – who also tried and failed to run their own public/private property company – and Tower Hamlets, where government inspectors have had to intervene.
Lambeth Labour alone are responsible for the expensive and failed HfL. They are responsible for selling off council homes and decades of neglect maintaining estates. They are responsible for millions of pounds in legal disrepair compensation payouts. They are responsible for unrealistic budget setting, poor contract management and weak governance.
Over the past 11 years I have seen the creep of their defensiveness infiltrate every tier of this council, which must make life extremely difficult for officers and backbench members, who may be concerned about putting their ideas forward. Ranks close when difficult questions are asked. No real change can take place in this suffocating atmosphere.
There is a penalty for Labour not taking ownership of its mistakes, it will always be too busy looking over its own shoulder to have a clear-eyed view of the road ahead. It will never open its ears to warnings from the Green Party and others who advocated so strongly against doomed schemes such as HfL. Lambeth Labour will never have the humility to completely reform its culture and shepherd this council out of financial crises.
Lambeth’s Budget Council meeting is on Wednesday 5 March 2025 7pm. I strongly suggest you watch it.
We are facing another confused, incomplete and unrealistic budget. Labour’s proposals to find £99m in savings over four years are mysterious at best, with £30m of this (Target Operating Model) still “in progress”. They must also now perform a magic trick to balance their Housing Revenue Account within one year and repay the £40m bailout loan from central government. It’s likely residents will see another fire sale of publicly owned assets.
A Green-led council would never have made the same mistakes, as we would have listened to the peoples’ plans on estates and worked with residents rather than against them. We would never have run estates into the ground in the first place or sold off council owned assets to private developers. We would never have signed off on such a poor business plan for HfL. We advocate participatory budgeting, so that communities have more of a say in how their money is invested in the borough.
For many years now, Labour has put party first. Greens would put people first. We work from the bottom up, not top down.
To read more on this topic see MyLondon’s coverage here .
For enquiries, contact lambethgreenofficer@gmail.com.