Leader — If it is broke, do fix it

Hackney Citizen crest identity

Following the release last month of the official report into the management of our neighbour Tower Hamlets, many in Hackney will feel relieved that they live in a borough without such unseemly goings-on.

But let’s not be too smug – the political brouhaha in Tower Hamlets may have knock-on effects in our borough and across the country.

The government-commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers report into the administration of independent mayor Lutfur Rahman criticised several aspects of the way his borough is run, including: the award of grants to community organisations on inappropriate grounds; the sale of some council properties in ways that fail the ‘best value’ test; excessive money spent on media advisers to Mayor Rahman; and the temporary contracts of several senior officer posts, which make their tenure vulnerable to politically-motivated decisions.

The report “calls into question the adequacy of … governance arrangements.”

Herein lie the wider implications of the episode, for this conclusion suggests that the institutional set-up of the directly-elected executive mayoral system was in part to blame for what happened in the borough.

Given that the same set-up can be found in the 14 other local authorities that have directly-elected executive mayors – including Hackney – this makes one wonder why both Labour and the Conservatives favour this new way of running councils.

A 2009 report by Hackney Council into the workings of the mayoral model concluded that “the Mayoral model has given stability, clarity and accountability to decision making”.

Yet former Labour mayor of Tower Hamlets Michael Keith argues that the executive mayoralty copes poorly with a number of aspects of local and municipal governance: “The true message of the PwC report […] is that if the proper checks and balances on deliberative democracy are not in place then the result is dysfunctional, opaque and – most importantly – to the detriment of democracy and the disadvantage of local people.”

So the question is whether concentration of power has been taken too far under the current system.

Indeed there are some parallels between the situation in Tower Hamlets and that in Hackney, including the stifling of effective scrutiny that occurs when such a large amount of discretion and patronage is vested in a single individual.

The clear warning is that if it happened in Tower Hamlets, it could happen anywhere.