Leader – ‘Lives, not spreadsheets’: Hackney’s new mayor is right to doubt the dashboard — but on climate, targets are how we survive

Standing in the council chamber at the first full meeting since the Greens’ landslide, Hackney’s new mayor set out a governing creed in plain terms.

“We don’t want an administration clinically-delivered based on KPIs,” Zoë Garbett declared. “The metric of success is what people feel and experience in their day-to-day lives.”

She has since put it more sharply still. “Across the public sector, I’ve seen firsthand that there is too often a focus on numbers on spreadsheets rather than lives and experiences,” the mayor says.

“For this administration, it’s Hackney residents who are going to set our benchmarks of success.”

It is a striking creed to open an era with, and a deliberate one.

Garbett has declared she is “determined to do things differently” as the Greens officially take control for the first time, encouraging residents to share ideas for how she can “fix what’s broken.”

The rebuke is aimed squarely at the Labour years and their faith in key performance indicators — the targets, ratings and dashboards that have defined how town halls account for themselves for a generation.

As a statement of philosophy, the new mayor is onto something real. As a governing strategy, it carries a risk she would be unwise to ignore.

The instinct that a number can mislead is not Green romanticism; it is hard-won social science.

Britain spent the New Labour years buried in metrics — at the height of the Best Value regime, councils reported against roughly 1,200 performance indicators — before the Audit Commission’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment graded every authority from “Excellent” to “Poor.”

That whole apparatus was scrapped in 2010, partly because everyone could see what it had bred: goal displacement, gaming, and the quiet truth that what gets measured gets managed while what cannot be measured gets dropped.

When the mayor says she does not want to “tweak the details and tick boxes” but to “change Hackney in a way that people across the borough can feel and see,” any methodologist would recognise the argument. Box-ticking is exactly the pathology the academic literature warns of.

And Hackney offers fresh, painful evidence for it. The day before the mayor’s speech, this paper reported that the council had admitted a restructure worsened a backlog of some 15,000 overdue housing safety checks.

Earlier this year, Ofsted told the council that too many children with special needs had been excluded from secondary schools for “too long,” even as the number of young people with Education, Health and Care plans had doubled since 2019 to nearly 3,840.

No KPI on a screen captures the family waiting on a plan, or the tenant whose gas check never came. The mayor’s promise of “getting the basics right” describes precisely where targets have failed residents on the ground.

But here is the danger in elevating felt experience into a governing principle — and it is a danger that climate change throws into the sharpest possible relief.

There are whole categories of harm where, by the time people feel and see them, it is already too late to act. That is the entire logic of last month’s report from the Climate Change Committee, A Well-Adapted UK, published on 20 May.

Its argument is the precise inverse of governing by lived experience: you must set concrete targets now, against devastation not yet felt, to stop it being felt at all.

The Committee is blunt about the cost of waiting. It found that the 2022 heatwave, when temperatures passed 40°C for the first time in British history, was linked to more than 3,000 early deaths in England and Wales, overwhelmingly among older people.

Without further action, it projects that annual heat-related deaths could climb to between 3,000 and 10,000 a year by 2050.

Its response is not to wait and see how residents feel, but to propose a hard, measurable target: that by 2050, excess heat-related mortality should be no higher than today’s average.

The whole report is built around fourteen systems each given an explicit structure — set ambition, identify actions, enable delivery, evaluate progress — and a table of numerical targets, because, as the Committee puts it, existing visions for adaptation have lacked meaningful objectives and measurable targets, and that gap is precisely why governments have failed to prepare.

This matters enormously for a borough like Hackney. Dense, low-lying inner London is acutely exposed to the two hazards the Committee ranks highest: lethal urban heat and surface-water flooding, the very flash-flooding that closed thirty Tube stations across the capital in 2021.

The CCC’s recommendation is to deploy low-cost cooling in the most vulnerable urban households and roll out property-level flood measures within five years — neither of which a council reaches for if it is waiting for residents to report feeling unsafe.

By the time a heatwave is felt, the vulnerable pensioner is already in hospital, or worse. The committee’s own phrase for the principle is unanswerable: taking action today is cheaper than taking action tomorrow.

The lesson is not that targets are clinical bureaucracy to be swept away. It is that targets are how a community protects the people it cannot yet hear.

The mayor is right that residents, not spreadsheets, should set the borough’s benchmarks of success — but residents are best served when those benchmarks are then written down, owned and measured.

A felt-experience administration is, by design, reactive: it responds to harm that has surfaced.

Prevention — whether of a child’s needs identified too late or of a heat death in a top-floor flat in a 2040 August — demands the opposite: cold, forward-looking metrics owned by someone accountable for hitting them.

The CCC insists that every target carry clear ownership within government and be tracked with published annual updates. That is not the enemy of Green politics; it is its delivery mechanism.

There is a neat irony here. The mayor invokes her “huge mandate” and the “vast number of ways” her manifesto promises to improve residents’ lives — and she is right that a cabinet is already in place and taking decisions.

But a manifesto of that scale is, in the end, a list of promises that residents are entitled to see kept, one by one, in numbers as well as in feeling and experience.

Labour’s new group leader, Cllr Anntoinette Bramble, put the point plainly: “We will be here to ensure we hold you to account. When you do well, we’ll absolutely welcome it. But when you don’t, we will be on your heels.”

An opposition cannot hold a mayor to account on feelings. It needs figures — repair times, flood-resilient homes retrofitted, that backlog of 15,000 checks next year against this. Abolish the metrics and you do not liberate scrutiny: you blind it.

The honest position is one that the whole sad history of council measurement keeps pointing toward. Numbers tell you what is happening; listening to residents tells you why.

The mayor’s promise to let Hackney’s people set the benchmarks, and to govern “right there beside you as partners,” is the qualitative half of a good answer.

The quantitative half — counting whether the housing checks get done, whether the cool rooms get installed before the next 40°C summer — is the half she must not throw out.

Good government listens, and good government counts. Hackney’s new mayor has promised the first; the borough should hold her to the second — for the sake of every resident whose safety depends on decisions taken long before they ever feel the consequences.