Leader: Fix the politics — and the plumbing

When Hackney Labour rewrote the council’s constitution last spring, the loudest objection from the opposition benches was not really about minutes and motions. It was about a principle: that the rules of the game should not be redrawn by the team that happens to be winning. A little over a year later, that principle has had its revenge. The administration that redrew the rules is gone, and the people who protested loudest now hold the pen.

It is worth being clear about what actually changed, because “constitution” sounds grander than the reality. A council’s constitution is its rulebook — who chairs what, who decides what, and crucially, who gets to speak, question, petition and propose. In Hackney that rulebook sits on top of an unusual concentration of power: a directly-elected mayor, in office since the borough voted for the model in 2002, running an executive that for two decades answered to a Labour supermajority. The mayor proposes the budget, picks the cabinet and sets the direction. Full council — the one room where every ward’s councillor sits and the public can have its say — is one of the few places that machine has to slow down and listen.

A quieter chamber

The changes Labour pushed through in May 2025 made that room quieter, and the council’s own report sets out those changes in frank detail. The mayor’s statement was trimmed from ten minutes to eight; opposition leaders’ response to it from five minutes to three. Councillors had their questions cut from two each to one. Members of the public saw the response time to their questions fall from five minutes to three, and the deadline for submitting them pushed back from four working days to eight. Deputations from the public were cut from two per meeting to one. Opposition groups were limited to a single item of “opposition-sponsored business” for an entire municipal year. The long-standing “cab rank” for motions — under which a motion that ran out of time rolled over to the next meeting — was scrapped and replaced with a hard cap of one debated motion per meeting. And the petitions rules were tightened, including the quiet removal of the “challenge” procedure by which someone could contest how their petition had been handled.

There were two further factors worth considering. One amendment formalised that opposition leaders’ response to the mayor must be “a response to the Elected Mayor’s statement and not a political statement in its own right” — while the mayor, of course, remained free to be as political as the office allows. And the running order of full council was reordered to focus more closely on the mayor’s priorities — a change the report notes did not even require a constitutional amendment, because the constitution never prescribed an order in the first place. The most pointed shift, in other words, needed no vote at all.

The case for the defence

To its credit, the administration did not pretend none of this was happening. Its report offered reasons, and some were real. Meetings had grown unwieldy: by the time the changes were drawn up, four motions were sitting undebated, the oldest submitted back in September 2024, with more queued behind them. Shorter response times, the argument ran, would let more questions be answered in the room rather than in writing afterwards, easing the load on officers. The shift to the council’s own portal for e-petitions would make it easier to check that signatories actually live, work or study in Hackney, after paper petitions arrived bearing names from across the UK and abroad. These are not frivolous points. Meetings that never reach the business in front of them serve no one.

But notice the pattern. Every one of these efficiency measures happened to reduce the friction the executive faced, and every one happened to reduce the time and the tools available to everybody else. Efficiency is the reason every incumbent everywhere gives for making scrutiny more convenient for itself. You can accept that the old system was clogged and still ask why the remedy fell so consistently on one side of the chamber. The three opposition groups — Greens, Independent Socialists and Conservatives, not all natural allies — issued a joint statement and staged a walkout. When parties that agree on almost nothing agree that the referee is being nobbled, it is worth taking seriously.

A national habit

Step back, and Hackney’s row turns out to be a small, sharp version of a national story.

In Westminster, Labour came to power in 2024 promising the biggest transfer of power out of the centre in generations. Two years on, the record is real but cautious. The hereditary peers have finally been removed from the House of Lords — a historic change, but also the easiest thing on the list, and the government conspicuously declined to use the same bill to limit how many peers a prime minister can simply appoint. A new ethics body has been set up, but without the force of law behind it, so a future government could weaken or ignore it. Votes at 16 are on their way, a bold and welcome extension of the franchise — yet the watchdog that referees our elections has been left with a Conservative-era lead around its neck that ministers have only promised, eventually, to remove. The Mandelson affair then exposed the cost of all this half-finishing: when a peerage needed removing and a vetting failure needed answering, there were no proper mechanisms in place, only emergency legislation drafted in a hurry.

The thread running through the national picture is a reluctance to tie the government’s own hands. The thread running through Hackney is the same instinct with the brakes off: a smaller arena, a bigger relative majority, fewer of the checks — a second chamber, the courts, a hungry national press — that slow Westminster down. At both levels the same party treated the constitution less as a neutral set of constraints and more as something to be arranged around the convenience of whoever is currently in charge.

The reckoning

The difference is what happened next. Nationally, Labour has not yet been made to pay for its timidity: it still has time to finish the job properly. In Hackney, the reckoning was immediate and total. On 7 May the borough did something it had not done since 2002: it removed Labour. Zoë Garbett took the mayoralty for the Greens, and the Greens swept 42 of the 57 council seats. The rules Labour wrote to suit a Labour executive are now the inheritance of a Green one.

That is the lesson, and it is a hopeful one if the new administration is willing to hear it. Hackney has just run, in fast-forward, the experiment Westminster is still only being warned about: what happens when you treat the constitution as a tool of incumbency and then stop being the incumbent. Every restriction on scrutiny that looked convenient with a forty-two-seat majority is now a restriction the Greens themselves must either live under – or dismantle.

What to do?

So here is the case for dismantling it — and for resisting the temptation that will inevitably follow. 

The temptation is obvious. A new administration with a thumping majority will quickly discover that long meetings, awkward motions and persistent public questions are no more pleasant from the mayor’s chair than they were from the opposition benches. The quiet rulebook Labour built will feel useful. That is exactly the moment to remember how it felt to be on the other side of it. The new administration should restore what was stripped out: proper response time for opposition leaders, more than one question per councillor, a sensible number of motions and deputations per meeting, and public-question time generous enough that residents feel heard rather than processed. It should drop the rule policing whether opposition statements are “too political” — scrutiny is political, that is the point of it. Where the old system really had seized up, fix the plumbing: a fairer way to clear the motions backlog, better drafting deadlines, a working e-petitions portal. And it should resist the deeper habit the agenda-reordering revealed — the idea that full council exists to showcase the mayor’s priorities. Full council exists to test them.

There is a chance here to do something more durable than a simple reversal. The Greens campaigned on changing the system, and the most credible way to prove that is not to repaint the rulebook in their own colours but to make it harder for any future administration — including a future Green one — to quietly narrow scrutiny when it suits them. Build the opposition’s speaking rights and the public’s right to petition into the constitution as protected features rather than gifts of the majority. Hand more real authority to scrutiny committees and resource them properly. Look honestly at the executive mayor model itself: changing it would require another referendum and is not a first-year job, but a party that believes in dispersing power can at least continue the conversation about whether one person should hold quite so much of it.

The principle is the one Labour forgot at both nationally and locally: a good rulebook is one you would be content to lose under. Write the constitution you would want if you were back in opposition next time — because in Hackney, as Labour has just discovered, next time can come faster than anyone expects.