“Toxic” was the standout word from a recent damning report into Tower Hamlets council and how it is run under independent mayor Lutfur Rahman.
A secretive culture permeates a town hall where “many good managers” have quit as a result of “speaking truth to power”, was the thrust of a government ordered investigation.
One councillor told the Standard that the atmosphere inside the local authority was “often dysfunctional and, at best, childish”.
Amid concerns about whether the council was providing value for taxpayers, then communities secretary Michael Gove drafted inspectors into the borough in February last year.
Now the new Labour government is set to act on their findings. It pledged to consider appointing “ministerial envoys” in November, but there has been no further announcements on who these officials that will address “serious concerns” about the management will be.
For many in the borough it is a case of history repeating itself.
When Mr Rahman, a former solicitor, was re-elected the independent mayor of Tower Hamlets in May 2022 it was a comeback that the political establishment dreaded.
Sensationally forced out of government seven years earlier, a specialist court found him guilty of vote-rigging and religious intimidation which resulted in 2014 local elections being annulled.
The election court in 2015 heard Mr Rahman made false statements about his rival Labour’s John Biggs, administered council grants in a way that constituted electoral bribery and spiritually intimidated voters.
In his judgement Richard Mawrey QC, who presided over the case, described the former leader as “unfailingly courteous and polite” but “almost pathologically incapable of giving a straight answer”.
Mr Rahman was struck off as a solicitor and banned from standing in elections for five years. His rivals thought him finally cast into the political wilderness.
But to many, in Tower Hamlets at least, he remained an inspirational figure. A softly spoken, well dressed, bespectacled family lawyer who rose to power in one of London’s poorest boroughs and then became a victim of “a racist witch-hunt” led by a political establishment who could not stand to see a Muslim socialist in power.
To others, he is a man who prioritises the Bangladeshi community over all others and who has no qualms about bribing voters and smearing rivals to remain in charge.
Born in Bangladesh he came to the East End as a child with his parents. He has said he “couldn’t speak a word of English” when he arrived in this country and it was teachers in Bow who helped “this boy from Bangladesh” to get his break in life and become a successful solicitor.
Lutfur Rahman (left) was elected mayor of Tower Hamlets in May 2022, defeating incumbent John Biggs (right) (PA / Evening Standard)
First elected elected as a Labour councillor in Spitalfields and Banglatown in 2002, he rose through the local party ranks to become leader in 2008 and was considered future MP material.
But in 2010 a Channel Four investigation linked Mr Rahman to the alleged fundamentalist group the Islamic Forum of Europe. When Tower Hamlets moved to an elected mayoral system in 2010 he was accused of signing up fake members to be selected as Labour’s candidate – a charge he denied – and ousted from the party.
He stood, and won, as an independent the following year becoming Britain’s first directly elected Muslim mayor.
A controversial first term was followed by the 2014 election where the accusations of intimidation at polling stations and vote rigging resulted in it the poll being annulled.
Labour’s Mr Biggs, who took over in the wake of the scandal, said he had been left to pick up the pieces of a broken borough and sort out a town hall that had been stripped of its powers to give out grants.
What came were a swathe of cuts and penny-pinching policies made under the watchful eye of government inspectors who had been drafted in to oversee spending in the wake of Mr Rahman’s downfall.
Huge reserves were built up and the borough cashed in millions-of-pounds of new homes bonuses as tower blocks sprung up across the East End.
When the government commissioners were withdrawn in 2017, the town hall was on its way to becoming one of London’s most well off.
But in Labour camps there were concerns about whether all that scrimping was necessary in an area that has, by some measures, the highest rate of child poverty in the UK.
“The council is in a strong financial position with significant reserves and this is in part is due to significant financial decisions made by the previous mayor John Biggs, including service reductions which many consider were unnecessary,” the recent government report found.
“The previous mayor considered that the council’s significant income from new homes bonus and business rates was not reliable and should therefore be used to fund investment rather than ongoing service costs.”
One Labour activist says: “At the time it was brought up across the Labour group that it was going a bit far in some cases, especially with things like cuts to nurseries, and the big protests we saw around those policies.
“I think we have to admit that some of those decisions led to us handing the 2022 election to [Mr Rahman].”
Tower Hamlets Labour councillor Marc Francis said the party is “humble” about mistakes that were made in past.
“The government report talks about the council’s financial position being healthy, but not a lot else is,” he says.
After serving a five year election ban Mr Rahman, now in his fifties, swooped back in to take back control of Tower Hamlets again, winning a landslide victory as leader of his independent Aspire party in May 2022.
He ran an anti-austerity campaign and vowed to tear out the controversial Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes that the Labour administration had so enthusiastically installed across the borough.
Mr Rahman’s victory not only raised eyebrows because of previous accusations about his conduct in office, but because every one of the 24 elected Aspire councillors was a man of south Asian heritage.
Back in power he began splashing out. In 2023, drawing on those healthy reserves, he laid out £40million of spending plans – twice what Labour had spent in any of the years it had run the town hall.
Next week Tower Hamlets will officially sign off its budget for 2025/26 – when he will again face the electorate.
Plans include continuing to hand £400 to 16 to 19-year-olds to stay in education, extending free school meals from primary to all secondary school students and free swimming lessons for women and girls.
Lutfur Rahman was accused of ‘corrupt and illegal practices’ during his controversial re-election in 2014 (NIGEL HOWARD)
The winter fuel allowance, cut by central government last year, has been replaced for 1,500 Tower Hamlets pensioners who can pick up a £175 cash bonus from the Post Office.
Last week it became the first town hall in England to offer a “universal” payment up to £150 for parents struggling with school uniform costs.
Labour are quick to point out that many of these plans will be paid for by a £6million household support fund issued by central Government.
“They are good choices, but its not money he’s invented”, says Mr Francis.
A legal challenge from some residents against the decision to remove a set of LTNs was fought, and won, by the council in the High Court in December.
However it’s not all been plain sailing for the controversial mayor, even before the government’s latest inspection thrust his administration firmly back into the spotlight.
A 2024 budget meeting “descended into chaos” with security having to remove the public and councillors being accused of racism and sexism.
Women members threatened to leave unless action was taken against what they claimed were Aspire supporters in the public gallery “persistently disrupting proceedings with abusive and disrespectful conduct”.
The video stream of the incident was removed from the council’s website and a statement issued. “Whilst we encourage healthy debate, providing a respectful environment for the public, councillors, and staff is a priority for the council,” a spokesman said.
Mr Rahman then lost three Aspire councillors who quit the party amid a reported internal power struggle and disagreements over housing homeless families more than 90 minutes outside of the borough to save costs.
However the party gained two more – its first female representatives – in the form of Labour defectors who resigned over their party’s stance on the war in Gaza.
Palestinian flags were flown in streets across the borough following Israel’s counterattack on the Palestinian territory after Hamas-led militants launched a surprise attack on October 7, 2023 killing at least 1,200 people and taking hundreds more hostage.
The council was criticised for originally deciding not to take down the flags “because we believe it could destabilise community cohesion”.
But under increased pressure a statement was issued: “The increasing focus on the issue, coupled with some unfair and divisive sentiment about our borough and its communities in recent weeks, has meant that the issue of flags has become part of a wider negative discourse used by some to misrepresent Tower Hamlets and our residents …As a result, the Council has decided to begin the removal of flags from council infrastructure.”
In a borough that has such high levels of deprivation, and where 40% of residents identify as Muslim, Labour’s policies at national level have made some think regaining control of the council at the next election is not possible.
“Mr Rahman will be the favourite to retain power next year,” concedes one former councillor.
“All the damning government reports in the world aren’t going to change, they haven’t in the past, and now we’ve got a Labour government seen as supporting Israel and enacting some policies that would’ve looked at home in a George Osborne budget.”
The borough’s longest serving and only Conservative councillor, Peter Golds, says the government should address problem with the elected mayoral system that gives the mayor the power to implement decisions without the support of councillors.
“God knows how unpopular Labour will be next year,” he says. “I don’t think that mayoral system works in a second tier local authority.
“It is brilliant for the regional figures. When you’ve got your Burnham’s, your Khan’s, your Tracy Brabin’s and your Andy Street’s you can actually see what they’re doing. They’re out and about. Then you go to a local authority and it’s not just someone who is doing bus routes, this is someone who decides who can park where in the municipal carpark and it’s all shrouded in secrecy.”
Mr Golds urged the government to make announcements about what the future holds for Tower Hamlets more quickly.
“I find it extraordinary that [Local Government Secretary] Angela Rayner hasn’t made an announcement on who the envoys are and exactly what they are going to do,” he adds.
“I think we should know. Who knows what might come.”
Tower Hamlets council has insisted it “welcomes” the Government’s decision to appoint an envoy “rather than send in commissioners” and it plans to work together with them on a support package that will help ease tensions in the town hall.
The “toxic” warning in the report refers to the relationship between Aspire and the Labour group, a council source added.
Labour disagrees.
“This report is 90% plus a judgement on the way he runs the authority,” Mr Francis said.
“It is a damning criticism. They are not making a judgement on Tower Hamlets Labour group. The intervention is on him and the way he runs the council. They haven’t been able to shift the dial on that.”