Was the Best Value Inspection of Tower Hamlets Council justified?

A recent central government inspection of Tower Hamlets Council and Mayor Lutfur Rahman diagnosed a ‘toxic’ culture  – but why was the Council investigated in the first place, and was it worth it?

On Tuesday, November 12, a whopping 204-page Best Value Inspection (BVI) of the Council was released by the central government, creating seismic waves in Tower Hamlets. The biggest headline was Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s administration being assigned ministerial babysitters as a result. Local government minister Jim McMahon’s made the call, after reading the report. 

BVIs are long-term investigations intended to ensure a Council is fit for purpose. This one revealed startling issues within the Council, including a lack of transparency, murky finances and problems with the treatment of women.

The inspection was prompted by a 2023 report from the Local Government Association (LGA), which highlighted concerns about the Council’s budgeting and workplace culture. 

The then secretary of state for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), Michael Gove, sent in a set of four inspectors.

The report compiled months of extensive surveying, observation and analysis of the state of affairs in the Council, and was conducted between February 2024 and May 2024. 

It’s not the first time the Council has had a BVI – the last inspection was during Rahman’s first term as Mayor in 2014. Shortly after, Rahman was re-elected and then quickly ousted from government, with his re-election declared null and void due to fraud. 

After a five-year ban on running for office, Rahman was re-elected in 2022 – a startling Trump-style comeback. 

It is unlikely this BVI will prompt a similar fall from power as the first one. Unlike the first one, it has not initiated a police investigation and the Council retains all its powers despite some concerning findings.

However, this time the BVI itself has been under increased scrutiny, with questions about its ballooning costs and a secret parallel hunt for extremism in the Council. 

As the dust settles following last week’s shock news for Tower Hamlets we ask whether the BVI was justified in terms of cause, cost and findings. 

A toxic Council culture

The BVI paints a picture of a despotic Mayor. 

‘The culture appears to be one where decisions are taken based on advice from a small number of people who are trusted by the Mayor and has been described by many staff and partners as “toxic”.’ 

The administration is described as ‘suspicious and defensive in its behaviour,’ unwilling to take on constructive criticism. 

Contributing to the toxic environment is a ‘ disproportionate focus from the two main political groups [Aspire and Labour] on the past’. 

The two parties are criticised for repeatedly rehashing the previous Labour and Aspire administrations (of John Biggs and Lutfur Rahman respectively) in a ‘backward looking debate.’ The eagerness from both parties to assign blame for the Council’s issues is slowing efforts to fix them. 

The report also describes a ‘culture of patronage’ undermining trust in the Council – alleging that the Mayor plays favourites and that everyone knows it. 

Key to this is a ‘two council culture’ – the official one and the one created by the Mayor’s inner circle. The BVI noted ‘there is a parallel Council operating through the Mayor’s Office, alongside the mainstream officer cohort.’ 

Employees allege that too many decisions needed to be signed off by the Mayor, slowing down formal processes.

Council employees were also nervous to speak to the investigators. Some staff would only talk to them with pseudonyms or using their personal email accounts. 

The report states that staff ‘were concerned that Council systems were being monitored and information would be reported to the Council’s leadership resulting in negative action against them.’ 

Inspectors described significant obstruction when requesting certain documents, and found it hard to establish timelines as to when some documents had been created. 

Murky finances

The BVI report suggested the 2024/25 budget was subject to several oversights and inconsistencies. Possibly the most startling is a £6.9 million contribution to the Mayor’s ‘Accelerated Delivery Fund,’ which has no stated specific purpose.

The budget also included a sorely needed £5 million for waste management and a £1.9 million allocation for housing services, which the BVI conceded was a good call. 

However, both allocations were classified as one-off investments, despite senior management saying they would likely be needed on an ongoing basis and causing concern over the Mayor’s medium-term budgeting. 

This is no doubt an area of concern for the government following the news that one in four English councils may be facing bankruptcy in next two years. 

For general funding decisions, the report said, ‘In some key areas, we have not seen enough evidence of the Council undertaking meaningful and comprehensive consultation with key partners, staff, and service users before decisions are taken about the financial envelope.’

One example in the report was the Council’s decision to pause The Tower Hamlet’s Food Hub (THFH) service in May 2024 providing only four days’ notice to the community organisations distributing the food. 

The inspectors noted that they could see no reason why so little notice was given, saying ‘the absence of engagement or assurance from the Council caused stress for partners and ultimately damaged relationships.’ 

Worryingly, last week, despite full knowledge of the report’s findings, our ongoing investigation discovered that the Council severely reduced the same service, this time with absolutely no notice. 

Sexism in the Town Hall

Women in the Council reported a pervasive pattern of disrespectful and dismissive treatment to the BVI inspectors, as well as to the LGA.

Not a single one of the Aspire councillors are women, a question we put to Mayor Luftur Rahman when we interviewed him two years ago.

Female councillors reported feeling patronised by the current administration, felt they had to work harder to be taken seriously, and were given less time to speak than their male colleagues. In interviews, it was suggested that women of colour were being treated especially badly. 

The inspectors also described a meeting where female councillors were made to feel unsafe in a meeting ‘during which the Speaker demonstrated limited control over poor behaviour in the public gallery by the largely male attendees.’

The Slice has noted several recent Council clashes with women’s issues. In 2023 the girls of the Vicky Park Rangers FC secured a contract for midweek training, only to have it terminated with no notice and re-allocated by the Council to a men’s team. 

More recently, £2.5 million earmarked for ‘wellbeing, women’s health and community health research’ as part of a deal to build QMUL’s new life science cluster in Whitechapel was re-allocated as simply ‘community health and wellbeing projects.’ 

The flip side –extremism without evidence

Despite the clear issues raised by the BVI in the Council, the issues with the inspection itself have been overshadowed by its findings. 

To start, the cost of the inspection was arguably too high.

A report by Novara Media revealed that the investigation ran massively over budget by roughly £120,000, bringing the final bill up to £360,000 and making the title of ‘Best Value’ feel a bit ironic. The bill was footed by Tower Hamlets Council, and by extension its taxpayers.

Compounded with the financial costs, the efficiency of the Council during the span of the investigation was slowed as staff were required to answer extensive queries by the investigation team. 

The focus and scope of the investigation were also not transparent. Middle East Eye (MEE) revealed this week that Gove ordered the BVI partly to look secretly for evidence of extremism in the Council. 

MEE reported that Sir John Jenkins, a former British diplomat in the Middle East, was assigned to the case due to his ‘specialist knowledge of extremism.’

Jenkins has also been accused of endorsing Islamophobic social media posts, and has penned pieces with titles like ‘For Islamists, Jeremy Corbyn is a Useful Idiot’ for The Telegraph, and ‘There’s Nothing Wrong with Macron’s War on Islamism’ for The Spectator.  

The Council was not informed that extremism was part of the investigation, and no justification was given for the search. 

To our knowledge, there was no evidence of extremism before or after the inspection, and the parallel search is not mentioned in the BVI. 

The order to investigate the Council coincided with a period of intense media scrutiny of Tower Hamlets due to a proliferation of Palestinian flags. Rahman’s initial refusal to take flags down off of Council property and his pro-Palestinian stance was controversial. 

In the wake of the flag controversy, The Jewish Chronicle dubbed Tower Hamlets ‘Little Palestine’ and Tory MP Paul Scully called Tower Hamlets a ‘no-go zone.’ 

The BVI flag scandal is covered in detail in the BVI – about seven hundred words are committed to it – with the repeated conclusion that the Council should have responded more quickly. It is a notably detailed part of the investigation.

The population of Tower Hamlets has the largest proportion of Muslims in the UK and has frequently been a target of discrimination as a result. 

Was the hunt for extremism part of an Islamophobic narrative triggered by discomfort over Rahman’s pro-Palestinian stance? 

And if this isn’t the case, why haven’t we been given the real reasoning behind an investigation that was supposed to foster transparency?

The response so far

In response to the release of the BVI, the Council said they are ‘committed to working with the Government on our continuous journey of improvement.’ 

The story behind the scenes is a little less magnanimous. Before the release of the BVI, it emerged in an exclusive by The Municipal Journal that the Council had attempted to halt the publication of the report, and had personally threatened members of the inspection team with legal action. 

Somewhat petulantly, the Council was quick to blame other parties too: ‘The report’s comments concerning culture include reference to rivalries between all parties and political groupings within the council. There is a responsibility on councillors from all parties to address this.’ 

In turn, Tower Hamlets’ Labour Party said: ‘This intervention is a scathing indictment of his leadership and an embarrassment for our borough.’

‘The Aspire Group and Mayor Rahman have ignored every call for responsible leadership, instead creating an environment so dysfunctional that external intervention has become inevitable.’ 

The infighting described several times in the report between Labour and Aspire seems to have only worsened since the BVI’s publication, and it’s unlikely the dust will settle anytime soon. 

With mayoral elections two years away, we can expect Labour to use the report as ammunition until the bitter end, and for Aspire to play the beleaguered victim of false accusations. 

Since his last term in office, it seems Mayor Luftur Rahman has taken some critiques on board, with improvements in management and budgeting. 

Other issues are persistent and unresolved – like excessive delays due to Mayoral micro-management, a lack of meaningful improvements in gender climate, and oversights in community engagement, as in the case of the ongoing Food Hub story. 

It’s also still not clear if Rahman will manage his ambitious anti-austerity budgeting responsibly, or if he is risking bankruptcy for the sake of his legacy. 

Either way, it’s obvious there is plenty of room for improvement. It’s less obvious if the Council’s current atmosphere of distrust will make change possible. 

The BVI has made important strides in addressing the changes needed to make our Council run smoothly, fairly and sustainably. 

Yet by concealing one of their prime motivations – an unjustified hunt for extremism in the largest Muslim-majority borough in the country – it could be said that the inspectors have betrayed their own calls for fairness and transparency. 

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