Obstruction, paranoia, and a public bollocking: Inside the court of Lutfur Rahman
Plus: Heaven shuts, cuts to the cable cars, and a Viking funeral down the Thames for a hamster
Morning — there are some things Lutfur Rahman, the mayor of Tower Hamlets, would rather we didn’t know. Unfortunately for him, a wideranging inspection into how he runs the east London borough has now been published. It’s feeling like a case of deja vu — in the 2010s, Rahman had inspectors knocking at the door before he was eventually expelled from office in 2015. And, once again, this time inspectors have reported back some troubling findings. A look at the inner workings of Rahman’s “parallel council” is after your round-up below.
Plus: Heaven shuts, cuts to the cable cars, and a Viking funeral down the Thames for a hamster.
In case you missed it: on Saturday we published an investigation into the Hackney schools crisis. Another four schools in the borough face closure, as pupil numbers plummet. The council blames demographics — but we’ve been speaking to parents and teachers who think a luxury development is to blame.
What we've spied
🚨 Heaven, one of London's biggest nightclubs, has been closed until further notice after a member of security staff was charged with rape. A 47-year-old bouncer was charged by the Met Police on Wednesday, after a woman was allegedly raped in the vicinity of Heaven on November 1. The club on Embankment has now shut after Westminster council's licensing committee suspended its license for 28 days, following a police request. A spokesperson for the council said: “A full licensing hearing will be held in December where both the police and venue management will have the opportunity to present new evidence". Jeremy Joseph, Heaven's owner, posted to Instagram on Friday: "We are sickened by this allegation but can't comment as its on going criminal investigation. We can only send our thoughts to the alleged victim. Our priority is to put new procedures in place to make sure nothing like this can happen again & gain the confidence of the Council as we move forward".
Related to nightlife safety: a BBC undercover investigation has found that half of London venues visited by reporters weren't implementing the Ask for Angela initiative, which is supposed to be a way for people to discreetly ask for staff's help.
🚠 TfL is cutting the London cable car's opening hours, as it was revealed it’s just seeing just four journeys in each direction in the morning. As detailed in a post by London blogger Diamond Geezer, the Docklands-Greenwich cable car will now open at 8am rather than 7am on weekdays, 9am instead of 7am on Fridays and 9am instead of 8am on Saturdays. The changes will come into force from December 1, according to TfL consultation document, which reveals the cable car only sees four journeys in each direction during its first hour of operation. It's one of our oldies, but last July we got our hands on the cable car's internal finances, which revealed it had finally made a profit from fares after operating costs.
✈️ Sadiq Khan is considering introducing a tourist tax in London. The mayor has told City Hall reporter Noah Vickers that he is "happy to look into" the possibility of an extra charge on tourists when booking hotels in the capital, and that his team would be examining evidence from Manchester and European cities. Manchester became the first city in the UK to introduce a tourist tax in April 2023 — a charge of £1 per room per night, which raised a total of £2.8m in its first year. More from the mayor: Khan has announced £2.3m in funding for youth mentors, in a bid to tackle violence.
🏗️ PLANNING CORNER 🏗️ On Thursday the heritage group Historic England published its latest at-risk building register, which the saw the addition of 26 buildings from across London. Stoke Newington Town Hall, Charlton House in Greenwich and Smith Square Hall in Westminster were all added because Historic England believe they're at risk of neglect, decay or inappropriate development. But 26 buildings were also removed from the register because they've been "saved", such as Abney Park Cemetery in Hackney and St Pancras Old Church in King's Cross. It means there are now 599 sites in London on the register. A map of all of Historic England’s at-risk buildings is viewable here.
Elsewhere in planning: the mayor has warned London will not hit its current affordable housing target without extra funding from the government; it's been revealed some new builds in west and north London are flushing raw sewage into rivers due to construction errors; student accommodation towers have been approved in both Deptford (31-storey) and Canary Wharf (46-storey); and 150 new homes on a former gasworks have been approved in Rotherhithe, despite residents' concerns about contaminated land.
🔍 And finally, we leave you with:
A rave in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel (TikTok)
Pictured: Lime bikers skip red light 84 times in an hour (Times £)
Photos of London street markets in the 70s, 80s and 90s (Guardian)
The longest possible Tube journey (TikTok)
A lawsuit over a £36m 'moth-infested' Notting Hill mansion (Guardian)
The very busy Bussey Building: inside Peckham’s creative mecca (FT £)
Protecting your friends from creeps on a London night out (TikTok)
'London bus crashes are the result of an unsafe model' (FT £)
When pirate DVDs were sold on the streets of London (Reddit)
A 2000-year-old Roman road discovered under Old Kent Road (Standard)
The appalling truth about London's ambulance service (Spectator £)
The otter exhibit at the London Zoo (TikTok)
Where to see Christmas lights in London (Time Out)
Rare Victoria line train terminating at Warren Street announcement (TikTok)
Tube girl core (TikTok)
Inside the court of Lutfur Rahman
When staff at Tower Hamlets council spoke to government inspectors earlier this year, they gave an example to explain their low morale. It was a bollocking they'd received from borough mayor Lutfur Rahman during a public cabinet meeting on January 23, 2023.
Rahman had been leading a discussion on the council's budget plans, and was speaking about the need to improve housing in the East End. “It breaks my heart to see the poverty, the inequality, the unfairness that exists in our borough,” he said. He lamented the reports of overcrowding he'd received from residents. He said he worried Tower Hamlets could see its own version of a recent case in Rochdale, where a two-year-old had been killed by mould in their social housing flat.
Then, with his frustration seemingly boiling over, Rahman opened fire on his council officers:
You know what, I'm sorry, I'm going public today: officers haven't done anything. I'm disappointed with our housing officers. I'm disappointed with those who work in the homelessness section. They need to get their fingers out. They need to work hard and serve the very people who pay their salary. They're not doing enough. Phone calls are made to officers — they don't answer the phones on time. When they answer the phones, they're bloody rude. Some of our officers cannot mistreat our residents in that way. They cannot. Our residents come first, our people come first, we come after, and officers come very after. Because they're getting paid to do a job, but they're not doing a good job.
Rahman concluded the dressing-down with: “I do not want a fatality in our borough because of mould and condensation but I'm worried we're going towards that, because it's not been taken seriously”. He'd later tell inspectors the outburst was an exceptional occurrence and he regretted if any staff felt upset.
Once again, the unusual politics of Tower Hamlets are back in the spotlight, after an official inspection of the council published its findings. Inspectors said they had “serious concerns” about the governance and “toxic” culture of the council, which is run by Rahman and his independent Aspire party. The government is now reportedly sending envoys to oversee how the council implements the inspection's recommendations.
It has the whiff of history repeating itself: Rahman was expelled from office in 2015 when a court found he was guilty of election fraud. The year before, government commissioners had taken over some functions of Tower Hamlets council, after an official report found he'd presided over serious abuses of public money and property. But Rahman mounted a surprise comeback in the 2022 local elections, defeating the incumbent Labour administration and his old foe, John Biggs, with 55% of the vote.
To his supporters, Rahman is a proud socialist who's dedicated to serving the East End's British Bangladeshi community but is targeted by anti-Muslim bigotry. Rahman was originally a Labour councillor, but he was expelled from the party in 2010. He now runs in the same circles as Jeremy Corbyn — the two were in attendance at a meeting in September to discuss setting up a new left-wing party called Collective. Rahman's 2022 manifesto was anti-austerity and pledged to ramp up the building of social housing. One of his flagship policies since entering office has been to offer free school meals to all secondary school pupils in Tower Hamlets, which goes further than Sadiq Khan's policy of free meals for all London primary pupils.
But to critics, Rahman is an egomaniac who wields his personal power ruthlessly. In 2014 he was likened to a “medieval monarch” by Ed Pickles, the then Conservative communities secretary who ordered central government to intervene in Tower Hamlets. Peter Golds, today the only Conservative councillor in the borough, once said Rahman “has for many years used allegations of racism to avoid scrutiny”. While in office in the early 2010s, Rahman was alleged to have directed public cash to favoured groups.
There's been lots of scrutiny of what the king of the East End’s court looks like in 2024 though, courtesy of the inspectors' latest report. It describes Rahman's office as a “parallel council” where decision-making is concentrated in an inner circle, cutting out the official Tower Hamlets bureaucracy. The inspectors paint a picture of a London town hall marred in at best “confusion” and at worst “cronyism” and “abuse”.
But the inspectors firstly say their job wasn't easy. They arrived at Tower Hamlets on February 2024, and spent the next four months interviewing staff and flicking through files. But they write: “At times we have found the council very slow in providing documents and arranging interviews. In some cases this could be seen to amount to a reluctance to share, cumbersome, or even active obstruction.”
Another difficulty was how paranoid some staff were about the inspection. The inspectors report that some didn't want to be interviewed in the council's building, for fear of it becoming known to leadership that they'd talked. Others expressed concern that their e-mails were being tracked. Almost all asked for assurance from the inspectors that they wouldn't be identified in the final report. “Even with the assurances provided by the inspection team, many staff expressed a deal of concern about their engagement with us.”
When staff did eventually talk, they had plenty to say. There gave a very physical example of what Rahman's return to power felt like: staff were turfed out of a room they had been using for breaks to give the mayor and his advisers more office space.
It's the size of Rahman's office that partly makes it an outlier. Inspectors said they examined three other mayoral offices in London, and found one had four members of staff, another eight and another 17. Rahman, by contrast, has a team of 37. Their roles range from diary manager to resident caseworker to policy advisor. Some are also consultants — the inspectors found Rahman has spent £1.1m on "agency workers" in his office in his first two and half years in power. An increasing reliance on consultants was identified across the wider council — inspectors said there was a "lack of grip" on the cost of it all.
As to the hiring process, the inspectors are blunt: "We do not believe that the council has always made officer appointments on the basis of merit in the past two years". Instead, they identify a "culture of patronage", with staff considering some appointments "inappropriate". This included jobs for friends and family, rather than necessarily the best candidate for the role. There was a feeling these appointees would be treated more favourably by leadership, leading to a lack of trust amongst other staff.
Two further issues were raised with the inspectors, which again inspectors said was harming trust: women at the council reporting they didn't feel respected, and the use of non-English languages in meetings. On the former, none of Rahman's cabinet members were women at the time of the inspection. Female councillors from both Rahman's Aspire party and the opposition Labour party told inspectors they were treated poorly at council meetings, citing a specific meeting this February where "poor behaviour in the public gallery by the largely male attendees" went unchecked. The inspectors also found that a number of senior women had left the council in a short period, while other staff said they had concerns "about the career progression of female officers of colour or who wear the hijab".
As for the use of language, the inspectors write:
We have heard in interviews and through free-text responses to the staff survey about the use of community languages in work meetings, variously between councillors, between officers, and between councillors and officers. Participants in these meetings who are not fluent speakers of community languages are uncomfortable with this, and some have been left with the impression that instructions were being given that not everyone in the room understood. This is not conducive to a culture of trust and does not promote transparency.
There’s no doubt the findings of the report provide much ammo to Rahman's detractors. “East London is a hotbed of political incompetence,” is how Prospect Magazine headlined its take.
Reacting to the inspection, a spokesperson for Tower Hamlets council said:
Tower Hamlets Council is committed to working with the Government on our continuous journey of improvement. We welcome the Government’s decision to appoint an envoy rather than send in commissioners, with a plan to work together with us on a support package, with the council retaining all its powers.
We look forward to working with the Ministerial envoy to build on the good Peer Review we received from the Local Government Association and an improved Investors in People inspection silver rating.
"Female councillors from both Rahman's Aspire party"
Last I looked there were NO female councillors in Aspire. Unless some have defected from Labour I expect that's still the case.