In this frank interview, Steve Reed the Leader of Lambeth Council, talks about new community developments, solving local youth crime, charity bike rides, where our money is spent and helps us to understand local politics. Did you know there’s been a 2 year Council Tax freeze? If you didn’t, you do now. It is essential reading for anyone that lives in Clapham or the wider Lambeth borough.

LoveClapham is becoming a frequent visitor of Lambeth Council HQ in Brixton Townhall. We last visited to interview the current Mayor of Lambeth and this time, waiting in reception, not only did we notice the same carpet our parents used to have, we also noticed the building was abuzz with activity as people were getting help with housing and other issues.

We may have been hours away from seeing Lady Gaga at Brixton Academy, but actually our interview with Steve Reed was all the more interesting because the topics directly touch our lives every day. For instance, after the below interview, Steve told us about plans for a highly likely third extension to the Northern Line from Kennington to Battersea. He then explained that extending the Victoria line beyond Brixton was physically possible, but totally impractical because the line is overcrowded in Central London.

Who knew?! We certainly didn’t and that’s why LoveClapham is becoming marginally obsessed with talking to our local Council. All the answers to questions we’ve had for years were given to us in less than 30 minutes. Kudos to Steve and his team for their openness. It’s certainly making us appreciate Lambeth Council’s efforts that little bit more than we did already.

Steve, first things first, you recently cycled from London to Brighton for charity – was it painful?!

Steve Reed

It was a lot better than I thought it would be. I was slightly set-up to do this by Christopher [the current Mayor of Lambeth] who got me after I’d had a few drinks, asked if I wanted to do it and I said “yes”. The next day he’d press released it! So I had very little option.

I did it for the British Heart Foundation and I was a bit worried that I’d need their services because I haven’t cycled for that long for many years, although I used to cycle a lot when I was younger. It was actually fantastic.

I bought a pair of padded shorts to stop the chaffing but I didn’t get any side effects the next day, I just thought the whole thing was fantastically enjoyable. There were stops along the way, there were some country lanes en route with little villages and then there were places for coffee and cakes to wait for other people to catch-up. I’d definitely do it again.

Secondly, and some would say more importantly, what do you do as Leader of Lambeth Council?

[laughs] That’s such a hard question because it’s so varied, not one day feels like another. The Council runs over 600 different services, it has a budget of around £1.3 billion and 8,000 employees. We do have a Chief Executive who runs it and manages it. I suppose the key to my job as Leader of the Council, is to work with my Council colleagues to set the priorities and strategies that we want the Council to achieve and then make sure it delivers them. We get the priorities and strategies from the public, the residents who vote in elections.

Big job! Can you give some examples of things you’ve done?

Labour was elected in 2006, taking over from a Tory / Lib Dem coalition and on the manifesto that had a number of priorities in it. Among them was tackling crime, improving life chances for young people and then tackling poverty to make the borough fairer – they were three of the priorities. We pursued those and put resources into tackling them, but things change.

The manifesto was written in 2005, the election was 2006 and now we’re in 2009. Apart from anything else, there’s been the biggest global recession in a century, so there are other things we have to tackle now. Such as big increases in demand for public services because people can’t afford to go private or they’ve lost their jobs, people who need help with their incomes – jobs in particular, keeping jobs, getting back into work, it’s much more important.

What’s being done about youth crime in the area?

When we were elected we already knew things had to be done to improve youth services and tackle youth crime, but straight away we had a spate of homicides and killings with teenagers being shot, and Lambeth was in the middle of the problem. So we had to take action.

The options were to point to the Government and police and say “it’s your problem”, or work with our community to find a solution. The tougher thing would be to work with the community, but we did it. Working for a year to understand what had caused the problem, we came up with the country’s first comprehensive local strategy, how to deliver the strategy and how to tackle the problem.

It was very wide ranging, fully involving the Council’s partners and the community. It was actually the country’s first comprehensive local programme for tackling violent youth crime, cutting the number of homicides by 50% in one year and giving us a 13% reduction in youth crime over the last 12 months. It’s made quite a big impact. Knowing the issues that residents care about is key, making sure the council is prioritising them and then pushing resources and talent in the right direction to make that change happen.

Steve has worked with the community to make positive, long-term changes to protecting the community

What else did you have to change?

Like any organisation, getting the money right is key and when we were elected we had millions of pounds of overspend with nothing in the bank. For an organisation with the budget we have, it was catastrophic. We have managed to deliver £35 million in efficiency savings in the last three years and took the reserves to the level that our financial auditor advised so that we have a financial safety net.

This has allowed us to do things like the two year Council Tax freeze to help people through the recession without cutting any frontline services – many other Councils have frozen tax but cut services – but we’ve not only protected services, we were able to have the freeze and invest in new services at the same time. We’ve got a lot of money going into new services, such as lunch clubs for pensioners to tackle isolation, one of the great fears older people have, as well as spending more on youth services and improving roads and pavements.

Speaking of Council Tax, each month we pay it, and you’ve explained where some of it goes, but what does the rest go toward?

People often think that Council Tax pays for everything the Council does, and it doesn’t. It’s about a fifth of our total revenue, the other four fifths come from other places and the vast majority of that comes from the Government as a direct grant to the Council. Usually, it’s ring fenced for specific things such as schools.

The single biggest element is education with 92 schools in Lambeth, which adds up to an awful lot of kids that need to be educated and an awful lot of teachers whose pay needs to be in their bank account every month. The rest of it goes to different services like housing, keeping the streets clean, collecting waste, running the parks and libraries, and community safety where council services back up the police.

Housing is  a very big area for Lambeth. We spend just short of £2 million a week improving Council housing because one third of people in the borough live in council-owned homes. The quality of where they live in some cases is dire. 10,000 of our homes had no heating, aren’t weather proof, have rotting windows and we have to put a lot of money into improving that.

We want to make sure everyone lives in a decent, well kept area. For instance in the last two years all of the lampposts have been replaced with new ones that are brighter, keeping the streets better lit at night helps people feel safer.

We’ve doubled the amount of money that goes into fixing roads and pavements, so people may have noticed that many road surfaces are better than they were – although I know there’s still a lot more to do. There’s a safety element to that too, we don’t want people to get hurt after falling over thanks to uneven pavements. A lot of council money also goes on pensions because we have a lot of former staff who are entitled to their pensions.

As a result of all of these initiatives you’ve become the fastest improving Council in the country…

Well, when you’re at the bottom the only way is up! Nevertheless the administration has helped make the improvements which is gratifying and shows that we must be doing something right.

It’s very easy when you talk about how fast the council’s improving to come across as complacent, but we’re not. I’m a resident of Lambeth and so is every Councillor. We know the things that are wrong and there are big areas that need to be improved further. However, the fact we’ve got so much of it going in the right direction has given the whole organisation confidence that it can be a high performing Council and that’s what we want Lambeth to be.

Before this interview you mentioned that your background is in publishing, how did you end up working for Lambeth Council?

I’ve always been interested in politics, I just wasn’t very active. I’ve been working for the Labour party since the Tories were still in Government and originally when I moved to Lambeth I was living in Clapham. I moved to Brixton, because I couldn’t afford Clapham, to buy a flat up on Brixton Hill.

I got involved in the General Election in 1997 when Tony Blair was first elected and I was asked to be the election organiser for the area. That went very well and after winning the election, some people said there were vacancies on the Council and asked if I was interested in standing. I’d always thought the Council was rubbish, which it was, and my only experience of it had been pretty negative on the whole. It sounded like an interesting thing to do, I didn’t fully understand what it involved but I liked the idea of representing people and campaigning to make life better. I stood for the Labour Party in Brixton Hill, got elected, and it all went from there.

Like most Councillors, when I was first elected I had a fulltime job, so I had to fit my council duties in the weekend and evenings. Labour lost the election in 2002 having won it in 1998, and I was elected leader of the opposition. That meant putting a strategy together to hold the Tory – Lib Dem administration to account and getting people to understand what had gone wrong. I wanted my party to engage with the community anymore, we’d become too disengaged, so we wanted to get people to reconnect , get some new blood in there, some new people with strong community backgrounds.

In my view, the Tory-Lib Dem council went wrong by putting Council Tax up by nearly 40%, there was a £3 million fraud scandal that was the single biggest housing fraud scandal in British history. There were a lot of things for us to hold them to account for!  We won the election again in 2006 and as the Labour leader, I became leader of this Council. Once that happened it was clear I couldn’t keep my other job going at the same time.  Getting to run your local council is not an opportunity that comes along often in your life. So, I gave up publishing to focus on this and, although there are still big challenges, it’s gone pretty well… but we’ll see next year in the elections whether people agree with me or not!

Ok, handing over to LoveClapham readers. Lots of people want to know what’s happening with the leisure centre on Clapham High Street…

That’s a really interesting one because one of the things we did when we came in was to change the plans that the Council had. They wanted to knock down the existing leisure centre and build a new one on Clapham High Street but they weren’t guaranteeing a pool. In fact, they were going to sell off certain assets like the leisure centre and the library in Clapham to recycle the money into other parts of the borough.

Whereas our proposition was to rebuild the leisure centre with a pool and then ring fence all of Clapham’s assets so that anything that is sold off the money would stay in Clapham. This allowed us to keep the library which will be used as a community art centre. We’re rebuilding the leisure centre on Clapham Manor Street rather than on Clapham High Street and the old Mary Seacole House – the old ugly office block – is going to become a library amongst other things. It will also have a health centre and a public performance space with the possibility to have theatre in Clapham for the first time in decades.

The funky designs for the new Clapham One library

After we put all of those plans together, we identified a partner developer called Cathedral, and then the recession hit! A lot of  the planned  development was funded by Council money but also we were going to build some flats on Clapham High Street and above the leisure centre. Those were going to be sold, with the money being used to help pay for the new public facilities. With the credit crunch and the housing market freeze, suddenly no one’s buying homes because no one can get a mortgage and that’s a big problem because it’s cut the money we need to pay for the new developments.

There’s a new Government body called the Homes and Community Agency. I’m on the board of it in London and it has several billion to spend, it’s there to rescue schemes like this one in Clapham.  The Agency has now agreed a grant that will buy the homes that were meant to be sold. They will be rented out at a level slightly below the market rent, but higher than Council rents would be, until the market recovers. Then, as people move out, we’ll sell them on the open market and we can pay back the money.  The good thing is it means the Future Clapham proposals will go ahead.

I’m really pleased that people in Clapham can look forward to a new community leisure centre with a new pool, a community art centre and that fantastic new library that looks a bit like the Guggenheim in New York! It’s good news for Clapham.

Agreed. It will be fantastic…

What I’d like to do is knock down that hideous tower block as soon as possible so people can see that something’s going to happen! I can imagine many people saying we’ve been talking about it for ages, but people want to see it happen.

Do you publish your expenses?

[laughs] Yes! They’re online. Mine get published in the local paper every year and in the last ten years I’ve claimed one train journey to Manchester for a conference. Councillor expenses aren’t like MP expenses. I haven’t claimed any duck houses or anything like that.  We’re completely open and always have been.

OK, you’re in the clear! In terms of how different Councils operate, such as for cross border territories, how does it work?

Lambeth is like a long, thin slice of London and actually the borders cut through some natural communities. Clapham gets it a bit, because the border goes through Clapham Common, but it’s actually more pronounced in areas like Herne Hill and Camberwell where it goes through the middle of town centres.

We work with Councils on the other side and the residents of affected areas to try and address the needs of people on both sides of the border. It’s important because for education, we don’t educate everyone’s children in Lambeth. For people near the edge who have a school over the border they like, that’s where they want their child to go.

There are ways to cooperate, for instance if people in Wandsworth want to come and use Clapham’s leisure facilities, there’s nothing to stop them doing that. We have a reciprocal deal with Clapham Common and Tooting Common which are both divided by the border. We manage the whole of Clapham Common including the Wandsworth bit, and Wandsworth manage Tooting Common including the Lambeth bit, so it works both ways.

Clapham Manor Primary School was reported to be over budget, are you able to comment on that?

I don’t know the details, but I know that ever since I was first elected Clapham Manor has wanted to extend into the car park next door. There was a local campaign for all of that time, fighting for the Council to buy that land for the school. It’s a wonderful school, loads of people want to send their kids there but it was getting cramped. The seller had the power in the negotiations, so we paid quite a lot of money for it, but I think it was worth it to allow the school to expand.

Clapham Manor Primary School's new wing

Christopher Wellbelove asks…

He sent one in?! [laughs]

Yep! He asks if he can be Mayor of Lambeth forever and wonders how you feel that his office is better than yours?

[laughs] I’ve told him that before he can ask that, he has to win his seat on the Council again next year! And as to him having a better office than mine, I think the right answer is that it’s about what comes out of the office, not what it looks like!

Huge thanks to Steve Reed for his time and for such a frank and informative interview. It’s great to hear from the Council directly about all of these topics and even better to find that everyone is so approachable. There are certainly exciting things for Clapham residents to look forward to in the near future.

Find out more about Lambeth Council on their website and be sure to check out Steve’s own website.