“I will say it straight. Britain has been on the wrong path for a long time. Deindustrialisation. Deregulation. Privatisation. Austerity. Brexit.” So said Andy Burnham in his Labour conference speech in September. He added that “I would love to go quicker. But I have to be honest about what the country can afford. I will stick to our fiscal rules to get borrowing and debt down.” UK government debt has just hit £3 trillion for the first time.

All this is the backdrop for continued austerity in local government. In September, Lambeth Council launched its ‘Services worth fighting for’ campaign, which aims to get resident buy-in for its campaign against ongoing cuts to council budgets, and to head off the possibility that Labour will blame the new administration for financial failings they left it with.

The council launched a consultation to get resident views on how to push back against this ongoing austerity, how people have been affected by the cuts, and how to increase council revenue and save money.

On October 15, a launch meeting was held at the town hall for the Services Worth Fighting For campaign. Michael Chessum, Green Cabinet Member for Economy, Cost of Living and Empowered Communities, said that the event was:

“the first time in decades that Lambeth has opened its doors to the community and tried to build a campaign to fight austerity. About 150 people attended the event and they came from trade unions, from local campaigns, they were local service providers, charities. Members of the public who have had experience of the cuts in recent years and wanted to organise something to oppose it.”

“The point of the event was to bring together a coalition of people who could form a genuinely community-led grassroots campaign against austerity, both here in Lambeth and as part of a nationwide campaign to push central government to restore funding. So while the meeting heard from myself and Zviko [Chihoro], the finance lead, it was really about giving over the floor to everybody in the room to come together and organise.”

Chessum added that the council is trying to break down barriers between the state and the community, to give people agency and involve them in mobilising and empowering together against austerity. Those who attended the event were able to sign up to a steering group to lead the campaign, with the next event being a demonstration on 27th October on the eve of Burnham’s first budget.

“Andy Burnham has promised an end to austerity, but for Lambeth and for many other councils, austerity is very real indeed”, Chessum says. As a result of the previous administration’s financial incompetence, Lambeth has over £1.1 billion of debt, and a budget black hole which regulators say will require a further £146 million of cuts over the next three years.

“As an administration, we will never accept cuts as inevitable, and we see one of our central jobs as being honest with the community we were elected to represent, and fighting alongside them”, Chessum says, adding that “one of the things that struck me most hearing the contributions from the floor was just how much austerity has profoundly damaged public trust and patience with the Council. And one of our main jobs as administration is clearly to rebuild that relationship, which has been quite badly damaged by many years of cuts, outsourcing, gentrification and a neoliberal approach to running the state that claims it is technocratic but in fact has been delivering a transparent and damaging ideological agenda.”

Green Cabinet member for Finance, Zviko Chihoro, presented the dire position that the council is in at an event for members on Tuesday 20th October. In case you didn’t know, I am a Green member, and I think it’s important to be transparent about that. This obviously affects the position I report from, though I will criticise the Green administration if I feel they deserve it. It also means that Labour councillors don’t respond to my requests for comment, which is a shame, because I do this reporting as a journalist, not a Green member.

”If we have a look at Lambeth’s finances in four specific figures,” Chihoro said, “right now in the Q2 report we released, we were at an overspend of £9.3 million, which is an issue but a massive improvement on what previous administrations have done in Lambeth.” Lambeth has borrowed £156 million from the government in Exceptional Financial Support (EFS), which will have to be paid back, and of which £40 million went into the Housing Revenue Account, which had been run down to only £5 million by the previous administration. The rest has been used to balance the books from previous years in which the council overspent.

The problem Lambeth now has to deal with is that there is a big gap in the Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) of £146.4 million, of which about £53 million of savings has been identified, leaving a £93.2 million gap in the budget for the next few years. The £53 million represents cuts identified previously by Labour, and without these cuts, the black hole is £146.4 million over 3 years.

As I have written about previously, the cost of Temporary Accommodation (over £100m a year), and adult social care have gone up considerably in recent years. There also seem to have been weak financial controls within the council, with Chihoro revealing: “Right now within the council there’s a spending limit of £5,000, because previously people would have been spending the money and then putting a Purchasing Order after, so people were doing what they wanted in terms of spending money and there was no control, and that’s something we’ve changed.”

Chihoro said that the previous administration “would put cuts in their MTFS that were undeliverable”, effectively kicking the can down the road and resulting in the £1.13 billion of debt the council’s finances are now burdened with. Looking at the council’s overspend, Chihoro said there was about £60.5 million overspend in 2024/25, £15.9 million in 2025/26, and projected £9.3 million this year. Part of this reduction in overspend is because of the Exceptional Financial Support from government, and comes with requirements to pay it back such as the disposal of assets held by the council.

Lambeth is currently under ‘Statutory Recommendations’ from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). This means there are legal recommendations from central government about how the council improves its finances, such as savings deliveries and asset disposals. The new Green-led administration has announced an independent financial review, the first phase of which has been completed and is going to the Audit and Risk Committee this week.

This report can be found in the supplementary agenda for the Audit and Risk Committee, which says: “Grant Thornton were appointed to undertake an independent assurance review of Lambeth Council’s compliance with the CIPFA FM Code [Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy Financial Management Code]... The review was commissioned in August 2026 with the assurance review work being undertaken throughout September/October 2026.”

The review found that 9 standards are “compliant, with areas for improvement” and 8 are “at risk of non-compliance”. These include a lack of value for money, with contract management and purchase order discipline being weak, savings and income assumptions unreliable, and some savings apparently being counted twice.

The Audit and Risk committee report says that funding has fallen more than 28% in real terms since 2010, which the report equates to about £116m a year less to spend. The council says it is “one of the more significant losers” under the new Fair Funding Formula and faces a funding cliff-edge after 2028/29.

The MHCLG is also reviewing Lambeth’s finances as part of a statutory review. The outcome of this review has four possibilities. They can continue to monitor the council, they can give a ‘best value notice’, instructing the council to improve its position under the risk of further action, they can recommend an improvement panel, where external experts are brought in to monitor savings and cuts, or they can bring commissioners in to run the council if they believe the new administration is not committed to financial improvement.

All this looks like further austerity being imposed on Lambeth by central government, and may remind some older Lambeth residents of what happened in the 1980s, when Lambeth Council’s radical left administration under Ted Knight refused to make cuts forced on them by Thatcher’s government. To quote Knight’s Wikipedia page:

“When the Conservative Government took powers through the Rates Act 1984 to limit the budgets of local councils, several left-wing Labour councils organised a rate-capping rebellion in which they refused to set a budget. All the councils eventually backed down except Liverpool City Council and Lambeth. The district auditor found that the council had lost interest on tax payments as a result, which was held to be due to the “wilful misconduct” of Knight and 31 other councillors. Each was required to repay the amount of lost interest in a surcharge and banned from holding office for five years from 1986. The Labour Party’s leader, Neil Kinnock, blamed local leaders like Knight and Linda Bellos from Lambeth, for bringing the Labour Party into disrepute.”

Although Lambeth councillors can no longer be held legally responsible for the financial situation of the council as Knight and his fellow councillors were in 1986, central government still has the power to come in and take control away from the Green administration if they do not find the savings that central government wants them to implement.

Hence the campaign to push back against austerity led by Michael Chessum, who says that “The number one thing we need to do is have a fight with central government to win more funding”, as he encouraged people to attend a demonstration against austerity on the 27th at Victoria Embankment.

“Those numbers are stark”, Chihoro says, and the council needs to spend its capital in a way that increases revenue and protects residents. “In order for us to stay in power, we need to pass a budget in March,” Chihoro adds. “Because of the makeup of the council, we don’t have the votes as the Green Party ourselves to pass this budget. We are going to need the votes of either the other parties abstaining or voting for our budget. There are three possible situations that could happen. Our budget passes because the Liberal Democrats abstain, and we vote for it, Labour and the Lib Dems pass their own alternative budget, or our budget gets voted down, alternative budgets get voted down, which means the council is in a situation where commissioners are brought in.”

This means the Greens have to work with other parties, and have set up a cross-party working group to work through proposals for the March budget. The working group meets fortnightly, and Chihoro says that the council will be trying to communicate the results of its financial review now to the public to help people understand the position it finds itself in, and to have something to measure progress against at the end of the current term.

From December-February, Chihoro says that there will be more information about funding from central government, and potential council tax rises, and on 24 February, the cabinet will recommend the budget to council, and full council will set the budget on 4 March.

Clearly the previous administration has been deeply financially incompetent in its spending, and the harsh reality is that it is left up to the new administration to pick up the pieces and return financial stability to a council that is heavily indebted. The Green administration will undoubtedly have to make some tough choices, but it needs to bring the public along with what it is doing and ensure that it can try to deliver on some of its commitments over the next few years, particularly in terms of building more social housing to alleviate the huge financial burden of Temporary Accommodation. I’m hoping to talk to Cabinet member for Housing Pete Elliot about that soon, and will bring you news of Lambeth’s housing plans when I am able.

You may have noticed that fly-tipping is quite a serious problem in Lambeth these days. Although the council has charged a fee for bulky waste collection for over a decade, the problem seems to have got worse. In 2024, the council brought in increased charges for littering and fly-tipping, but this has not deterred people from dumping rubbish, as there is a general lack of enforcement.

In 2021, outsourcing firm Serco was brought in to manage Lambeth’s waste contract, in a deal worth an initial £118.7 million for the first 6 years. It now seems that this contract will not be extended when it expires in 2027. This was challenged at the time by the Green Party, who are now running the council. The contract was previously held by Veolia.

Lambeth’s financial records show that Serco has been awarded £94,138,579.31 in contracts since 2019. An FoI request in March 2025 asked Lambeth to reveal the value of its current contracts with Serco. Lambeth replied listing two contracts:

However, like Veolia before them, Serco is failing to meet the terms of its contract, and some resident groups like the Palace Road Estate Residents Association (PRERA) have lodged complaints, with PRERA saying:

“PRERA have logged a Stage 2 complaint against Serco with Lambeth for failure to deliver as per their contract. In particular we have highlighted the lack of any weeding of hard surfaces in the last year and the awful state of the bins. This is an ongoing borough wide issue – It is an open secret that Serco and failing to deliver on their contract and not responding to complaints. We are in contact with Lambeth Council, our Local Councillors, and are speaking to fellow Lambeth Residents Association representatives in the hope of joining forces in putting pressure on Lambeth and Serco.”

In 2024, the Greens petitioned Lambeth to review the contract with Serco, saying that: “we asked the council to:

• review the contract performance of Serco specifically in relation to the cleanliness of Streatham according to the expectations and perceptions of the community,

• devote the necessary resources to address environmental vandalism in Streatham hotspots,

• demand Serco pay greater attention to the cleanliness of Streatham Town centre with enforced daily clean ups and regular jet washing.”

The Council’s response claimed that “Over the past couple of months, we have seen a marked improvement in Serco’s performance with the number of missed refuse collections returning to an acceptable standard of 40 per 100,000… Contractually Serco has 72 hours to remove fly-tipped waste when a complaint is received. To fulfil this requirement Serco were responding to the complaints in an attempt to achieve the SLA. However when we reviewed this approach, we found it to be inefficient. Serco have [sic] now moved to the proactive removal of fly-tips where they check each road twice a week and remove any fly-tips identified. As a result we are starting to see the number of reported fly-tips drop.”

Despite these assurances, it’s clear that the problem is not improving. The council is now looking at raising the fixed penalty for fly-tipping to the legal maximum of £5,000. However, without enforcement capacity, it’s hard to see this making much difference. This week’s council committee meeting therefore sees a motion from the Liberal Democrats which seeks to tackle persistent fly-tipping in the borough ahead of the main waste contract with Serco expiring on 30 September 2027. The motion notes that “Poor waste collection, especially fly-tipping, is frequently cited by Lambeth residents as having a significant psychological and emotional impact, with people feeling neglected and uncomfortable in their own neighbourhoods.”

The motion also reveals that while fly-tipping enforcement is weak, “In March 2026 Officers reported 11,132 incidents of fly-tipping in 2024/25. 4,232 were investigated and 740 enforcement notices issued. On 1 September 2026 the maximum permitted fixed penalty for fly-tipping was increased to £5,000 by law, five times the amount charged by Lambeth. A recent FOI response indicated that around 25% of Lambeth bulky waste collection bookings are not fulfilled on the agreed date. All three parties represented in the Council made a manifesto pledge to introduce community mega-skips as one way to reduce fly-tipping.”

Because all three main parties had a similar manifesto pledge to introduce community mega skips, it’s likely this will happen. The Lib Dem motion notes that “Wandsworth holds mega-skip days in seven locations twice a month, varying locations over time. They report this has cut fly-tipping by 20%. Southwark has announced a pilot scheme, and there are schemes in other London boroughs.”

The motion also notes that Serco is not devoting enough resources to Lambeth: “There are only two grab vehicles to empty underground waste storage units on estates, both of which were unavailable from late July to early August. This led to bagged domestic and food waste banking up during hot weather. By late August only one vehicle was back in service. Vehicle shortage has led to fly-tipping collections in some areas being reduced from three days a week to one.”

This chimes with my own experience during the May elections when I was canvassing on Myatt’s Fields North estate, the history of which I wrote about here. Myatt’s Fields North has underground waste bins which are often out of order because they become so full up that you cannot put any more waste in them. It seems that the cause of this is Serco simply not bothering to collect rubbish on time.

The number of waste bins on the street has also declined. There are currently 619 litter bins on public highways in the borough, down 28% from 860 in 2019. The Lib Dem motion resolves to not renew the Serco contract, but instead undertake “A comprehensive review of the waste contract to inform a new tender, involving Councillors from each Group as well as Officers, which will recommend a new Service Level Agreement, Key Performance Indicators and effective contractual remedies for poor performance.”

I’ve been doing some litterpicking in my spare time around my local area, and can attest to how much rubbish and fly-tipping there is. One recurring problem is nitrous oxide canisters, which London Centric reported on this week, as people doing nitrous and then driving in cars are becoming a big problem, even leading to deaths. If nitrous canisters get put in regular waste bins and crushed in waste disposal trucks, they can even explode. I know that the depot at Myatt’s Fields Park accepts these canisters which are then collected by the police, but I would imagine that most people have no idea what to do with them, so they regularly get left on the street, as you can see in my video below.

It’s likely that the Green Party will want to consider taking the waste contract back in-house. During the election I talked to one Serco waste disposal employee who had stopped his truck near Myatt’s Fields Park, and asked him what it was like working for Serco. He told me that Serco does not pay the living wage, unlike Lewisham where he had previously worked for an in-house service that did pay the living wage. As a consequence, he told me that the service was worse in Lambeth, because workers did not feel they were paid enough to do a good job. I regularly see rubbish strewn across streets where Serco trucks have just come to collect waste.

The Green Party wants to add to this motion the fact that: “Lambeth has announced a community mega-skip trial running from November 2026 to January 2027. The trial will test demand, operational requirements, costs and impact on fly-tipping. The evaluation of the trial will be shared with all political Groups once completed.” The Labour group, meanwhile, wants to add a paragraph noting that: “In July this year the Labour Government announced greater powers for Councils to crack down on fly-tipping and littering.”

The committee report contains the annual report of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee, which notes that in a meeting in March 2026, “the Director for Public Realm and Safety advised the Committee that Lambeth was looking at trialling a number of new initiatives which may involve naming individuals who had been convicted for flytipping and rewarding members of the public who had contributed evidence to successful prosecutions.” There is as yet no word on whether the new council plans to implement any fly-tipping reporting system. Personally, I use fixmystreet.com to report fly-tipping to the council quite regularly, and it usually does result in action being taken.

Serco has a troubling record of fraud and incompetence. In 2019, Serco subsidiary Serco Geografix admitted to three counts of fraud and two of false accounting regarding electronic monitoring contracts with the UK Ministry of Justice. The company charged the government for tracking criminals who were dead, back in prison, or outside the country. The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) handed down a Deferred Prosecution Agreement and a £19.2 million fine.

In 2023, The Guardian reported that “Serco has been handed more than £56m in fines since 2010, including for defrauding the government, but has since won billions of pounds in government contracts as one of its top five biggest outsourcing partners, including to run the government’s much-criticised track and trace programme during the pandemic and to manage asylum seeker accommodation.”

Also in 2023, the Local Government Ombudsman also ruled against Serco and Lambeth after a crew broke a resident’s bin and wrongfully charged her for a replacement. Meanwhile in Wandsworth, FOI data revealed that Serco’s missed bin collection rates in the borough ran nearly three times higher than the council’s performance target, alongside persistent complaints about service inconsistency.

In 2022, Serco apologised for its poor performance running Basingstoke Council’s waste collection after it faced heavy criticism for severe staff shortages, missed recycling rounds, and paused garden-waste collections. And in 2021, Bexley decided to strip Serco of its local contract, with local leadership citing poor monitoring, under-recruitment, and a preference for bringing services back under municipal control.

Jane Lethbridge, Director of Public Services International Research Unit (PSIRU) at the University of Greenwich, wrote in The Conversation in 2013 that Serco should beware, as there are alternatives to outsourcing, yet here we are 13 years later and little has changed. She argued that “Serco bids for contracts which the public sector wants to deliver more cheaply and so it is not really any surprise to see that there are some problems with its services. Often, cutting corners requires a drop in quality, and Serco’s entire business model is based providing cost savings.”

Yet this gets to the heart of why councils outsource these services. Councillors and officers feel they are obliged to get the best value for money on these services, and that often means choosing cheaper outsourced services which reduces cost in the short term, but means the quality of the service falls, and leads the council to replace the service with yet another outsourced company, who promptly hire all the same staff who were working for the last company.

When I talked to the Serco employee I met in the street earlier this year, he told me that he commutes into London from Kent every day, as his wages don’t allow him to live in London. Paying the lowest cost for waste collection may look financially prudent in the short term, especially with Lambeth’s finances in the state they currently are, but in the long term there are other costs to the council and its workforce from all the corners being cut. The question now is whether the new Green-led council has the appetite and the ability to provide a better waste collection service in house.

Green councillors moved towards setting out a new direction for housing in the borough at the Housing Scrutiny sub-committee on 30 September.

Plans for bringing some housing repairs back in house, a programme of estate works and the cancellation of Lambeth Labour’s previous estate ‘regeneration’ were discussed, while Labour criticised the delay in bringing concrete plans before the council.

Tracey Gregory and Antony Wynn from the Lambeth Homeowners Association and Simon Morrow from The People’s Audit group criticised the history of failures in housing repairs and house building which the new administration has inherited.

The sub-committee considered a number of reports from officers, including one looking at the effectiveness of the repairs and maintenance service, and others on leaseholder experience, housing supply and the works programme. There is a major concern about the current performance of Lambeth’s repairs contract with Wates, who have have been given £416,783 of deductions from one of their contracts due to not meeting performance targets.

Commenting on the reports presented to the Council, Tracey Gregory told Investigating Lambeth that, “The Homeownership Service report bears little relation to the actual experience of leaseholders. The Report itself flags high levels of risk of error in the calculation, apportionment or administration of service charges. As leaseholders we can confirm there are multiple errors of this kind. The judge in a recent property First Tier Tribunal case found Lambeth as a landlord is careless and inattentive. Leaseholders were being charged for repairs on the wrong area of ground and charged for a door entry system that didn’t work.”

Antony Wynn asked the Council to provide a full explanation of how charges are made including contractor invoices and who signed them off.

LHA leaseholders “fully support and really welcome the creation of a working group for service improvement proposed by Housing Scrutiny Chair Simon Cordon”, said Gregory. The proposal was also supported by all members of the cross party committee.

LHA committee member Tracey Gregory said, “after years of trying to get Council officers and councillors to work with us constructively to improve services, we look forward to working with cross party members of the new Housing Scrutiny committee on an action plan for change.”

A number of years ago, Gregory and the LHA helped to reveal that Lambeth had been paying off residents and asking them to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements in exchange for discounts on their repairs bill. The BBC reported that Lambeth “paid out nearly £1.6m in building works refunds to these residents, at an average of more than £11,500 per case. Leaseholders have told the BBC how they were refunded after being charged for shoddy work to their homes - and sometimes for work that never took place at all.”

Simon Morrow from the People’s Audit is a chartered surveyor who has been representing leaseholders who have been overcharged by the council. Morrow said he felt “compelled to speak about this agenda item because the report is quite frankly a work of fantasy. It is no exaggeration to say that over the last ten years, tens of millions of pounds have been overpaid to contractors.”. Morrow gave the following examples of mismanagement:

• Paying the incorrect percentage for overheads and profit. For over six years Mears were paid the wrong percentage on their Decent Homes Contract - an overpayment in the order of £8M.

• Payment for non-existent work. There are multiple instances of this - some is just laziness, other instances bore all the hallmarks of fraud. As an example of these overpayments, on one project the contractor was paid for replacing all the gates in the road, none of which were replaced-an overpayment of £40K just on one item.

• Works being grossly overvalued. Even leaseholders as lay people can see this, yet the contractors still get paid.

• Duplication of costs.

• Ignoring contract rates. Some officers think that they can ignore what the contract says and just pay the contractors what they feel like.

• Overmeasurement. On one contract I worked on, the area of scaffolding the contractor was paid for was nearly three times the area of the building.

• Works not being competitively tendered. On several projects less than 10% of the work has been tendered.

• Works being paid for where there is no instruction or evidence that the works have been carried out.

• Quality of work is consistently poor. In one case I had more than 25% of the roofs leaked after the works were carried out when there had been no leaks before. I would suggest that a significant cause of the increased cost of maintenance noted in the report is as a result of having to fix previous poor workmanship.

Morrow says that “there has been no attempt to recover any of these monies from consultants or contractors. The report states that the council is investing in training staff. If officers haven’t learned from their mistakes in the ten years I have been dealing with them, then they never will. I would suggest that the best investment the council could make would be in employing staff who are capable of professionally managing contracts rather than carrying on with the status quo.”

Green Cabinet member for Housing Pete Elliot introduced another report which proposed a significant increase in investment with a wide range of £64-500 million in Lambeth’s housing stock. Labour’s Danny Adilypour responded demanding to know what level of income would be needed for a stable budget while doing this level of capital investment and asked when there would be transparency on the new administration’s plans for estate regeneration.

Watch the segment below for some of the exchange between the Greens and Labour on the cost of major works and whose responsibility the cost is.

Two big estates in Lambeth, Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens, have been under threat of ‘regeneration’ for over a decade, with Lambeth Labour pursuing a plan to knock the original estates down and have them rebuilt with more private units to pay for the cost. The Greens promised to cancel this plan, and seem to be developing alternative plans to increase housing density on the estates without demolishing them. Labour’s line seems to be that cancelling the regeneration will cost more money in repairs in the long term.

Elliot noted that the Council was already spending a large amount on reactive repairs, around £600m on standard housing works from 2014-2018, and that the Council is paying for long term underinvestment from the previous Labour administration. Green Councillor Scott Ainslie added that the need for repairs was due to the fact that Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens had been run down by the previous administration, and that the new council was meeting resistance from officers to its housing plans, though he acknowledged that they were behind schedule in publishing their plans.

At this point, one of the council officers said that they would undertake a condition survey of council properties, but that this would not be done by Lambeth itself, meaning it will be outsourced. Green Councillor Tom Palmer asked the officer if this would be done by Savills, who previously authored reports recommending estate ‘regeneration’. The officer clarified that Savills had not been appointed, but that the council was close to awarding a contract for the work. This seemed to come as news to the councillors present. Scott Ainslie asked if the council needed to be spending money on this, given that the Green group had promised to insource more contracts.

Ainslie then moved on to discussing Housing Supply, where the relevant report states: “The Council is delivering new homes in partnership with the private sector. Given the financial and market challenges facing affordable housing delivery, and high levels of risk of direct delivery, forming strong and effective partnerships is a key pathway to delivery. It is not the only pathway that is being explored with self-delivery of smaller and infill sites under consideration.”

One of the main Green pledges was to bring empty council properties back into use, with a target of 200 by Christmas. According to the council reports: “A weekly voids tracker is being used to monitor performance against the current position (baseline), a monthly Cabinet Member performance report and dashboard also tracks the progress. This work will be supported by resident updates and a wider communications plan.”

Ainslie said the council has been working with officers to review the new homes programme, focusing on Central Hill and Cressingham Gardens, undertaking an options appraisal to assess which schemes are viable. The review also looked at schemes in the New Homes Hexagon and the construct of an arrangement with Vistry, a housebuilder which is currently under pressure after serious financial losses.

Labour’s Danny Adilypour said he was concerned about the limited detail on what the new administration wants to do on housing, and repeated that any announcement on cancelling ‘regeneration’ would impact the Housing Revenue Account. Ainslie argued that it was important for the new administration to take time to review previous work.

Lib Dem Councillor Chris Nicholson asked about the Green group’s stance on the Brixton Central development, which is being built by an Abu Dhabi owned constructor and will see the eviction of businesses and charities from International House. Ainslie said that he had voted against the development, and the Greens were reviewing it.

Although there was quite a lot of political point scoring on the committee, it was quite well chaired by Lib Dem councillor Simon Cordon. Green councillors informed me that when committee allocations were voted on, the Lib Dems and Labour had seemingly worked together to appoint their members as chairs of every committee, stopping the Green group from chairing any of the council committees. I am told that some committees, such as the Planning Committee, are much more fractious and likely to descend into political point scoring than this sub-committee.

Some aspects of the work of committees like this are better than under the previous Council administration. Because there is no overall control of the council, there is better scrutiny happening in these committees. Reports from Council officers are not just nodded through but are properly criticised, while the sub-committee chair Simon Cordon said that he recognised the LHA as a representative resident body (subject to approval by Legal or Cabinet), something that was rejected for years by the previous administration.

At the moment, there is still not much concrete information about decisions that the new administration is making. They have pledged to fill void properties, cancel ‘regeneration’ and stop developments like Brixton Central, but the question is whether they can follow through. Going through the previous administration’s work is taking time, and there seems to be obstruction by officers who have largely been appointed by the previous administration. The council has a long history of incompetence, and turning the ship around is likely to take longer and go more slowly than most would wish for.

In Lambeth’s Cabinet meeting on Wednesday 23rd September, the council heard a report that Lambeth is facing a severe ongoing budget crisis. Green Councillor Zvikomborero Chihoro presented the Q1 2026/27 financial report (April - July 2026), showing that the council has a £9.303 million Q1 overspend driven primarily by temporary accommodation costs for homeless families, children’s social care, and growth/environment revenue shortfalls.

As I’ve recently covered here, there continues to be a high spend on the Dedicated Schools Grant, which is currently showing a £13.4 million overspend in the High Needs Block, due to the increasing volume and complexity of support needed for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND).

Before the May election, Labour had identified cuts of £84 million which it wanted the council to make, and Labour councillors continue to press the Green-led administration to follow through on their planned cuts. These included the Lambeth Country Fair, and further libraries cuts. Taking over the local authority, the Greens promised to end austerity and restore the Lambeth Country Fair, and councillors are now having to find a way to honour election promises while keeping the council financially stable, under threat of the government bringing in commissioners to run the council if it’s seen to be financially incompetent.

The video below is the segment from the Cabinet meeting in which Cllr Chihoro lays out the financial position facing the council.

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The council is also managing £1.13 billion in overall debt and £156 million in Exceptional Financial Support (EFS) borrowing. The council is responding to this by disposing of assets across both the Housing Revenue Account and General Fund to meet mandatory EFS repayment schedules. Emphasising the need for tough choices, Cllr Chihoro stated that “we cannot protect everything and anyone who tells residents otherwise is not being honest with them”. To help mitigate temporary accommodation spend, the administration is working to bring 200 empty council homes back into use by Christmas. Council leader Martin Abrams said the council was conducting an audit of all the empty council homes in the borough.

Labour’s former council leader Claire Holland accused the Green administration of a lack of honesty and transparency, asking them to say whether they were planning council tax rises, and adding “this is not a student union, it is a council chamber, and every tough decision you duck, every time you prioritise populism and ideology over value-driven sensible governance you impact the lives of our residents for the worse and you have a duty to be honest with them.”

It seems Ms Holland may not be taking her party’s drubbing in the recent elections very well.

Libraries under threat

Meanwhile, on 26 July, Laura Swaffield emailed the Save Lambeth Libraries mailing list:

“BAD NEWS

Lambeth libraries are still reeling from the brutal £1m cut (almost a quarter of the entire budget) imposed last year - with no warning, no consultation and (it turned out) no viable ideas on how to make it work. All this came from Directors who are too high up in the top-heavy Lambeth management structure to have any real understanding of how to run libraries.

NOW IT’S SET TO HAPPEN ALL OVER AGAIN.

BUT WORSE.

HOW BAD?

Despite all the pain, the £1m cut - surprise, surprise! - could not be made in full. Around half a million (£c.448k) still has to be “saved” in the current budget, as agreed by Labour before the May local elections. (The new Green administration is not responsible for it, and is seeking ways round.) How? It’s hard to say. But those Directors are moving ahead at pace, so we need to know right away.”

On Wednesday, libraries campaigners staged a protest outside the Town Hall, where I talked to Laura and other campaigners from the borough about the threat to libraries funding. Libraries campaigners are very concerned that the Head of Libraries post is about to be made redundant, “booting out the current head of service, Susanna Barnes, who is exceptionally talented and hard-working”, according to Swaffield. There is a petition for residents to sign opposing the move here.

The Head of Libraries post is due to be replaced with a much broader job role, loading the post with extra responsibilities for running the whole leisure service as well, including all leisure centres, swimming pools, gyms, indoor sports, health and fitness programmes. Swaffield says that libraries and leisure are vastly different posts which each need a properly qualified manager: “Which do you fancy? A gym specialist running your library? A librarian running your leisure centre and pool? A “manager” running both without understanding either one?”

Councillors Abrams and Kane have apparently “come to the end of the road” trying to protect the head of libraries position in the face of opposition by council officers, according to Swaffield. Lambeth’s constitution delegates certain authorities to officers, making it potentially unlawful for the new administration to interfere in this restructuring.

Councillor Kane told Investigating Lambeth that: “In our manifesto we pledged to protect the libraries services from Labour cuts, and we’re doing what we can by removing the planned £498,000 cuts that have been passed on by the previous administration. No cuts are now assigned. We’re keen to create a service that can be sustained and invested in, through the consultation and collaboration of those who know it best, librarians, staff, and the readers themselves rather than defaulting to expensive consultants. We know that libraries are front-lines services, and social and cultural epicentres that our communities desperately need, so despite the incredible financial position we have inherited, we will do everything we can to protect them.”

For the moment, the Greens have been able to kill off the review of libraries which would have led to cuts, but the threat continues as Lambeth is expected to find budget cuts elsewhere. According to Swaffield “Still in place is the other daft “Labour legacy” plan - in essence, to attack the librarians” though a ‘staff-restructure’ that includes making the Head of Libraries redundant.

As well as the ongoing threats to the libraries budget, recent reports have focused on asset disposals to generate income for the council. After the election in May, Lambeth officers were present at a land sale conference in Leeds, touting business opportunities on council land, according to Brixton Buzz. Although the forecast overspend for the last Quarter was £1.676m less than had been previously anticipated at £9.3m, there remains a forecast £19.8m savings delivery gap against a £44.5m savings target.

The cabinet meeting on 23 September adopted Site Allocations Development Plan Document (SADPD) which sets site-specific planning policies for thirteen sites across the borough, including Royal Street SE1, St Thomas’ Hospital, Gabriel’s Wharf, the Tesco site on Acre Lane, land near Kennington Lane, and King’s College Hospital, Denmark Hill, covering housing, employment and mixed-use development. The document has been through two rounds of statutory consultation (Regulation 18 in 2022, Regulation 19 in 2024) and independent examination by the Planning Inspectorate, with public hearings in Feb–March 2025. The Inspector judged the plan sound and legally compliant, and the total cost of preparing the SADPD to date has been £277,581. Once adopted, it carries full statutory weight in planning decisions.

The site allocations are as follows:

Waterloo and South Bank

Site 1: Royal Street SE1 (owned by Guy’s and St Thomas’ Foundation) Currently offices (Becket House, 18,885 sqm) and other institutional uses. Policy requires at least 129 self-contained residential units replacing the existing amount, plus office floorspace (~30% lab-enabled, linked to the health/life-sciences cluster), ground-floor flexible/cultural space. Affordable housing threshold: 35%.

Site 2: St Thomas’ Hospital SE1 (2.74 ha, wholly owned by Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust) No housing: this allocation is purely hospital and ancillary uses, plus reprovision of the Florence Nightingale Museum on site or elsewhere. Sits within the Westminster World Heritage Site setting, so heritage impact assessment required.

Site 8: 110 Stamford Street SE1 (0.11 ha, private/social enterprise, vacant since 1985) Small site: community/office space at ground floor plus approximately 30 self-contained residential units. Affordable housing: 50% (public land) / 35% (private land). Not suitable for a tall building (defined as above 45m here).

Site 9: Gabriel’s Wharf and Princes Wharf, Upper Ground SE1 (0.53 ha; owned by Coin Street Community Builders, with Princes Wharf leased to ITV until 2029) Mixed-use redevelopment: ground-floor active/cultural frontage, offices/workspace above, and self-contained C3 residential (possibly with extra care housing/nursing home). “Meanwhile uses” encouraged pending full redevelopment. Affordable housing: 50%/35% depending on ownership.

Brixton

Site 17: 330–336 Brixton Road SW9 (0.52 ha; mixed ownership incl. South London and Maudsley NHS Trust) Currently a petrol station, light industrial workshops, medical services and offices. Comprehensive mixed-use redevelopment sought: replacement office/community space, at least 1,289 sqm light industrial workspace, and approximately 60–70 residential units. Interestingly, from my point of view as a history nerd, this site has an Archaeological Priority Area 4 designation, as part of the ‘Line of Roman Road linking London and Lewes’.

Site 20: Tesco, 13 Acre Lane SW2 (1.25 ha, private) Replacement supermarket with approximately 180–210 residential units, the largest housing number of any site. Affordable housing: 35%.

Site 21: 51–57 Effra Road SW2 (1.07 ha, private - currently a retail park) Comprehensive mixed-use redevelopment: new light industrial workspace plus approximately 85–95 residential units. Affordable housing: 35%.

Streatham

Site 3: 35–37 and Car Park, Leigham Court Road SW16 (0.22 ha, Council-owned) Currently a car park and disused public toilets. Approximately 25–30 residential units plus ground-floor commercial (Class E). Affordable housing: 50% (public ownership).

West Norwood / Tulse Hill

Site 18: 300–346 Norwood Road SE27 (0.97 ha; Council and mixed private ownership) Currently a parade with 9 flats above shops, retail units, offices, light industrial, a church, a petrol station and fast-food units. Phased development expected given fragmented ownership. Potential for approximately 150–170 residential units plus 3,000–4,000 sqm non-residential floorspace (min. 1,123 sqm light industrial). At least 50% of ground-floor units along the Norwood Road frontage must stay in shop use. Affordable housing: 35–50% blended by ownership share.

Kennington/Oval

Site 7: 6–12 Kennington Lane and Wooden Spoon House, 5 Dugard Way SE11 (0.66 ha; part owned by Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust) Currently a builders’ merchant/yard, a vacant former language school building, and NHS offices (Wooden Spoon House). If the NHS relocates the medical use, the site could accommodate approximately 115–125 residential units plus at least 2,200 sqm light industrial space and a replacement community facility. Affordable housing: blended ~42% (up to 50% if industrial capacity is lost).

Loughborough Junction

Site 22: 1 & 3–11 Wellfit Street, 7–9 Hinton Road & Units 1–4 Hardess Street SE24 (0.33 ha, mixed ownership) Currently light industrial and retail near the railway arches. Potential for approximately 50–70 residential units plus at least 1,400 sqm light industrial workspace, appropriate to the Brixton Creative Enterprise Zone. Affordable housing: 35–50% depending on ownership/industrial loss.

Site 23: Land at corner of Coldharbour Lane and Herne Hill Road SE24 (0.10 ha, private, currently a place of worship) Existing community use must be replaced with equivalent or better provision, plus approximately 30–40 residential units on upper floors (ground floor not suitable for housing here) and creative workspace along Junction Yard. Affordable housing: 35%.

Site 24: King’s College Hospital, Denmark Hill SE5 (7.45 ha, much the largest site, owned by KCH NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London) No housing, hospital and ancillary uses, medical services and R&D, including conversion of King’s Business Park from storage/business use into clinical/research use. Height is carefully constrained by townscape and heritage context: roughly 9m in the north near Venetian Road, rising to about 40m along the eastern/southern boundaries, with no tall buildings (above 45m) permitted.

This gives a total of 969 potential new residential units across all 13 sites which the council is aiming for. This would, of course, be very useful for alleviating housing need in the borough. The question is how long this will all take, given that the council bureaucracy moves at a snail’s pace.

There have been a lot of council papers and meetings published and held recently, and I thought it would be useful to lay out some of the financial issues that are being considered and shaping the direction of the new administration at the moment, especially in the context of what it means for budget fights over services like libraries. There are undoubtedly many more fights like this to come over the next few years, and hard decisions to be made, given the state of council finances, and I will bring you analysis of those decisions when they happen.

In July, Lambeth’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee looked at the issue of e-bikes in the borough, with a recent Council report revealing that e-bike use is surging. There was a 17% rise in rides from May to June 2026 compared to just 3% fleet growth, while national legislation of the issue is still 18-24 months away.

The Scrutiny Committee took evidence from three big operators of e-bikes and e-scooters: Human Forest, Lime and Voi. Lambeth has a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with these companies, which operates as an interim framework that the companies voluntarily sign up to, pending TfL/GLA statutory regulation.

Human Forest alone runs around 20,000 bikes across 20 London boroughs, while Voi is capped at 800 vehicles in Lambeth, where the demand hotspots are around Waterloo, South Bank, Brixton, Clapham, and Vauxhall. Lambeth does not publish how much it has received in income from the e-bike companies, but it used to charge a flat £700 fee per docking bay per year, which has since been replaced by tiered fees depending on the size of the operator’s fleet, according to Brixton Buzz.

The Evening Standard has reported that the previous Labour administration had worked with Lime, Voi and Human Forest to increase the amount of pavement space available to park e-bikes as demand has risen considerably in recent years:

”All three firms praised Lambeth’s approach, which recognises the increasing popularity of dockless e-bikes. Lambeth declined to reveal the amount being paid by each of the firms, but the deal is understood to be worth several million pounds.”

It will be interesting to see if the Freedom of Information request I have put in to find out how much money Lambeth is receiving from these companies is rejected or not.

In 2025, Jim Waterson’s London Centric revealed that Lime Bikes were responsible for an ‘epidemic’ of serious injuries to riders. The publication asked:

“As California-headquartered Lime rushes to grow its London revenue ahead of a billion dollar stock market flotation, questions remains: Should the largely unregulated company offer a more comprehensive insurance package to protect its paying customers — and what’s the cost to the NHS for picking up the pieces when people are injured?”

So Lambeth councillors were understandably concerned to know how the e-bike companies were regulating their use. Dominic Hughes, Senior Policy Manager at Human Forest informed the Committee that, according to the Lambeth report, “there had been a 17% rise in rides between May and June 2026 with only a 3% fleet increase”.

Additionally, Human Forest had issued over 15,000 warnings, 1,200 fines, suspended 51 users, and permanently banned 114 riders. It was hoped that this was a reflection of their management, as they had received only 5% of total operator enforcement fees despite providing nearly a third of rides.”

Human Forest are also “trialling license plates for easier identification and enforcement for their bikes”, and asked the committee to consider larger parking bays in ‘hotspot’ areas.

Lime Senior Public Affairs Manager Alice Pleasant told the Committee that:

“Cycling journeys in London had increased substantially since 2019 and shared vehicles had become an established part of the capital’s transport network. It was noted that Lime’s London Action Plan had included £20 million of investment in its service, including parking infrastructure and a 60% increase in its on-street team.”

The company says it has 16 staff in Lambeth specifically, and monitors rider behaviour by requiring users “to submit an end-of-journey photograph”, while “artificial intelligence checks had been used to identify inappropriate parking, after which warnings, fines or bans could be issued.”

Now, call me a Luddite if you will (which is fine, the Luddites were cool and you should read Brian Merchant’s book about them, Blood in the Machine), but I think it might be a problem to have AI making decisions about who to fine and ban. Incidentally, today’s London Centric email carries the news that:

”Lime has permanently banned one of its e-bike users who cycled on a London pavement following a police investigation, in the latest example of rental e-bike companies being forced to crack down on individual rider behaviour. Perhaps more notably it shows how Lime is willing to share the identity of riders engaged in bad behaviour if the police actively ask for user data.”

Lime says that around 80% of users who received a first fine had not reoffended, and that more than 99.9% of Lime journeys in the past year ended without incident. London Centric reported that there are around 150,000 dockless e-bike journeys in London per day, with Lime making up the biggest share of that. If we assume that 100,000 of those are Lime journeys, that’s 36,500,000 Lime journeys a year, of which 0.1% would be 3,650 journeys involving some kind of ‘incident’. According to The Telegraph, Lime has set aside £40 million to pay personal injury claims by users.

The Committee were told that approximately 80% of users who had received a first fine had not reoffended with more than 99.9% of line journeys last year ending without incident. To support safety on the road, Lime had introduced a ‘Respect the Red’ campaign and were involved in delivering training with Cycling UK and supported the ‘Share the Joy’ community cycling grant initiative in London run by the London Cycling Campaign and themselves. The MoU was a positive interim mechanism pending a Transport for London (TfL) and Greater London Authority (GLA)-led regulatory framework

Lambeth Labour’s Cllr Nanda Manley-Browne told the Committee that poorly parked bikes disproportionately harm disabled residents, older people, visually impaired residents, wheelchair users, and parents with prams, and pushed to treat this as a public health issue, not just a transport one.

Other criticisms of the e-bike companies included the problem of GPS inaccuracies undermining the requirement to park e-bikes in specific, geofenced areas. Bikes also regularly fall over and block paths, while there was also ‘event-driven chaos’, with bikes flooding into areas like the Oval during events, and spilling into bays for privately owned bicycles.

Lime’s Alice Pleasant told the Committee that “the price of a journey on a Lime e-bike had been measured against the cost of a bus fare and Lime also had provided a 50% discount for eligible users, including key workers, National Health Service staff, carers, students and residents on low incomes.” This seems surprising to me, someone who has been a student for the past few years, and the only time I’ve taken a Lime bike, from Central London to Brixton, it cost me over £8.

While the Council does now have a mailbox for reporting e-bike contraventions, Council officers admitted it was understaffed, with the Climate Response Strategy Manager tellin councillors “that a system for reporting e-bike contraventions was in development, but all enforcement officers had not been trained in its use at this point. The Committee were also briefed that the existing mailbox where people could report incidents to the Council had been understaffed and recognised that the Council had not provided the required level of responsiveness that would be expected.”

Until there is wider regulation brought in by the government or GLA, Lambeth’s ability to police these companies is very minimal, relying on a voluntary MoU and self-policing by e-bike companies. All the figures provided for the effectiveness of e-bike company self-enforcement come from the companies themselves, though Lambeth’s committee made recommendations for the companies to improve performance, such as fixing inconsistent bay enforcement, clarifying reporting procedures, and improving engagement with disability groups and the NHS.

As someone who cycles a lot, I find it hard to get my head around why you would hire expensive bikes which you have to leave in designated areas from a company like Lime, which is owned by companies including Uber, Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Investments, and the Abu Dhabi Growth Fund.

Cycling to me is about independence, and when you’re paying some big corporation for the experience, I think it rather undermines most of the benefits you get from saving time, money and the environment. The only really good use I’ve so far found for Lime bikes is that they make a decent canvass for a roll of Boycott Israeli Apartheid stickers.

Lambeth Council officers have recommended conditional planning permission be given to a huge new skyscraper in Vauxhall which would be the UK’s second tallest residential building.

The scheme would see the demolition of structures near Vauxhall bus station which currently house padel courts, and the erection of 7 buildings, 6 of which would be at least 20 storeys, with the tallest at 69 storeys of 230.5m with market sale housing for 500 homes.

There would also be a 17 storey office, retail and hotel building, a 61 storey tower with 355 ‘Build-to-Rent’ homes and 120 ‘Discount Market Rent’ homes, a 20 storey tower with 122 homes at Social Rent, a 45 storey, 699-unit student accommodation tower, and a 61 storey tower with 1,164 co-living units. A seventh 2 storey building would house a cinema and retail units.

The project is slated to add 1,097 new homes in total, with 25% being ‘affordable’, comprising the Social Rent and Discount Market Rent homes. This is below the 35% affordable goal, but allowed within the Mayor of London’s temporary affordable housing route. The affordable homes quota includes 122 Social Rent homes, and the developers will also make a £79.9 million financial contribution towards off-site affordable housing.

However, the Planning Applications Committee report notes that:

“The development would make a very significant contribution to housing delivery with an equivalent 2,204 net additional dwellings. This represents 152 per cent of the Council’s annual housing target, or 15 per cent of the total housing target over the plan period to 2028. The Council has delivered 39 per cent of its housing target in the three years between 2022-2025 and as a result of failing the Government’s Housing Delivery Test, is subject to sanctions to help improve housing delivery. The provision of housing is also a strategic priority within the development plan. Accordingly, the contribution these homes would make towards the Council’s housing target is given very substantial weight.”

The development claims that it will score higher than the policy target for how energy efficient and eco-friendly the building is compared to the minimum legal baseline set by UK building laws, with a proposed 58% of on site carbon savings being achieved. How they plan to achieve this doesn’t seem to be mentioned. The planning documents also say the development will exceed minimum Biodiversity Net Gain rules for the site (a new green space is included in plans), though this may be because the site is basically a wasteland at the moment, so it would be hard to create less biodiversity than there currently is. However, the developers are still likely to pay a carbon offset contribution of around £1.7m.

4,751 properties were consulted on the application, resulting in 7 responses in support of the application, 32 responses against, and 2 neutral. Many objections focused on the loss of sunlight and views for nearby residents.

Developer Vauxhall Square says the project will cost in the region of £2.25bn, and will be undertaken by “Cedarstone Capital, joint venture partner Cheyne Capital and developer Bmor”. The site used to be owned by a Chinese company, but in 2024 they sold it to “Cedarstone Capital Partners, a company set up last September and backed by Dubai-based GFH Partners”. Although based in Dubai, GFH Partners “is a fully-owned subsidiary of the GFH Financial Group”, whose Wikipedia page says they were “previously known as Gulf Finance House… an Islamic investment bank with headquarters in Bahrain Financial Harbour, Bahrain”.

Now, I know a few things about the Bahraini government, because I used to work for one of the main human rights organisations based there during the period of the Arab Spring. The Bahraini government put a number of people I knew in jail for long periods of time, largely for crimes like ‘insulting the King’ or similar nonsense, but really for calling for democratic reforms and taking part in demonstrations.

Of course it’s hardly surprising that the Gulf dictatorships who we send lots of money to for oil would want to reinvest that money into the relative safety of London real estate. Elsewhere in Lambeth, the UAE owned company London Square is behind the Brixton Central development which would turf out charities and small businesses from International House.

GFH Financial Group has had multiple members of the Bahraini ruling family, the Al-Khalifas, as directors. Shaikh Ahmed bin Khalifa Al-Khalifa previously served as the Chairman of the Board, and Shaikha Minwa bint Ali Al-Khalifa currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors. Her Highness’s qualifications for being the director of a bank apparently include being a “podcaster and content creator”.

Another member of the ruling family, Shaikh Hamed Al Khalifa, was appointed as CEO of GFH Properties in 2019. So this is a company that is intimately connected to the ruling elite which runs the dictatorial Bahraini state.

Over 100 people died in the violence precipitated by regime forces attacking demonstrators calling for democratic reforms in 2011. I vividly remember seeing images of multiple people whose brains were blown out of their skulls by teargas canisters fired from extreme close range. Members of the Al-Khalifa family were credibly accused of personally torturing civilians. This is a regime that systematically discriminates against the half of its population who identify as Shia Muslims, and has undertaken no meaningful political reform since it crushed its domestic opponents 15 years ago.

Should these business links mean that Lambeth Council should reject the planning application against the wishes of council officers? This planning proposal has been in the works since 2023 under the previous Labour administration, and my feeling is that the new Green-led administration will be unlikely to reject it at the last hurdle.

Obviously the problematic nature of the companies benefitting from this has to be weighed against councillors’ and officers’ understandable desire to meet housing targets. The Nine Elms area next to Vauxhall, most of which is in Wandsworth, has already been turned into a forest of ugly skyscrapers around the new US embassy which always reminds me of the Borg cube from Star Trek.

Responding to the news, Bahraini human rights activist Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei said:

“This £2.25 billion development is backed by Bahrain’s GFH Financial Group, where current and former members of the ruling Al Khalifa family have held senior positions. It is deeply disturbing to see billions flowing into luxury London property through a financial group with such close links to Bahrain’s ruling elite, while the Al Khalifa family presides over one of the Gulf’s most repressive states, where political opponents and human rights defenders have spent years behind bars.

London cannot become a playground for investments linked to authoritarian ruling elites without serious scrutiny. The public has a right to know who is behind these billions, where the money comes from and who ultimately benefits.”

It’s hard to see Lambeth saying no to the financial incentive of £80 million to spend on social housing elsewhere in the borough. But that doesn’t mean we should all shut up about companies connected to Middle Eastern dictatorships profiting from the value of London property. We deserve to know who is behind the big development companies taking advantage of cash-strapped councils to make inner London a playground for the rich, with the corollary that working class Londoners are increasingly pushed to the capital’s edge.

This type of issue also raises uncomfortable questions about the morality of corporate development. Would Local Authorities be as comfortable about developments backed by Putin cronies, for example? Nowhere in planning documents do council officers ever discuss where the capital for developments comes from, and maybe they should. It’s not clear to me that councillors would know who was behind this development unless they read this article, because it is simply not mentioned in council papers which councillors are supposed to base their decisions on. Arguably, more due diligence should be taken about whose money is being used to build London’s skyscrapers.

In November 2025, London Councils published a statement in which it “warned of “enormous challenges” threatening to “break boroughs’ budgets”” as a result of the fast rising number of pupils in London with special educational needs (SEND).

They warned that “at least 16 of London’s 33 local authorities are at heightened risk of bankruptcy due to insufficient schools funding and rising SEND pressures” and that “boroughs’ deficits for SEND provision will total £500m by the end of 2026-27 – destabilising town hall budgets and undermining investment in schools’ resources and support for pupils”.

I’ve published a lot here about how Lambeth’s finances are under strain from Temporary Accommodation costs. However, looking at the financial records for the first half of 2026, the category which has the highest spending total is spending marked as ‘EDUCATION & LEARNING (DSG)’. DSG here means the Dedicated Schools Grant, a ring-fenced grant from the UK government (via the Department for Education) given to local authorities, which councils must spend on their schools budget and related educational provisions.

One of the major contributors to Lambeth’s overspend in 2025 was the DSG, which the council was forecast to overspend by £4.65m, according to Brixton Buzz. The council announced in mid 2025 that

Within this category, there are some schools that receive quite a lot of money from the Dedicated Schools Grant. These are below.

The top schools on this list generally seem to have high academic standards, with La Retraite and Bishop Thomas Grant both being classed as some of the best schools in Lambeth in this 2022 MyLondon article, while the Wandsworth Guardian reported in 2025 that La Retraite was “rated Outstanding for the third time by Ofsted and [received] top honours from the Catholic Schools Inspectorate in 2024”. One of the school’s most famous alumni is Cynthia Erivo, star of the Wicked films. Almost half of the pupils at the school reportedly come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

According to the Good Schools Guide, La Retraite has 1,219 pupils, of which 1.72% of pupils have a SEN Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), while 5.82% of pupils receive some SEN support. This compares to a “UK mainstream school avg. 3.09%” for SEN EHCP and “UK mainstream school avg. 13.4%” for SEN support. So the school seems to have fewer than average pupils who receive SEN support or have a care plan annually.

However, over the period 2019-2026, the funding for La Retraite has increased from around £6.5m a year to likely over £12 million in 2026 once the data from the second half of the year is released.

One reason for the rise in funding for some schools could be the consolidation of schools as pupil numbers in Lambeth have fallen over the past 10 years. La Retraite and Bishop Thomas Grant schools are core Voluntary Aided (VA) mainstream schools within the local authority, serving as key partners in the Lambeth Catholic Schools Partnership. La Retraite’s pupil numbers passed 1,000 for the first time in 2016 and has now risen to over 1,200.

The school’s website notes that “Our vision is to expand further to accommodate the increase in students and hope to obtain further funding over the coming years for a new Art & DT block, a whole-school Reception area with associated administration offices and a school hall. The plans are ready but we just need the green light (with associated funding) to go”.

However, the school’s numbers have not doubled since 2019, when the grant that La Retraite receives has doubled in that time, so this cannot be all of the explanation. Lambeth Council has also shifted its local funding methodology to transition closer to the central government’s National Funding Formula (NFF) values. This restructuring heavily factors in local deprivation indices (such as IDACI and Free School Meal metrics). Because La Retraite serves a student body with above-average eligibility for free school meals, the formula adjustments generated significantly higher Additional Educational Needs (AEN) allocations for the school.

As with Temporary Accommodation and Adult Social Care, Local Authorities and schools are legally required to fund the specific provisions outlined in a child’s EHCP, forcing spending upwards regardless of tight overall budgets. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, “The number of school pupils with EHCPs has risen by 180,000 or 71% between 2018 and 2024.”

Additionally, councils have often had to fund these obligations from their own budgets, not the Dedicated Schools Grant. Again, the IFS says: “High needs spending has been consistently higher than funding by £200–800 million per year between 2018 and 2022, mainly because local authorities have a statutory obligation to deliver the provision set out in EHCPs. As a result, local authorities have accumulated large deficits in their high-needs budgets, estimated to be at least £3.3 billion in total by this year.”

I asked La Retraite school about the increase in their levels of funding, and Paul Steward, Director of Business & Operations responded saying:

“the growth in our funding levels relates to an increase in our student numbers from 2019/2020 onwards which has been more significant than other local schools. Firstly, our 6^th Form increased its roll from around 200 students in 2020, to having over 400 students on roll now; the increase was partly due to the start of an introduction of a comprehensive T Level offer in September 2020 which has expanded considerably since then.”

“Secondly, the school is now at capacity in lower years when it hadn’t been previously. We made a conscious decision after Harris Clapham opened in September 2020 (which led to a number of schools having reduced Y7 numbers as a result of its opening including us) to actively market the school, so that we do not fall victim to falling numbers, and our numbers have increased year on year to the point that we are now at capacity. We are now the largest secondary school (with our 6^th Form) in Lambeth after Dunraven School.”

“Thirdly, we also attracting more students with SEND and with EHCPs as, in part, the diagnosis of autism, in particular, of girls is becoming more widespread. We have a very successful SEND provision here with many families relocating their daughters here in-year in order to benefit from this provision, and it seems to have become the ‘go to’ place in the local community to send your daughter if they have SEND. The opening of a girls autistic base here from this month has garnered yet more interest.”

Steward also said that “there have been considerable additional payments made to schools for covering the cost of teachers’ pensions and employers’ contributions (which increased from 16.48% to 28.68% in 2019), grants to cover above inflationary cost of living awards since 2023 for both teachers and support staff, and various other post-pandemic grants to enable targeted catch-up – these have amounted to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds in total each year. This margin of increase for the introduction of these grants does partially correlate with the steep rise in income from 2019 to 2020 and 2024 to 2025.”

Lambeth Council told me that:

“Both La Retraite and Bishop Thomas Grant are maintained schools, and the amounts processed by the council include several distinct funding streams provided under national arrangements by the DfE.

Each school’s core delegated budget is recorded under Consistent Financial Reporting code I01. This is funded through the Schools Block of the government’s ring-fenced DSG and is determined by pupil numbers and the factors within the national school funding formulas and set by the DfE.

Since 2021, a number of government grants, introduced to meet national teachers’ pay awards, increased pension contributions and other staffing costs, have progressively been incorporated into schools’ core funding within the DSG. This has increased per-pupil formula rates and school funding baselines while reducing the amounts shown as separate grants. The Department for Education incorporated funding for the 2018 and 2019 teachers’ pay awards into the National Funding Formula from 2021/22. The Schools Supplementary Grant was incorporated in 2023/24, the Mainstream Schools Additional Grant in 2024/25 and, in 2025/26, the Teachers’ Pay Additional Grant, Teachers’ Pension Employer Contribution Grant and Core Schools Budget Grant were rolled into the National Funding Formula.

These changes mean that comparisons with earlier years can make the core budget-share payment appear to have increased substantially, even where part of the movement reflects previously separate government grants being consolidated into the per-pupil funding received through the Schools Block of the Dedicated Schools Grant. These are national funding changes rather than additional discretionary funding decisions made by Lambeth Council.

The schools’ financial returns, which can be reviewed in detail on the link below, show all of the schools core funding from sixth-form and SEND income, which are in addition to I01

Sixth-form funding is provided through separate national post-16 funding arrangements. La Retraite has operated a sixth form since 1997, so this is not new provision, although its level of sixth-form funding has increased over the period.

Separately identified SEND income principally reflects additional funding for individual pupils whose assessed needs require provision above the support schools are expected to fund from their delegated budgets, I01, and are linked to all of the agreed EHC Plans and agreements.

As a note the schools’ total CFR income also includes Pupil Premium, other government grants and income generated directly by the schools, including lettings, catering and other services. The only Income the schools receive from the LA are linked to national funding guidance and formulas based on pupil numbers and SEN income based on EHC Agreements.

It seems that educational provision, especially for neurodiverse children, is yet another area of local authority finances where demand is rising, while funding for local authorities flatlines. The government says that it has ended the Tory era of austerity, but when councils must ringfence statutory duties like homeless provision, adult social care, and education, what ends up getting cut is everything else: libraries, parks, infrastructure spending, and so on. Austerity for these things continues without end.

I’m starting a new strand of this Substack, which will hopefully allow me to somewhat up my frequency of output by providing information on companies and institutions in Lambeth which are significant actors in the area. Full investigations come with lengthy delays, sending right of replies, and the potential to have some rich person threaten to take you to court, as happened to me with the company I reported on recently for The Guardian.

So I thought the first one should be on Lexadon, a big property developer and landlord in Lambeth with many of their developments based around central Brixton. I was talking to a contact at ACORN the other day, who told me:

“We took part in ACORN’s London-wide action with London Renters Union members. The action was to protest high rents and call for rent controls. The issue is widespread enough that it applies across the country as well as Lambeth but the stand out Lambeth-specific example that I’ve come across is a member who faced a 70% rent increase and eviction when she couldn’t pay it. We stopped the eviction and helped them get the increase down to an affordable level.”

According to a Brixton Buzz article from the time, the rent increase was as much as 74%.

The landlord in question was Lexadon. You only need to look at the company’s Google reviews to tell that their reputation in the borough isn’t that brilliant. The reviews on Trustpilot are no better, where the company has a score of 1.6 out of 5 stars. Their most recent Trustpilot review says “One of the worst companies I’ve ever interacted with”, and describes renting a home that was “filthy, covered in mould, smears on the walls, bags of rubbish in the garden. When we challenged it, they made up multiple different excuses, including that they’d only moved out the previous tenant the same day we moved in so they ‘didn’t have time to do a deep clean’.”

The company is owned by Jerry and Janet Knight, a couple who “made made their fortune converting ex-council homes in Clapham and Brixton” according to Brixton Buzz. Lambeth is now having to buy back some of the homes sold off under Thatcher’s Right to Buy at great expense due to the huge shortage of council houses in the borough.

The company’s portfolio consists of developments such as the Viaduct and flats at 419 Colaharbour Lane, the converted Laundry restaurant, Clifton Mansions, 124-128 Brixton Road, and dozens of other new and converted properties around Brixton.

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New financial figures published by Lambeth Council show that spending on Temporary Accommodation continued to eat into the Local Authority’s finances in the first Quarter of the new financial year, though the total spending has fallen slightly since last year.

The figures show that Midos Management Co Ltd raked in over £1.8 million in the period, despite the fact that I revealed in a Guardian article in May that the company was connected to a family group of companies run by the Schreiber family which are also alleged by the Guardian to have engaged in a tax avoidance scheme.

Another company run by the family has a business relationship to a subsidiary company of the Israeli arms company Elbit systems. The subsidiary company, Instro Precision, has been targeted by Palestine Action, and owns land at Discovery Park, in Sandwich in Kent, which was sold to the company by another company owned by the Schreiber family for £5.7m in 2021.

Until the latest financial reports, Lambeth listed a different Midos company - Midos Estates - as its main provider of temporary accommodation. When I approached Midos Estates for comment on my previous story, they told me that it was a mistake by Lambeth, who had confused Midos Estates and Midos Management Co, which they claimed was a totally different company unconnected to the Midos Group of companies.

I was later able to establish through marriage records that Elizabeth Endzweig, the owner of Midos Management Co, is the daughter of David Schreiber, the owner of Midos Group.

Adding this quarter’s data to my database of Lambeth’s spending on Temporary Accommodation shows that the total figure for this quarter is down slightly from a high of just over £30 million in October to December 2024. This reflects the fact that Lambeth says that the total number of people in TA has fallen slightly from over 4,700 people at the start of 2025.

The new Lambeth Green administration is in a difficult situation. It is a statutory legal duty for councils to provide TA for homeless residents, and councils across London compete against each other for the same poor quality housing for their residents provided by companies like those listed above. If Lambeth does not accept this poor quality accommodation in or near the borough, the only other options may be to offer people TA places in other cities.

So councils across the UK are stuck in a bind - do they continue renting accommodation from companies like Midos Management, whose reputations and business practices are suspect, or do they ship people off to other cities?

I believe that the TA problem cannot be solved by Local Authorities alone. This is a national and regional problem. There should be a central London authority responsible for TA across the capital to stop different councils competing against each other for the same housing and pushing the prices up. And councils should run their own hostels for people needing TA, rather than outsourcing it expensively to private landlords who are taking councils for all they are worth.

None of this is going to be solved quickly, but Lambeth must look for alternative provision so that it is not forced to turn to companies like Midos who are unsuitable to be providing such an important public service.

The former Charles Edward Brooke School on Cormont Road has been derelict since 2012, and was taken back under Lambeth Council’s control in 2021.

I wrote about the ongoing situation at the school last December for Brixton Buzz, and while there is some hope that the new Green-controlled council will be able to push things forward, the building still appears to be caught in a cycle of neverending bureaucracy.

In early July, Green cabinet members Scott Ainslie, Pete Elliot, and Myatt’s ward councillor Patience Clague went on a site visit with Lambeth staff, Save Cormont Road School campaigner Seb Frichot and Tracey Gregory, a local heritage campaigner. Fiona McKeith, Assistant Director of Valuation and Strategic Assets at the council also attended

Gregory told me that it “was good to get inside the school. Only got into the ground floor. Some water damage, but art works from the kids still on the wall look like they only left yesterday.”

Lambeth council is in the process of putting the school on the market for potential developers to bid for it. This requires certain procedural boxes to be ticked, such as having Council committees sign off on it. Unfortunately, the Council has significant internal capacity issues, with not enough staff and little real urgency to get something done with the building.

In the past, despite previous councillors for the area saying they have applied pressure to move the project on, there has been a lack of enthusiasm within the Council for putting the future of the building on the agenda, and too many competing priorities (housing, lack of money) for councillors and officers to make a final decision.

As for the sale itself, it is understood that the soft market testing of the site has now been completed. This early, informal stage is not the sale itself, but the way in which the council can take the temperature of the market before committing: who might be interested, what they would want to do with a building like this, what they could realistically afford, and what conditions would make a bid worth their while.

What comes back then feeds directly into how the formal opportunity is written and, crucially, into the parameters against which bidders will later be judged. In other words, the decisions that will most shape the outcome are being taken now, quietly, before anyone has formally bid on anything.

Under considerable pressure from campaigners, this soft marketing process was widened to reach as many potential bidders as possible. The formal marketing of the site is expected to launch in September, with a decision to follow. As I mentioned in my previous Brixton Buzz article, there has been one local art school interested in the site for the past two years, but there are fears that the process has now taken so long that they could end up moving out of the borough entirely.

To date, however, the council has seemed fixated on housing as the answer for the site. Seb Frichot says that “the council appear to be wedded to the idea of delivering luxury flats to the community”.

The problem is that housing in the main building simply doesn’t stack up. The school’s large rooms would need to be subdivided, and the expense of doing this in a Grade II listed building would prohibit anything other than luxury flats being built - something that is neither needed nor wanted, except perhaps by developers.

Campaigners are instead asking for a mixed-use site. It is understood that at least one potential bidder would deliver exactly that, possibly returning the main building to an educational use, with housing then developed on the remaining land. The site could also accommodate any number of uses other than luxury flats, and so it is hoped councillors will remain open-minded.

The really important question now is the process by which councillors will make their selection. What are the criteria against which bidders will be scored, and how will they be weighted? Local campaigners argue that this process should be debated, fully documented and transparent.

Whatever decision is made, the sale still has to be signed off by Lambeth’s new cabinet. Below you can see a drone-shot video of the back and roof of the building.

It seems clear that a lack of local reporting or public communicaion by the council about the fate of the school has contributed to a lack of urgency among the council and officers to move anything forward, so I think there remains a strong public interest in reporting the ongoing situation of the building and what may happen to it.

Both Seb Frichot and Tracey Gregory agree that the school needs someone in the council to champion its renovation.

A mixed use of the main building on the site would be the quickest route to returning the building to the community. An educational or institutional occupier could take the building broadly as it stands, using the large rooms as they were designed to be used. That means no wholesale subdivision, no drawn-out fight over listed building consent, no viability appraisal that only works if the flats are expensive enough. And no developer wriggling out of commitments to deliver affordable housing, as they are so prone to do.

With an educational or institutional occupier, campaigners say affordable housing could then be delivered on the grounds of the site, which would be more economically viable. It is hoped that Lambeth’s officers realise that a mixed use, such as this, could be the best solution for the site.

Further delays further risk the future of the building. Derelict buildings in this city rarely just decay quietly: they attract the sort of attention that ends with a fire and a cleared site, which has a way of resolving a heritage question that nobody in the town hall was willing to resolve themselves.

Lambeth Council held its Cabinet committee meeting on 1 July, with former Labour cabinet members attempting to elicit commitments from the new council to confirm Labour’s planned spending cuts.

The Quarter 4 2025/26 budget report showed that Lambeth overspent by £15.9m, a reduction of £1.2m from the overspend reported in Q3. Overspending on housing, adult social care, and children’s services fell slightly, while spending on the budget pots for Growth & Environment, Resources and Corporate Items worsened.

Labour Councillor Danny Adilypour defended the previous administration’s performance and their securing of emergency EFS funds from central government to prop up the Housing budget. However, he said there was still a need for a further £99m of cuts. He asked the Green council to confirm that Labour’s previous savings programme was non-negotiable and for the council to deliver the savings and asset disposals required, under threat that the government would be forced to come in and ‘make swingeing cuts’.

Labour councillor Judith Cavanagh also pressed the council cabinet to commit to more cuts from the parks and libraries budget.

Lib Dem Cllr Matthew Bryant commented on the ‘huge slippage in savings from last year’, and asked the council how confident they are that they will achieve those savings, when the Greens have committed to reversing some cuts such as to the Central Hill dementia centre. He asked what officers will be doing to better manage the capital programme. Bryant added that he was concerned about the £8 million overspend in the dedicated schools grant on the high needs bloc (SEN provision). Lastly he asked Cllr Elliot if he was confident that the HRA could be balanced in the current financial year.

Cllr Adilypour said the number of families in TA had reduced by 8.9% over the previous financial year: “Thanks to the changes made by the previous Labour administration through our allocations policy, placements policy and discharge policy, the number of Lambeth households in TA fell by 8.9% in the 2025/26 financial year, and I hope this is something all members can welcome, because this means that 1058 Lambeth families are no longer in Temporary Accommodation, are in much more stable and secure accommodation, thanks to the pragmatic approach that we took as the previous administration. However as the report notes, there are still over 4000 Lambeth families living in TA and it is absolutely imperative that the new administration does what it can to drive this figure down.”

I emailed Adilypour to ask him what evidence there was that people who are no longer in TA have moved to ‘much more stable and secure accommodation’. In my experience, when people are offered unsuitable TA far from where their friends, family and work or school are, many people will move to less secure tenancies, or even sofa surfing, rather than accept TA which is far away. If people do not take up offers of TA, therefore, it’s not possible to say that they have then moved to more secure tenancies. Cllr Adilypour did not bother to reply to my email.

Adilypour added that: “Sadly with the current housing crisis and lack of housing supply there is simply no way that nearly 4500 families can be accommodated in Lambeth Council Housing in future, so the only way that these families can be supported out of TA and into a more stable living environment is by continued use of a responsible discharge policy that includes using the private sector in a responsible way.”

He called for this to remain part of the solution and commit to using every available policy tool including use of the private sector. Lambeth’s TA discharge policy generally means that those leaving TA are offered a 12-24 month private tenancy, but due to rental costs in the borough, the council has said it expects that most placements will be outside the borough and even outside the Southeast of England.

Cabinet member for finance, Zvikomborero Chihoro hit back at Labour, saying that “the financial instability of the council is down to one party only.” He promised to bring financial stability, starting with a review of the previous council’s finances, and said he refused to be lectured by the previous administration on financial matters.

Cllr Scott Ainslie said he wanted to put people and planet before profit, that the crisis in temporary accommodation because of high private rents and he said they must deliver new homes to alleviate this, asking officers how they will push to utilise empty homes.

Cllr Abrams said the financial situation was ‘stark’, that he would take the financial situation ‘incredibly seriously’ and would work with other parties on it, creating a new financial committee to work on the matter. However, he added that: ‘What I won’t accept is that austerity is a certainty like death and taxes. It’s a political choice, and the new PM Andy Burnham has a political choice to make. Will he continue down the path of austerity, or will he provide the funding needed to ensure councils don’t have to cut services.’

Councillor Jonathan Bartley said all cabinet members were looking at their portfolios to establish savings. In his portfolio there was a big spend on litigation and huge expenses for council officers, and said he thought that by working to improve the culture of the council, it would be possible to make a lot of financial savings.

Councillor Pete Elliot said he needed more work from officers on the Housing Revenue Account (HRA) recovery plan, but said he thought there were ‘plenty of savings that could be made’, in areas such as disrepair court costs and the amount of money spent on liquidation, the repairs cost contracts where jobs were repeatedly not being done, the amount of money paid in compensation and complaints escalated to the ombudsman’s desk. We’ve stopped doing preventative maintenance.

Elliot added that they were looking at a number of options to create new council housing, and called on Council officers to work with him to stop the last 11 Homes for Lambeth tenants being evicted from Central Hill estate.

Council officers said that reports were due later this month to be shared with the scrutiny committee which would answer some questions. On the HRA outturn and the £8m surplus through EFS, which has been set aside for ongoing disrepair costs. There are ‘encouraging signs’ that the underlying health of the HRA is improving. The consolidated position of council finances will be presented to the Audit and Risk committee later in July.

The Cabinet committee Agenda Report Pack lays out the key financial figures:

• HRA (Housing Revenue Account): surplus of £8.0m (using £40m EFS, mainly to fund disrepair costs)

• Dedicated Schools Grant: overspend of £8.475m, driven by the High Needs Block (SEND placements)

• Savings delivery: £46.3m targeted; only £21.3m fully delivered, leaving a £24.956m gap

• Capital programme: underspent by £131.4m (59.6%) due to a capital pause/review and slippage

• Reserves: closing balance £114.6m (up from £93.1m), though still described as offering “little financial resilience”

Temporary Accommodation & Housing Issues

• Housing Services (GF) overspend: £14.528m: the single largest directorate overspend, though £3.5m better than Q3

• Driven mainly by nightly-paid Temporary Accommodation (TA) costs (£8.5m variance) and additional staffing (£5.1m) to manage TA reduction

• The number of households in TA fell 8.3% over the year; 1,058 households moved out of TA (target: 1,050), mainly into the private rented sector

• Repairs/tenant satisfaction: satisfaction with repairs rose to 85.4%, average mould removal/treatment time fell 24% but narrowly missed the 10-day target (11.3 days) after a March surge

• New Homes Programme: ambition to deliver 10,000 new homes over the next decade (40% affordable); Somerleyton Road (56% affordable) and Fenwick Place (100% social rent) cited as recent successes, alongside opposition concerns about delivery delays and viability risk to future affordable housing targets

• HRA capital programme: underspent by £49.7m against budget, with statutory compliance and Lambeth Housing Programme schemes significantly delayed

I hope to follow up this review of the current financial situation by talking to Cabinet member Zviko Chihoro who is undertaking a review of the council’s finances and what position the previous administration has left it in. I hope that they can also be more transparent about certain contracts for big-ticket items, and that we will find out what happened to all the money that was given to Homes for Lambeth.

Stay tuned!

14 out of 164 pubs listed on a 2022 pub database in Lambeth have closed, or around 8.5% of the venues listed in the past 4 years. I analysed open pubs data (derived from the Food Standard Agency’s Food Hygiene Ratings and the ONS Postcode Directory) and looked up every venue listed to see what had changed.

Some of the places listed I have categorised as ‘not really pubs’, such as Phonox nightclub in Brixton, or places that are known as wine bars. Removing the 22 venues that I decided weren’t really pubs gave 14/144, which is almost 10% of the pubs listed.

Of course, since then there are quite a few new venues that have opened which could be described as pubs, such as the breweries and tap rooms of Brixton (London Beer Lab, Supercute, Brixton Brewery Taproom). Unfortunately, there just isn’t very good open data on pubs in the UK, which is a shame, as one of my current project ideas is to create a website called Who Owns My Pub which would help people understand the ownership of pubs in the UK.

You can view my spreadsheet of Lambeth pubs here, where you can see I’ve started to fill in ownership data for the places where it’s not too hard to find out who the owners are. I looked up every place on the list to see if they were still in business and I found a number of interesting things going on.

1. Nolan’s Freehouse to be knocked down and rebuilt.

Wilcox Road is very close to the new Nine Elms Northern Line station and the area is undergoing a lot of development pressure from all the high rises which are going up next door.

Southwark News reported that “Lambeth Council’s Planning Applications Committee unanimously approved the plans during a meeting on Tuesday evening (April 14).” The building is owned by the family who run the pub, and it looks like they’re cashing in on the value of the land to rebuild the pub with residential development on the top.

A CGI drawing showing how the new development plans to look Credit: Lambeth Council planning documents

2. The Royal Oak near Waterloo is up for sale for £750,000

I once went to this pub for a friend’s birthday and the barman took about 20 minutes to pour me a pint because he was on LSD, so I’m not surprised that this hippy pub on a backstreet near Waterloo with residential houses around it went out of business. The asking price seems quite low for a pub in an area like that, but I’d imagine anyone wanting to use it as a pub would have licensing issues, and perhaps it needs a lot of work.

You can check out the listing on RightMove here.

3. Campaign to save The Railway Bell in Gipsy Hill

According to Norwood Forum, “A planning application has been submitted by a developer for the demolition of the historic Railway Bell pub and outbuildings at 14 Cawnpore Street, Gipsy Hill SE19 (the pub frontage is to be retained), and the construction of a block of flats with nine 1 bedroom apartments spread over three floors.”

Thankfully the planning application was rejected on April 17, on the grounds that it would damage the heritage value of the building. The developer is a company called Londres Developments Limited, according to planning records, owned by Nicholas Benjamin Jacob. You can often glean interesting bits of information from Companies House, like that Londres Developments used to be a car repair company called Chelsea Motor Company Limited, before getting into real estate. Benjamin still appears to have another company that repairs cars.

Londres Developments seems to be another one of these meta-landlording companies, who say they “will manage your property, dealing with day-to-day issues such as rent collection or tenant issues quickly and professionally.” There are quite a few of these in Lambeth, renting out small time landlords’ properties to the council and making lots of money from it.

4. Streatham Rabbit Hole on the market for £2.5 million

A large pub on Streatham Common is up for sale. According to London Now, “The property dates back to 1930, when it was rebuilt for publican Charles Walter Hoye, complete with landscaped gardens that were marketed as “Streatham’s Finest Garden Rendezvous”.”

The pub has 12 rooms and seems like the kind of place that a housing developer might want to convert into housing, so it’s possible that the closure of this pub could become permanent unless it’s bought by someone who actually wants to run it as a pub. The Streatham Society has a pamphlet about the area which records the origins of the pub:

5. The Crown & Sceptre is under threat from a massive housing redevelopment

Somewhat like Nolan’s Freehouse, the big pub at the other end of Streatham from the Rabbit Hole, on the corner of the South Circular and Clapham Park Estate, sits the rather majestic building that is the Crown & Sceptre, which has recently been run as a Latin pub, though the last time I went in there I got the impression that management was Eastern European. It looks like this corner is due to be developed into a big housing block too, with the facade of the old pub retained.

As Brixton Buzz notes: “In recent years, the Crown & Sceptre has became hugely popular with the local Latino community and is one of the very few place left in the neighbourhood where people can drink and dance after midnight on weekends. If this scheme is approved, we can’t imagine how these nights could survive with so many residential units crammed all around a venue that would be dramatically reduced in size.”

A post on the Urban75 discussion thread notes:

“It is very much worth noting that this is not a simple “refurbishment” of the C&S. It’s façade retention only. The whole interior, walls and floors will be demolished and a new, smaller building will replace them. No continuity.”

A post by Streatham Hill Theatre notes that: “Comments on the application can be made at the Lambeth Planning Portal under ref. 26/01394/FUL, or by email to planning@lambeth.gov.uk, providing your name, address and the 26/01394/FUL application ref.”

6. Other pub closures

The Westow Tap (formerly located at 23 Westow Hill in Crystal Palace, London) permanently closed in April 2025. The space has since been taken over and reopened as Fino Café Bar, which operates primarily as a daytime cafe, restaurant, and bar.

The Shrub & Shutter on Coldharbour Lane also closed in 2025, yet another victim of the dramatic decline in pubs in Brixton along with the closure of the Dogstar, and temporary closure of the PoW.

The Queen’s Head in Brixton closed in 2024 and remains boarded up. Its Wikipedia page notes that “In November 2014 photos emerged of the then landlord dressed in blackface at a party there, with another guest wearing a Ku Klux Klan costume and performing a Nazi salute, causing public outrage that was reported in the national press.”

Is the Aziz family pub empire up for sale?

The saga of many of the pubs managed by the Aziz family property management company grinds on, and I am informed that there is a hearing on the China Hall at Croydon magistrates court in the coming week.

In February, The Londoner reported that: “In Borough, the Gladstone Arms has been listed by Savills for £1.1m (any takers?). Meanwhile, in south east London, locals of the White Swan in Charlton, which has been empty and abandoned since high rents forced its closure in 2020, are fundraising to try and buy its freehold.”

The Londoner also mentioned a Lambeth pub that was part of the Aziz portfolio and was up for sale. This is The Beehive, the mock Tudor frontage pub near The Oval, which South London News reported recently was for sale for £3.5 million.

A while ago I started making a spreadsheet of all the pubs known to be managed by the Aziz family. In Lambeth it includes what used to be The Junction on Coldharbour Lane and is now a restaurant called Casa Mofongo, which from my experience never seems to have anybody inside. He also threatened to sue me for writing this article about it, with his lawyers trying to use the argument that he *personally* had never closed down a pub.

The portfolio of pubs managed by the Aziz family also includes the Streatham Wine House at 53a Streatham Hill, the former Brady’s Pub at 20 Atlantic Rd, SW9, which is now a Franco Manca, the Foxtons in Brixton at 506a Brixton Rd, the Grosvenor Arms on Sidney Road, SW9, a bunch of different buildings on Brixton Hill and Streatham Hill, and The Windmill pub in Blenheim Gardens, Brixton. The Windmill is a thriving music venue, and I’ve not heard anything about it being sold or developed, so hopefully that’s not happening, but if it did get put up for sale, it would be a prime candidate for a beloved pub that could be purchased by the community.

Since Mr Aziz’s lawyers are so interested in my work, I will make it clear here that Mr Aziz does not personally own any of the pubs listed in this article. They are, however, managed by companies controlled by his family.

I found a lot of these properties associated with the Aziz family empire by looking on the Tax Policy Associates offshore map of the UK, which uses open data on offshore companies that own property in the UK. I’d recommend checking it out because it seems to have a recent makeover which makes it even more useful. You’ll probably have to know which companies are part of the Aziz family portfolio, however, as companies like Mendoza and Hamna Wakaf don’t list their ultimate owners.

If you know of any more Aziz-connected properties in London, feel free to get in touch and I’ll add them to my list.

It certainly seems that pubs and other nightlife in Lambeth, as in the rest of London, are not doing well. The housing crisis, Private Equity companies, an unfriendly legislative and licensing environment are all partly to blame. Last year The Londoner reported that some pubs are being harassed with noise complaints that putting onerous licensing conditions on them.

One such example is The Fox on The Hill, a Wetherspoons in Camberwell that sits on Denmark Hill, with a lovely outside area which is a great place to drink in the summer. The Londoner reported that the pub “had its licence reviewed after car alarms, music in the car park and departing patrons trespassing on a local estate were labelled a public nuisance.”

I note that, possibly as a result of these licensing rules, a new CCTV tower has appeared in the garden of the pub, with a security guard stationed there too, just in case you might be thinking of having too much fun.

The new Green council have said they want to be more generous to nightlife and pub venues, and I hope that they seek to make things easier for publicans. I think it would be an amazing idea if the council could do something similar to a Community Energy Project, where money is raised from the local community to build a solar array on a church or school, and then the investors get their money back. I think something similar would be possible to create a community owned pub like the Ivy House in Nunhead. There are not many community-owned pubs in London, and according to the CAMRA list of community-run pubs, there are none in Lambeth. Maybe it’s time to change that?

Prince William’s Duchy of Cornwall estate, which is worth over £1bn, is planning to redevelop a derelict school near the Oval cricket ground into housing which is set to include social rent homes.

Archbishop Tenison’s school next to the Oval cricket ground closed in 2023, a decision which Lambeth council was keen to say it was not responsible for. Instead, the culprit was the cost of living and the housing crises.

Local MP Florence Eshalomi told ITV News that: “We cannot lose a fantastic community asset like this. I hope whatever comes after here is a community facility. Pupil numbers across not just in Lambeth, but across London and the UK are falling. In my constituency we are seeing cases where more and more people are moving further out because they simply cannot afford to live here.”

It seems that while the land was always owned by the Duchy of Cornwall (the personal estate of the Prince of Wales), the Archbishop Tenison’s School Foundation had a lease on the site, and when the school was closed, the lease was up for sale and was bought back by the Duchy. I asked the Duchy if this was the case and they responded saying: “The purchase of the former Archbishop Tenison’s School included both an area of freehold land and the school’s leasehold interest in the part of the site already owned by the Duchy.”

Property consultants Rapleys, who helped with the auction, said:

“Rapleys was originally instructed by the trustees of Archbishop Tenison’s School Foundation (ATSF) to assist with managing a site that had recently become vacant. The original aim of the client was to lease the whole site (rent free) to the London Borough of Lambeth to be used as a state school. When it became clear that the Council did not require the whole school, our instruction changed to a disposal.”

The school site was put up for sale with a guide price of £4.5m-plus, according to Estates Gazette, and was on the market for the first time in 97 years. In the end, it went for £7.8m, with Property Week reporting:

“George Walker, partner and commercial auctioneer at Allsop, said this “was a highlight as it is a high-profile site”. He added: “The process drew out various special purchasers including The Duchy of Cornwall and others who had been interested in buying it for some time. Sadly, we can only sell it once.””

The Duchy announced in 2026 that it plans to sell off roughly 20% of its estate to fund housing and renewable energy projects. As loath as I am to say anything nice about the monarchy as someone who is in principle against the idea of hereditary privilege, schemes like the Oval redevelopment look like they are part of this plan, and I was pleasantly surprised when I attended the public consultation last week to see that the plans included a decent amount of not just ‘affordable’, but actual social rent housing.

Part of the presentation by the architects responsible for the development noted:

The proposals are still evolving and subject to change, but currently feature:

• 55 homes for social rent in a six-storey building

• 65 market rent homes in a six-storey building

• 220 co-living homes in a six to eight-storey building

  

That makes about 16% of the total made up of social rent housing, which is desperately needed in Lambeth. The Berkeley Homes development on the other side of the Oval has more ‘affordable’ housing as a percentage, but a lot of that is made up of shared ownership homes, which I personally don’t think should be classed as affordable. What Lambeth needs are rent-controlled housing units at rates that people can afford on low incomes, and this should hopefully provide that.

I asked the Duchy why the development seemed to have a lower percentage of affordable housing than the recently reduced target of 20% of new developments, and their press office responded: “These percentages, as noted in the Government/GLA announcement earlier this year, are calculated by habitable room - which is the methodology adopted by local authorities to encourage the provision of larger, family size homes rather than one-bed or studio homes. The project is aiming for 35% affordable housing based on habitable room. We do not more detailed/specific numbers to share at this time as the project is still evolving, but happy to keep you updated.”

Maybe I have just become so used to seeing really bad and unaffordable developments being proposed, but if all those social rent homes are built by the Duchy, I think they deserve credit for doing it. On the other hand, Prince William has made homelessness prevention a key part of his charity work, even making a TV programme about the issue last year, so it’s probably fair to ask his massive medieval estate to pull their finger out and actually build some housing that might help to reduce the huge demand for council housing in Lambeth.

There is also the issue of whether the Duchy estates, and the Crown Estate should be the property of the Royal Family at all, or whether their profits should go to the Treasury. A 2023 Guardian investigation revealed that Queen Elizabeth and King Charles had taken profits of over £1 billion from their two private estates, the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, with the newspaper saying:

“Ever since the advent of parliamentary democracy, however, generations of MPs have challenged the arrangement and called for duchy profits to be paid to the Treasury instead. Parliamentary debate has often coincided with the accession of a new monarch, amid renewed scrutiny over their public and private sources of wealth.”

So the development of social housing should be considered within this historical context of increased scrutiny over the landholdings of the royals at a time of change between monarchs, and in the context of the ongoing appalling housing crisis which means that there are currently almost 200,000 homeless people in London alone - most of whom are in temporary accommodation.

Part of the success of the royal family is in good PR, and so I think it’s important to strike a balance between being obsequiously grateful that the royals have deigned to use some of their massive wealth to build a little social housing, and being fair about the fact that this development does include much-needed social housing. Lambeth needs social housing, the Duchy is providing some, and therefore they deserve some credit.

On the other hand, I am mindful that part of the cause of the housing crisis is that we have massively unequal land distribution in the UK as a result of there not having been a proper modern revolution in the country that could have distributed land more equally. The primacy of property rights in British common law means that it is unlikely that we are ever going to have a more equal distribution of land ownership without some serious political upheaval, and it is the ongoing job of the royal family to exclude this possibility by making a performance of being good stewards of their landholdings.

The Duchy is also building homes on its Nansleden estate near Newquay in Cornwall that are intended to address homelessness, so this is not the only effort that they are making to build social housing. I think it’s possible for the private estates of the royals to do much more in the way of building social housing, and it’s the job of the press and a good public sphere to press them to do more (or at least it should be if you do public interest journalism rather than whatever most royal family journalism is).

So I hope that I’ve got this balance right between saying that this development deserves some credit and putting it in context. In the end, the success of this scheme will come down to whether they build as much social housing as they say they will, but I hope that the Duchy won’t do the common developer trick of reducing the percentage of social housing after planning permission has been granted. As it is, it looks like a decent development that does seek to respond to the ongoing housing affordability crisis in the borough.

You can see a slideshow of the boards that were presented at the consultation here.

This post was updated on June 24 with further responses from the Duchy of Cornwall.

I’ve been working on an important story about Lambeth’s Temporary Accommodation (TA) crisis for a number of months now, and like a lot of serious investigative journalism, it takes a long time to get your ducks in a row and make sure your facts are all watertight, especially when you are receiving legal threats from rich people who are determined to stop you from publishing what you’ve found.

Thankfully, the full story was published by The Guardian on Sunday, and you can read it here. I’m not going to repeat most of what we published, but I will add a bit to what we found. Thank you so much to the people who have subscribed to this Substack, as it makes it more possible for me to work on longer investigations like this one.

Investigations like this take months of preparation to make sure you have the facts right and can’t be sued by rich people who employ fancy law firms, which is why much of the mainstream news is reluctant to fund them, as the time and effort they take is far beyond what most employers are willing to pay journalists for their time.

I’ve never done journalism for the money because there is none, but because it’s a public service to expose bad actors and people profiting from human misery. I hope you will agree that this investigation has done that.

The Temporary Accommodation crisis

A recent Housing Committee report from the House of Commons underlines that “too many children and families continue to live in temporary accommodation ‘so poor as to be unfit for human habitation’.” Cash-strapped councils will procure the worst, lowest quality accommodation they can find, and have few inspectors employed to make sure the TA they rent is up to standard. TA has been linked to the deaths of 74 children, according to the BBC.

I would like to speak to people in Lambeth who have experience of living in TA, and who can give evidence about the quality of the homes they were housed in. It is not easy to find people who have experienced homelessness and time in TA, as they often move around and understandably may not want to talk to journalists, but their experiences are important, and are currently missing from this conversation.

This story starts with the financial documents published by Lambeth Council every quarter of the year, and a company called Midos Estates Ltd.

According to Lambeth’s financial records for the past 15 years, this company has been a provider of ‘Bed & Breakfast’ temporary accommodation. Now, however, Lambeth says that this was a mistake, and that the records should have listed a different company - Midos Management Co Ltd. Midos Group, the parent company of Midos Estates, say that they never received any money from TA, and that they are not related in any way to Midos Management. So why did Lambeth, as well as other London councils, seemingly mix up these companies for over a decade?

In response to a Members’ Enquiry by Cllr Nicole Griffiths, Lambeth said “we can confirm that we have been paying Midos Management Co Ltd since 2011 which is as far back as our payment records go. The records on the Lambeth internet £500+ disclosures reflect the error made in the organisation name details. We have corrected this from March 2026. Regarding the disclosure / organisation details (prior to March 2026): this is historical information posted onto the lambeth website, and we are looking into how best to address/notify the error made regarding the organisation name.”

Read more

“Increasing financialisation has, to an extent, distanced democratic control of investment decision-making” - Blood Money report, Shake the CIV

On 1 December 2025, the Lambeth Pension Fund Annual Report was published on the Local Government Pension Scheme website. For some reason these are no longer published on the Lambeth.gov.uk website where the last annual report was for the 20/21 year. The report looks at the performance of the investments that Lambeth council workers have in their pension pots (not very good), and reports on risks to the fund, the primary one of which is that:

“The Fund’s primary long-term risk is that its assets fall short of its liabilities such that there are insufficient resources to pay promised pension benefits to members. Therefore, its investment objectives have been set with the aim of maximising investment returns over the long term within specified risk tolerances, the aim being to optimise the likelihood that pensions and other benefits can be paid as and when they fall due.”

Given that the primary concern of the fund is increasing its value, it’s notable that the performance of the fun has been poor. It returned 1.0% against a benchmark of 3.2% for the year, 0.0% against 3.2% over three years, and 5.6% against 7.2% over five years. Every single asset class underperformed its benchmark in 2024/25.

On the funding side, the picture is more positive. The estimated funding level at 31 March 2025 was 121%, implying a surplus of around £320m, up from 96% at the last formal valuation in March 2022.

As well as the financial risk of a poor investment strategy:

“The Fund recognises various forms of risk that must be considered, monitored, and managed to ensure it can meet its primary objective of providing benefits to its members. These risks are identified and addressed in the Fund’s Investment Strategy Statement and Funding Strategy Statement under several high-level groupings: investment, demographic, solvency, governance, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks, the latter of which also includes climate risk.”

Now you may be asking, considering that there have been ongoing protests for the council to divest its pension funds from complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, does the annual report mention this at all? And of course the answer would be no. There’s vague mention of ESG concerns:

“The Committee believes that environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks (including climate change) should be taken into account on an ongoing basis. ESG considerations are an integral part of the Fund’s strategy and objective of being a long-term investor. The Fund’s policy on ESG issues is set out within its Investment Strategy Statement (ISS) and its Stewardship Report.”

But most of the report is about the investments that the fund has made, including recent investments in private equity funds:

“the Fund agreed commitments to two new private equity funds with the Fund’s existing private equity manager Adams Street Partners; $70m to the 2025 Global Fund and €50m to the 2023 European Venture Fund, although this was not formally accepted by the manager until April 2025. As at 31 March 2025, excluding cash, the Fund’s assets are invested into six separate pooled funds with the London CIV and an additional seven off-pool funds across six managers in various asset classes. In the year to 31 March 2025 the Fund’s net asset value remained relatively static, increasing by just £0.85m.”

London Collective Investment Vehicle (LCIV)

“As at 31 March 2025 the Fund had approximately £1,070.8m pooled through the London CIV, achieving an estimated annual fee saving of £1.1m” - Pension Fund Annual Report

The London Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) Collective Investment Vehicle (CIV) was set up in 2015 as a UK based, Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Authorised Contractual Scheme (ACS). It acts as an umbrella vehicle for the pension funds of all London boroughs to collectively invest capital and benefit from the increased size of the investment portfolio. What it also does is to make it harder for individual councils to have ultimate control of how the pensions of their staff are invested.

The LCIV issued a statement in response to being targeted by Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists, saying:

“In the case of the conflict in Israel/the Occupied Palestinian territories there are allegations of human rights abuses by all parties involved. There are also a large number of local and multinational companies present in the region, undertaking a wide range of functions. Companies may provide a breadth of services including to both military, government and civilians on either side of the conflict. Some companies are focused on this region, while for others the exposure may be a small part of their business.

London CIV has developed an approach to this particular conflict zone, which is outlined under Our Approach, below. In determining our approach, we have been mindful of the needs of our Partner Funds, who have differing views on this matter. London CIV must remain neutral except where led by the UK government, for example in the case of sanctions. We consider ESG related risks on a case-by-case basis, taking into account our overall fiduciary duty.”

The approach the LCIV follows is one that involves “taking a neutral stance, to respecting UK law and the UK’s interpretation of international rulings, and to considering case studies on their own merits.” They say they engage with external investment managers about why they hold certain funds, and monitor ”exposure to companies active in the Israel/Palestine region since 2021. We use the following lists: United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner’s A/HRC/37/39 Report, the WhoProfits database, and the AFSC (Investigate) watchlist. We consider that these are the most politically balanced and thorough sources of information that we can access.”

The group Rank & File Trade Unionists for Divestment from Israel (RAFTUDI) have produced a pamphlet which criticises councils who have made resolutions to divest only from companies on the OHCHR UN list, which “based on companies with links to settlements in the OPT. This represents a small fraction of complicit investments, even when calculated using the non-exhaustive PSC list of companies.” RAFTUDI say that in the case of Southwark Council’s divestment resolution, the UN list covers “less than 5% of the £97 million invested in companies linked to Israel. The list does not include investments in huge companies like Elbit, BAE Systems, Barclays, Google and Amazon.”

At the beginning of 2026, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign presented a petition of over 5,000 signatures to Lambeth council, calling for divestment from companies implicated in Israel’s genocide. Lambeth Council blocked the petition organisers from speaking at a full meeting of the council, with Brixton Buzz reporting at the time: “Under Lambeth council’s constitution, petitions with over 3,000 signatures should be heard and given full debate at the council’s public meetings. The seeming refusal to hear the voice of those opposing genocide in Lambeth is the latest attempt to block those showing solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

Lambeth also blocked a Green Party motion on divestment at the same meeting, using delaying tactics and gutting opposition motions, leading the Green Party councillors to walk out. The same meeting was also interrupted by ACORN members complaining about the use of bailiffs to collect council tax, resulting in a farcically disorganised and bad-tempered meeting, perhaps portending the coming collapse of the Labour administration. The Green group is now led by ex-Labour councillor Martin Abrams, who had the whip withdrawn for voting for a Green-led motion on Gaza, and subsequently defected to the Green Party. Abrams has been a vocal supporter of divestment campaigns, and so it will be interesting to see how far the new Green-led council will be able to push divestment given the constraints of the LCIV.

Campaign group Shake The CIV’s Blood Money report, published in 2025, states that:

“An investment manager with a £34.2 billion portfolio, the LCIV invests a staggering £7 billion in companies known to be enabling Israel’s grave violations of Palestinian human rights. The London CIV says £6.5bn of this are passive strategies, managed by third-party fund managers, not under London CIV management and entirely outside the pool’s control in terms of any investment decisions. Its latest statement in response to the campaign can be read in full here. The money in LCIV’s portfolio — which elsewhere it consistently describes and depicts as including the full £7 billion of complicit funds — is the pooled pension funds of London local authorities; the deferred wages of around 700,000 Londoners. The complicit companies include arms manufacturers like Elbit Systems, technology firms like Palantir, and numerous other companies, like logistics firm Maersk, implicated in human rights abuses. “

For their part, LCIV disputes these figures, saying in a September 2025 statement that the £7 billion figure is incorrect, and the data “actually showed that London CIV’s exposure stood at £713 million, which equated to 4% of the pool’s total assets under management.” They say that campaign groups included “Partner Fund exposures in their own passive strategies (often described as “deemed pooled”), which totalled £6.5bn. These passive strategies are managed by third-party fund managers, not under London CIV management and entirely outside the pool’s control in terms of any investment decisions.”

So you see, Lambeth’s pension fund is not under their control because it’s pooled with the LCIV, while LCIV’s investments are also not under their control, because they include investments that they also don’t control, so nobody’s really responsible for this and we can all wash our hands and walk away from the pile of bodies under the rubble of a thousand flattened Gazan apartment blocks.

Despite LCIV’s claims that they can’t do anything more about their investments, Shake The CIV’s report notes that “Despite quietly selling off Israeli state bonds and claiming to be “assessing” its investments in 12 unnamed companies, meaningful material change is still lacking.“

It does seem, however, that there are examples of London councils who are able to divest from their CIV commitments. Waltham Forest, for example, has been working with the LCIV to divest its pension funds from exposure to the global arms trade. The council reported on March 25 that:

“Following a detailed analysis of its current portfolio, the Fund confirmed its ability to divest without any material detrimental impact on its financial position at a Pension Committee meeting on Wednesday 25 March. This breakthrough delivers on the commitment made in 2024 to pursue divestment in a financially responsible way. The transition will begin as soon as suitable alternative investments become available through the London Collective Investment Vehicle (CIV), the government-established investment pool that manages pension funds for London local authorities.”

Waltham Forest also say that they have “agreed to adopt a new framework to strengthen its ability to make additional ethical exclusions, including from UN-identified companies linked to human rights abuses, once it has been formed by the London CIV. As always, all final investment decisions will be guided by an overriding principle that there must be no material, detrimental financial impact on the Fund.”

So it does seem that it will be possible to at least divest CIV funds from the companies listed by the UN as complicit in Israel’s genocide. This is not going to satisfy BDS campaigners who believe the list doesn’t go far enough, but it is at least a step in the right direction.

Well, I didn’t win a seat on the council by just 17 votes. On the one hand, it’s disappointing to lose by such a small margin, but on the other hand we ran a really good race in my ward without many resources and we got my colleague Patience elected. A lot of people split their votes between different candidates, and the independent candidate who was supported by Roger Hallam’s Shake It Up group got around 200 votes.

Hallam’s group did exactly what I expected and warned them that they would do - they got a tiny amount of votes, campaigned in a ward they could never win, and didn’t have the resources or the volunteers to mount a serious challenge. I hope that the independent candidates they stood will continue doing community work, and I’d encourage Green councillors who did get elected to reach out to them.

I was generally left with the impression that Hallam is quite politically naive, doesn’t understand how long it takes to do proper community organising, and is a flighty campaigner who quickly gets bored with his current project and moves on when it inevitably fails, or gets kicked out like in the case of XR. I also witnessed his campaigners breaking a number of election rules, particularly by flyposting on lampposts with information about their candidates, which is against Lambeth’s electoral rules.

On the other hand, there are good aspects to not being elected. It means I have more time to carry on with my journalism, as I think I might have had to abandon Investigating Lambeth if I had won because it would have been difficult to be inside Lambeth council and also report on it. I now have a lot of useful contacts on the council, and I am optimistic that a Green-led administration would open up the council’s finances and contracts with companies for the public to scrutinise, which would mean a lot for me to talk about on here.

Before that happens, the Greens need to choose a leader for the council, a process that is currently being decided by a vote of the elected councillors, and then the party needs to reach some kind of agreement with the Liberal Democrat group if it hopes to achieve a voting majority. This could prove tricky if both parties are a bit reticent about getting into any formal agreement with each other (for understandable reasons), which means that an informal, ‘confidence and supply’ agreement is more likely.

Reflecting on the campaign in Myatt’s Fields specifically, it was wonderful to meet so many local people in my area, and talk to so many people about the things that need fixing. There is a huge amount of flytipping in the borough, and waste is generally not being collected effectively. On the Myatt’s Fields North Estate, owned by Regenter Myatt’s Field North, and managed by Pinnacle, I saw lots of underground waste collection areas which were not working because they were totally full and needed to be emptied, resulting in piles of rubbish being left beside them. Regenter is getting paid £13 million a year by Lambeth to run the estate, but seems to be totally failing to collect the rubbish.

On other housing estates like the Cowley estate, I met people who were living in cramped, overcrowded council properties, who were bidding for bigger homes on the council’s bidding website, but coming hundreds of places down the bidding pecking order when 500 people or more are applying for every new council property that becomes available.

I also met people who were sofa surfing or living with friends and family after refusing to accept temporary accommodation outside the borough. These people are in very precarious situations, relying on the kindness of their friends and family, but often suffering their own mental health or other health problems at the same time. As Lambeth’s own news site said last November:

“Lambeth also expects that the majority [of homeless families] will have to move out of the borough – and often out of the southeast – where there is a greater supply of affordable accommodation”.

These problems will take time to turn around under a Green-led council, and some of the answers to this cannot be done on a Local Authority level. When Thatcher closed the GLC in 1986, responsibility for housing devolved to individual councils. I personally think housing should be done on a London-wide level, because people are often not tied to one borough, and it would avoid the problem of councils competing against each other for limited housing.

But one thing the Green victory does hopefully mean is that Labour can no longer use the borough as a training ground for its future MPs. It is no longer a safe Labour area they can take for granted, offering us loyal Special Advisors as council candidates who they know will always toe the party line. The Green Party knows none of its new seats are safe ones that they can take for granted, and I expect them to work hard to retain their seats in 2030.

My friend Andrew Kersley wrote a good summary of the election and the history of Labour’s project in Lambeth for The Londoner, which I’d encourage you to read here. Brixton Buzz also had a good report here.

Labour is failing on a national level, of course, but locally they have also been hollowed out by an authoritarian local party leadership who were happy to tell anyone to the left of Ghenghis Khan that they weren’t wanted in the party. Those people largely went to join the Green Party, and aren’t coming back any time soon.

Before the election I had a civil conversation with one Lambeth councillor who told me that the party’s failures on housing were because they had to agree to working with the private sector to build housing in order to get funding for their plans. It’s certainly true that Local Authorities are constrained in how they build housing by national rules, although it has become more possible for councils to borrow to build than it was in the past, but I still felt this excuse was a bit pathetic.

A council with real teeth and independence of mind would not have blindly followed their national party’s insistence that they must only build housing in partnership with big private housebuilders. This is an aspect of Labour’s internal authoritarianism, and its slavish demand for obedience to the higher ups. If you believe in building real council housing, you cannot accept being forced to do this only through letting big private housebuilders demolish whole estates and then beg them to build a little affordable housing along with lots of expensive market rate homes.

Although I will have no say in how a Green-run council approaches building social housing, I will be there to hold them to account for doing so, and I will report on what progress (or not) is being made. It’s a new era for Lambeth, with new possibilities to alleviate the problems that plague our borough, and there is a lot of work to be done.

Lambeth Council has spent £122,086,918.04 on consultancy fees since 1 January 2019, according to data from Lambeth’s spending records.

The biggest recipient of money for consultancy fees was the company Capita Plc & Business Services Ltd. Capita’s website says it is “Delivering better citizen services for Lambeth Council through intelligent communications”. Interestingly, one of its main offices is in Oval Business Park on the Brixton Road in Lambeth.

The company is “partnering with the London Borough of Lambeth, using artificial intelligence to improve communication processes, streamline operations and drive better customer experiences across key departments, including corporate services, revenues and benefits and parking enforcement. Our solutions support council efficiencies, contribute to carbon reduction and maximise income.”

This is interesting because in April 2025, Lambeth responded to my Freedom of Infromation request asking if they used AI in the provision of any public services, denying it with the simple answer ‘No’.

The biggest amounts of money given to Capita Plc were in 2021, so it seems fair to assume that Lambeth’s denial of using AI looks somewhat dubious.

What exactly is Capita Plc doing with AI for Lambeth? Their website continues: “Using AI, we designed an overarching, purpose-built management information (MI) dashboard and employee help portal, enabling the council’s central team to review department-specific details quickly and easily. This solution optimises digital change spending, maximising cost savings and efficiency.”

I’m doing a PhD looking at the effects of AI on journalism, and reading widely on the subject, so I’m familiar with how AI hype can be used to sell products and promise dramatic cost savings, as seems to be the case here. Capita says they used AI to build a dashboard. Dashboards generally bring different kinds of data together in one place for managers to understand it. Either they used AI to code the dashboard, or they are saying that the analysis and suggestions for actions are managed by AI systems, both of which are bad.

The council’s finances are horrendous, with around £1 billion of debt. Yet it seems they are abdicating responsibility for making spending decisions, and getting AI software to suggest the best ways to cut costs and ‘maximise efficiency’. These are not decisions that should be taken by AI systems like Large Language Models, and the cheapest and most efficient decisions are often bad because they have serious social consequences, which an AI model will not necessarily see as a reason not to suggest a particular course of action.

The Capita Plc website continues: “All mail is now redirected from Lambeth properties and delivered to our mail processing centre in Darlington, where AI-driven rules ensure documents are routed correctly. A hybrid print driver allows users to print from desktops directly to our central print site in Mansfield, where mail is printed, enveloped, and dispatched.”

So when you correspond with Lambeth, your mail is sent 257 miles north to Darlington (a journey of almost 5 hours by car), so that it can be sorted and rerouted by another AI-driven Capita software system.

Capita says it has been running “a customised print and mail service for the council’s revenues and benefits department in 2011, which is still in use today”, and it also has the contract to run Lambeth’s parking system from 2018-2026. Capita says its services help the council save money, but how much? Capita is paid around £2 million a year for its services, but there isn’t much hard evidence of what this buys the council beyond its mail and parking systems being outsourced.

Capita is the kind of company you’d expect Lambeth Council to work with, as its success is connected to the advent of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) model. According to Capita’s Wikipedia page: “A key development in Capita’s fortunes was the emergence of the private finance initiative (PFI) model, under which private companies such as Capita could secure government contracts that involved them paying for the construction and delivery costs of a given project, such as a school or hospital, and earning income by renting the finished project to the public sector. Via PFI, Capita was awarded contracts for the provision of various services across numerous British government departments, including the National Health Service and the Ministry of Defence.”

Capita’s website says it is “equipping more than 500 employees with advanced AI skills”, which will improve their efficiency as employees, and lead to “a significant shift toward a data and AI-augmented workforce, where technical skills are used to remove manual administrative burdens and accelerate decision making.” The company is also implementing AI in its hiring systems for the 10,000 temporary workers it employs every year.

I think more questions need to be asked about how council staff are using Capita’s AI dashboard to make decisions, and what decisions they are making using these tools. AI does not understand social systems, moral questions, or whether decisions are politically wise. It can give you options for cutting costs when your council is £1 billion in debt, but not whether these cuts will have other, unintended costs.

Other companies

One of the companies that was paid over £1 million for ‘Consultancy Fees’ was Ashe Roofing Limited, which seems to be a roofing company according to its Companies House page. Lambeth does sometimes make mistakes in its records, so without sending in an FoI, it’s hard to know why they would have paid a roofing company for consultancy.

There may also be a mistake with the description for Regenter Myatt’s Field North Ltd, the company which runs the PFI-built ‘regenerated’ Myatt’s Field North estate, which they prefer to call Oval Quarter, and which I wrote about last week. These payments are for upkeep and management of the estate, so perhaps they just put ‘Consultancy Fees’ in the description because it doesn’t fall neatly under another description used on Lambeth’s financial disclosures.

That could also be the case for ‘Sundry refunds’, which again doesn’t seem consultancy related, while there’s a redacted company, ‘******’, which raises questions about why a supplier would not want their relationship with Lambeth Council to be public.

Keybridge House 2 LLP was set up in 2017 and is owned by A2dominion Developments Limited, which runs the A2Dominion housing association who are a provider of social housing to Lambeth Council. The Keybridge development in Vauxhall seems to be a luxury housing development, where you can buy homes for just 53,520,000 Rubles, or around £530,000, according to one website I found:

Very close to this development is Wyvil Primary School, and it appears that what Lambeth Council are paying Keybridge/A2Dominion for is the Wyvil Primary School expansion (Keybridge House phase II),

“A two-form expansion of Wyvil Primary School, delivered in partnership between the council and Mount Anvil, by 2021.” The council’s website says this project cost £79 million, and “is saving the council in the region of £8m and will also create 13 intermediate rent flats for which the council has secured nomination rights for ‘key workers’ in frontline public services.”

None of this stuff really seems like ‘Consultancy Fees’ to me, but then I had a similar experience when I was writing about why the council was spending so much on legal fees, only to realise they paid a law firm around £14 million to extend leases on homes used to house council tenants. These are really housing and construction costs, for some reason listed as consultancy costs.

Once again, Lambeth’s finances are an opaque maze of indeterminate definitions and messy record keeping, making it really very difficult to see exactly how much money is being spent on what.

On 8 July 2024, just a few days after the General Election, Rachel Reeves visited the Berkeley Homes development Oval Village in the North of Lambeth to don a hard hat and tell the press she wanted to get Britain building.

In November 2025, Lambeth Council’s news website Love Lambeth published an article championing its partnership in the Oval Village development, saying that “More than 100 new, high quality affordable homes are now available for families in need from Lambeth”.

Council leader Claire Holland said: “In Lambeth, the housing crisis is the worst it has ever been. We have more than 29,000 families on our housing waiting list and more than 4,500 families in temporary accommodation. So, I’m delighted that these 102 desperately needed new affordable homes here in Oval are now available to house residents in need. In fact, people have already started to move in, which is brilliant news.”

That’s great, right? 102 new homes for people on the council waiting list and in Temporarty Accommodation (TA)…

Well no, this is of course not for the people in TA. They get put in the worst quality housing, expensively procured from the private sector. Lambeth has not said what kind of tenants have been offered the new homes in Oval Village, except that they are ‘local people’, which would indicate those on the council waiting list.

When the project was given planning permission in 2018, Cllr Matthew Bennett, Lambeth Cabinet Member for Planning, Investment & New Homes, said: “Bringing this polluted, largely vacant land into use for desperately needed new homes, as well as new offices and public spaces, delivers major benefits for both Kennington and the wider borough. This significant piece of land will be integrated it into the local neighbourhood for the first time in 150 years. Nearly 200 of the new homes built here will be for genuinely affordable and social rent, as we use all our powers as a council to tackle the housing crisis.

When you walk around Oval Village, it’s certainly not the social and affordable homes being advertised on the billboards touting luxury apartments.

According to the Love Lambeth website, “The newly completed homes include 20 for London Affordable Rent which are now occupied by local people, and 82 for Shared Ownership, giving buyers the chance to purchase a minimum 25% share and step onto the property ladder with a lower deposit.“

Sadiq Khan introduced two new ‘affordable’ housing types (London Affordable Rent and London Living Rent) when he became Mayor of London in 2016. The London Plan 2021 says 50% of new homes delivered in London should be ‘genuinely affordable’; 30% of which should be low-cost rented, 30% intermediate and 40% as determined by individual boroughs.

The table I found below on londontenants.org suggests that London Affordable Rent (LAR), while significantly lower than market rate, does not include service charges, which in a development like the Berkeley Homes Oval Village could be quite high.

A 2018 article on Inside Housing said that “How rent is calculated and how much should be paid is not as clear as it could be”, and that “One London rental expert tells Inside Housing that the LAR is, in effect, a means by which housing associations can apply for grants for social rented homes while still coming under the auspices of the AHP.” That’s the Affordable Homes Programme.

So it looks like Berkeley Homes are benefitting from grants to provide 20 new rent-controlled homes on a development which will end up with 1360 new homes. When all the homes are built, there are due to be more ‘social rent’ homes, according to Berkeley’s press department who listed the final breakdown as:

Total homes: 1357

• Private homes: 844

• Affordable homes: 513

  • Social rent: 283

  • Shared ownership: 230

So the breakdown of affordable homes includes 283 at ‘social rent’ (of which the above 20 are the first to be built), with another 230 shared ownership homes. I personally don’t think that shared ownership should be classed as ‘affordable’ because you still have to be able to afford a mortgage, and because these homes can also become much less affordable if large service charges are levied, as many people have been finding out in recent years according to a recent podcast I listened to.

Shared ownership homes in the Oval Village development start from £118,750 for a 25% share of a £475,000 flat.

One other thing to note is that ‘Social Rent’ and ‘London Affordable Rent’ are not the same thing. The Berkeley Homes press department said there would be 283 homes at social rent, but the 20 which have just been built are said to be London Affordable Rent homes, according to the Love Lambeth website.

If the first 20 are not in fact social rent, but LAR, it seems likely to me that the rest of them will be too. 283 out of 1357 total homes on the estate would actually be 20% affordable housing. If these are filled with people on the council house waiting list, which the council leader Claire Holland said was over 29,000 people, then that is a good thing.

It may be, however, that these homes turn out to be less affordable than they seem, if the tenants have to pay big service charges or if their council tax increases as a result of the value of the homes. Inside Housing stated in 2018 that LAR rents were “significantly north of social rents in the capital.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that “developers such as Berkeley Group Holdings Plc are pulling back from building homes in London due to unfavorable economics, with the company citing a continuous increase in the tax and regulatory burden on residential development.”

Inside Housing reported on 2 April that Berkeley is stopping buying land and hiring staff due to rising costs.

Companies like Berkeley do not really want to build affordable homes, but the confusion over different types of affordable rent and the inclusion of shared ownership in affordable rent quotas allows them to boast about providing more affordable housing than may really be the case.

While there are no records of Berkeley specifically donating to Labour, other housing developers appear to have been part of a secretive Breakfast Club donation scheme that funnelled money to Labour before the last election.

This is somewhat ironic given that Labour was criticising the Tories in 2021 after The Guardian revealed that 13% of its donations were from property developers. Steve Reed, the shadow communities and local government secretary at the time, said the donations were “yet more evidence of the cosy relationship between the Conservative party and property developers, who for their investment will be allowed to concrete over communities at will”.

When you look into some of Labour’s claims to be encouraging the building of affordable and social rent housing, like Berkeley’s Oval Village, they turn out to be a lot of hot air, the problematic details hidden in the small print.

The state continues to refuse to get involved in housebuilding itself, with Labour providing funding of £39 billion over the course of the next 10 years for Local Authorities and private developers to build social and affordable housing.

This is clearly inadequate. The defence budget hovers around £70 billion a year, with suggestions this could double over the next few years as the British government jumps to attention for Donald Trump’s demands that we increase spending to 5% of GDP.

Only the state can coordinate the sums of money required, the training of the builders and other people required to kickstart a housing revolution, and the identification of the land needed. It’s time we used the power of the state for what it is intended for - doing things at a national scale that individual companies cannot achieve alone.

We’ve forgotten what government is for after 45 years of Thatcherism. There is such a thing as society, but it’s up to the state to build the society we want.

I recently started reading Stuart Hodkinson’s book Safe As Houses: private greed, political negligence and housing policy after Grenfell. Part of the book discusses:

“The comprehensive regeneration of Myatts Field North (MFN) estate in the London Borough of Lambeth, originally built in the mid-1970s as part of a slum clearance and area improvement plan, with the provision of 477 homes. After years of delays and uncertainty, in 2012 Lambeth signed a £272.4 million contract for 25 years with Regenter Myatts Field North Ltd, a joint venture between Pinnacle Regeneration Group and John Laing Investments Ltd, to carry out the demolition and replacement of approximately 300 homes, to refurbish the remainder (again by Rydon), to provide new community facilities and green spaces, to build 503 new private flats outside of the PFI contract, and to connect all new and existing homes to a district heating system run by the energy giant E.ON.”

Rydon, by the way, is the company that installed the flammable cladding on Grenfell tower.

Like many housing schemes, such as the privatisation and ‘regeneration’ of Clapham Park, where I worked as a community organiser in 2013-14, the realities of the Myatt’s Field North redevelopment were somewhat different to what its residents were promised. According to Hodkinson, there were an “extraordinary number of defective works and services that plagued the refurbishment and new housing” on the redeveloped estate. And Lambeth Council has to keep paying Regenter for this, with costs of over £13 million in 2025, according to Lambeth’s own financial disclosures, which I have turned into the graph below.

MFN reminds me a lot of Clapham Park estate, where I worked, and where previous attempts to refurbish that estate under the New Deal for Communities (NDC) grant funding had run out of money by the early 2000s. After this, a ‘cross-subsidy’ model development was abandoned in 2002 when the council was briefly run by a Lib Dem-Tory coalition from 2002-2006. In 2003, the council then pursued a PFI model for regeneration, which allowed them to avoid the need for unpopular, high density residential towers. However, there was a vocal anti-privatisation campaign by residents, and the government rejected Lambeth’s first proposal in 2005. After further assurances, council tenants voted 55% in favour of the PFI scheme in July 2005, with leaseholders voting yes by 64%.

The PFI scheme was then hit by more delays when Mayor of London Ken Livingstone objected to the planning application, insisting that the scheme should include a new district heating system instead of individual gas boilers. Then the global financial crisis hit in 2007-8, which saw reduced private finance available and resulted in the unravelling of the PFI scheme’s complex financial model.

Finally in December 2009, Lambeth announced that Regenter had been chosen as the scheme’s preferred bidder, with Pinnacle PSG running the homes and estate services, Higgins Construction PLC doing the new housing, facilities and estate remodelling, and Rydon Maintenance Ltd would provide long term repair and maintenance services. On a walk around the estate today, I saw a couple of Rydon vehicles parked there, one with its engine running and the driver just sitting there listening to the radio.

Pinnacle and Higgins Homes PLC were also contracted to build private residential developments through a separate joint venture company outside the PFI contract, with E.On providing the district heating. However, when Savills (at the time a shareholder in Pinnacle) submitted a planning application in 2010, it was nothing like the scheme they had voted on. The number of private flats for sale had doubled from 187 to 439, while Regenter’s requirement to provide 50% affordable units in any additional housing was waived. The residents’ objections were ignored, and planning permission granted.

The protracted consultation and procurement process added to the costs of the PFI scheme, with the government’s and Lambeth’s expected contributions both rising sharply. The start of the scheme was delayed again by the 2010 election and the beginning of austerity policies. “The Coalition’s subsequent abolition of social housing grants saw £12.4 removed that had been earmarked for Regenter’s promised 105 social rented homes,” according to Hodkinson. The Coalition also cut £15.8 million from PFI credits for the scheme. The resulting £28.2 million funding gap required Lambeth and Regenter to make major changes to the project, which were “designed to cut costs while protecting the private companies’ profit margins.”

Costs were cut by slashing design and materials budgets, with the community centre reduced in size and air conditioning removed. The ‘handback standard’, the condition the estate would be in when handed back to Lambeth after 25 years, would be reduced, and the number of private homes being developed was increased from 398 to 503. Still the savings weren’t enough, and Lambeth increased its net annual contribution to £1.986 million in 2011 prices. These costs were also passed down to residents, with rents and service charges increasing.

“In summary, austerity had combined with this heavily financialised form of regeneration to generate

huge cuts to Lambeth’s housing budget, 105 fewer social homes, reduced quality of design and materials, lower service standards and a huge increase in private development on land that had been effectively gifted to private developers.” (Hodkinson, 2019, p128)

When Rydon began works on the refurbished homes that were being spared demolition, the work was carried out shoddily, and when one resident complained to Rydon’s project manager, he was told: “Look mate, it ain’t Chelsea round here.”

In 2013, residents were surprised to see signs going up for ‘Oval Quarter’, with a website that laundered the site’s connection to Brixton while doing its best to hide the council housing on the estate. The name chosen by the PFI company may have been chosen to appeal to Asian investors, with Pinnacle Regeneration Group having been taken over by a Hong Kong billionaire, Cheng Yu-tung, in 2011, at a time when the Asian investor market accounted for 48% of London investment in 2013. Hodkinson says that the overall effect was to turn a predominantly public housing estate, with 3 in every 4 homes for council tenants, into one which was 62 percent private.

Then the problems with E.On’s district heating system began. It was regularly faulty, with unscheduled outages on 48 days between February 2013 and April 2017, including Christmas Day 2014, when the majority of homes lost heating for most of the day. Inexplicable and high bills were charged to residents, some of whom were forced into fuel poverty by the faulty systems, which E.On ended up admitting were not sending accurate readings to the company. One older resident who had lived on the estate for 25 years was found dead in 2016 with no food in his flat. He had decided to pay his heating bills rather than buy food.

Homeowners on the estate also found that the promises for them to remain on the estate by porting their mortgages to a newbuild home were empty. Mortgage providers often refused to lend to low income residents largely from ethnic minority backgrounds, and the help they had been told was on offer by Pinnacle was nowhere to be found. Many were forced to sell up at low rates and move out of the area. Both Pinnacle and Lambeth had motivations for selling off the homes not taken up by residents who were unable to move into like-for-like properties on the new estate, as they would both profit by selling them on the open market.

After Grenfell in 2017, an ITV investigation found that Rydon had not fitted fire doors to national safety standards, despite one resident complaining about the issue to Pinnacle in 2014, who never replied to their emails. Hodkinson concludes his chapter on MFN by saying:

“Behind each act of dispossession was a very clear financial imperative running through the PFI model to capture profit from land and services at the expense of residents’ well-being. This underlines how the financing underpinning Lambeth’s PFI regeneration scheme - and the crucial acquisition and rehousing of homeowners - depended hugely on the commodification, marketisation and gentrification of the estate, unlocking existing open and built space for the purpose of profit-seeking private development.”

In 2025 Lambeth Council said it hoped to reduce borrowing costs for the MFN PFI scheme by refinancing its debt. Brixton Buzz reported that “the Council identified in 2023 a number of issues relating to the performance of the contract. The settlement two years ago resulted in money being returned to the Council, but the exact amount remained confidential. Now it seems that a new refinancing agreement will boost the Council coffers by £4.1M.”

This seems like a bit of a PR exercise by a council which is trying to make its huge costs for the scheme seem less bad. As the financial data above shows, the council is now paying Regenter MFN over £13 million a year. Yet the mess and complexity of the PFI contract carries on. In 2022, Brixton Buzz also reported that Lambeth was spending £189,000 “on ‘technical’ advice on managing the mess of the PFI contract at the Myatts Fields estate ‘regeneration.’ The Council admits that having pushed through the New Labour Private Finance Initiative model to manage the estate, the Town Hall doesn’t have the insider knowledge to work out what has gone wrong with the contract. Instead it wants to spend close to £200,000 on a three year deal with Montagu Evans LLP to sort out the Myatts Fields mess for residents.

So how much is that costing Lambeth? According to my database of financial spending since 2019:

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that privatisation and outsourcing are more costly in the long run.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes a lot of data about the populations of Local Authority areas like Lambeth. It’s interesting to compare Lambeth to other local authorities to see what unique attributes the borough has that make it both one of the best places to live, and also an incredibly difficult place to live for many people.

One of the most interesting revelations from these statistics, published in 2024, is that Lambeth’s population is falling faster than anywhere else in the country. You can see all the data on this here, but the TLDR is that Lambeth is an outlier in terms of how much its population is shrinking.

Lambeth has a much bigger population than the average Local Authority (LA) area, but it also seems to have had quite a big downturn which coincided with the pandemic. A lot of people seemingly decided that the rents and other costs of living close to central London weren’t worth it, and moved elsewhere. Lambeth’s younger median age also suggests it’s a place where young people live, but leave once they have families.

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