David Floyd looks back on four years of Labour and ahead to May’s local election

The 2022 local election provided a historic moment for Barnet as Labour won a majority at the town hall for the first time since the borough was created in 1965.

While Labour’s vote only increased by 4% compared to 2018, that was enough for the party to gain 16 seats and leave Barry Rawlings as leader of the council.

The Conservatives under Dan Thomas, now seeking to become Reform first minister of Wales, were out of power after 20 years, having first removed the previous Labour/Lib Dem coalition in 2002.

Labour’s weird tax claims

Labour came to power with a manifesto that included five key pledges: to freeze council tax in 2022 and ‘keep it low’; invest more in CCTV; protect and enhance green spaces; protect weekly bin collections and finally to “stand up to developers” on the basis that “we need more affordable family homes not tower-block blight”.

Some pledges have been fulfilled (on CCTV and bin collections) and opinions may differ on the extent to which the borough’s green spaces have been enhanced but it’s the other two pledges that have led to the most controversy.

Labour went into the election pledging to refund a 1% increase in the social care precept made by the outgoing Conservative administration in its 2022/23 budget, which had frozen core council tax rates that year.

On arriving in office they soon found that literally refunding the money midway through the financial year would be procedurally complicated and decided to find another way to fulfill the pledge. Then, at least as Labour portrays the situation, came the ‘Liz Truss mini budget’.

After the economic shocks of September 2022, the financial outlook for many councils suddenly became more stark. So much so that by the time Barnet Labour came to set its budget for 2023/24, it was in no position to even consider actually cutting taxes. Instead, it contorted its way out of the problem by implementing a combined rise of 3.8% in council tax and social care precept while claiming that it had provided a “refund” of the Conservative increase by not raising council tax by a further 1%.

If that experience caused many residents to develop a tolerance for the preposterous, they would come to need it when engaging with subsequent budget discussions. Whether or not the administration is wholly (or even primarily) to blame, the reality is that taxes have continued to rise, while council leader Barry Rawlings has continued to make ever more implausible claims about his commitment to keeping them low.

Last month, in their final budget before the election, Barnet Labour put up taxes by 4.98% with Rawlings bizarrely expressing his pride in keeping the rise 0.01% below the maximum amount allowed without holding a referendum. This amounts to a 15 pence annual saving for a resident of a Band D property. The Post can only hope that citizens spend this money wisely.

Standing up to some developers

The final pledge, and the most ambiguous, was the promise that: “We will stand up to developers: we need more affordable family homes not tower-block blight.”

In power, Barnet Labour has certainly leaned into the ambiguity. It has definitely stood up to some developers while, at other times, apparently being content to carry out its interactions while remaining fully seated.

The most prominent instances of standing up have occurred in the past few months, a shift that cynics may suspect overlaps with councillors’ fears about the upcoming election result.

December saw two sets of tower blocks blocked by the council’s strategic planning committee with Regal’s plan for the Great North Leisure Park and Barratt London’s plans for the High Barnet tube station car park both firmly biffed eight to one by a combination of Labour and Conservative councillors.

Residents of virtually anywhere in the UK apart from inner London may have been surprised by the committee’s apparently solemnly held view that the bid to develop the Leisure Park, a twelve minute walk from a high street served by ten bus routes and a 25 minute walk from a tube station, needed to be refused at least partly due to its poor transport links.

While both refusals were the culmination of strong local campaigns by Our North Finchley and The Barnet Society (among others), local campaigning was not enough to prevent another equally controversial scheme getting the go ahead.

In Edgware, developers Ballymore and TfL received the green light for their plans to build over 3,300 homes in the town centre. Being next to the tube station, these properties will (in theory) have good transport links although the scheme does also involve knocking down the bus station and building a highly controversial underground bus garage.

Labour claimed they had no choice about backing the scheme because it was part of the Local Plan that the previous Conservative administration had initiated. This prior support didn’t stop Tory councillors on the committee voting against the scheme.

No money, many problems

As its term has continued, the overriding theme of Labour’s time in office has been its extraordinary lack of money. If some eyebrows were raised last year, when cabinet member for finance Simon Radford needed to request £55.7million of exceptional financial support (EFS) to balance the 2024/25 budget, they would have been raised even further following this year’s request for EFS of £79.3m.

Labour blames the need to use EFS – which means it receives permission from the government to borrow money to cover its costs – on the rising bills for services that it is legally obliged to deliver such as temporary accommodation for homeless people, services for vulnerable children and adult social care.

The Conservatives can hardly claim that this problem doesn’t exist. They were in power in 2012 when officers shared the Barnet ‘Graph of Doom’, a powerpoint slide predicted that the council’s entire income would be spent on children’s services and social care in 20 years’ time.

However, this year’s bailout comes after a central government review of council funding to ensure it is “fair”. Whether or not Labour is to blame, they currently seem short of serious ideas about how the borough will ever be able to balance books other than, as the Conservatives warn, through huge council tax rises.

Aside from being engulfed by an ongoing financial crisis, council leader Rawlings has faced a smorgasbord of additional tribulations: ranging from those which have raised serious questions about his leadership to those which even many of his critics would admit were beyond his control.

The former include the revelations in a Sky News documentary in November that three young people who had been in the council’s care had died shortly after leaving it. Whether or not the council was significantly at fault for what happened, opposition councillors and campaigners were deeply unhappy about the apparent lack of transparency in the council’s response – and Rawlings ended up on Sky News explaining why he wasn’t going to resign.

Two other challenges arose from within the Labour group itself. Earlier this month, the party’s former councillor for Whetstone Liron Velleman was given a suspended prison sentence for child sex offences last month, following investigations into which had prompted his mysterious, abrupt departure from the town hall last year.

Prior to that, the council’s cabinet member for finance Ammar Naqvi was fired from his role by Rawlings after the Post revealed that he had claimed to be a professor at UCL Medical School, when the reality was that he had never worked there.

Four party battle

Not too long ago, this year’s election was shaping up to be another straight fight between the Conservatives and Labour. In 2022, the local Lib Dems confirmed their growing local moribundity while the Greens failed to make a significant breakthrough. Reform did not even contest the election.

Now the picture is quite different. Both Reform and the Greens have gained councillors through defections and are planning to run full slates in May. The national polls suggest both could have a big impact but neither have yet made a major breakthrough in a by-election in the borough.

The upshot of this is, while it still seems likely either Rawlings’ Labour or the Conservatives, led by Peter Zinkin, will ultimately form the next administration, the other parties will definitely have a big impact on which of them gets to do so and may even end up in a coalition.

The potential third and fourth party surge means that it’s harder than usual to say which wards are marginals and which are safe bets.

For example, Labour won Woodhouse ward in North Finchley by a wide margin in 2022 but the Greens have strong home of a breakthrough there, with local candidates George Ttoouli and Charli Thompson having been heavily involved in the successful Our North Finchley campaign.

Similarly, the Conservatives finished well ahead in Hendon ward last time around but Reform, whose Barnet leader is current Hendon councillor Mark Shooter, may fancy their chances there (despite the Tories comfortably holding one of the seats in a by-election last year).

Marginal wards last time around included Barnet Vale, which elected two Labour councillors and one Conservative; Brunswick Park, Childs Hill and East Barnet (all narrowly won by Labour): and Edgwarebury (narrowly Conservative). But, for example, what impact could a strong Reform showing have in Mill Hill, where the Conservative candidates were around 500 votes ahead last time?

There’s even a suggestion that Friern Barnet ward, represented by Rawlings and where Labour won by miles last time, could see a Green threat from candidates including Linda Lusingu, the former Labour councillor who defected to the party this year.

Above all, this is a recipe for confusion containing many different flavours but, on the plus side, the lack of certainty about the result means that each vote is unusually important. So now’s a great time to find out more about the contest in your ward and make sure you have your say in May.

Note: Barnet Post understands that Your Party and the Liberal Democrats will be standing in May’s election in Barnet however we have so far been unsuccessful in our attempts to contact their representatives.

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