Teresa O’Neill, who is about to step down as leader of Bexley Council after 17 years in the job, was just too young to vote in the general election of 1979, the one that ushered Margaret Thatcher into Number 10. But she was not too young to be a fan. That was partly because Britain’s first female Prime Minister was a role model, someone who, by her very ascent to the highest office, signalled, as O’Neill puts it when we meet at Bexley’s Civic Offices, “this is open to girls”. But it was also about values: “I suppose my family always believed in working for what they got, being independent and all of that sort of stuff.”
O’Neill’s name gives a clue to her family history, although, as she points out, her textbook south London accent does not. Her parents moved to the capital from Limerick in 1960, seeking work, as many Irish people did in the decades after the war, and settling first in Camberwell. Their daughter was born the following year. Her father worked as a bus conductor and then as a train guard, she recalls, her mother, part-time in Sainsbury’s. When she was four, the family moved to Woolwich, and when she was ten, to Lewisham, where she attended a Roman Catholic, single sex secondary school that is no more.
She could have trained to be a maths teacher, she says. Instead, she went straight into the world of work. “Right place, right time,” she explains. It began with getting a job with an insurance company. Over a period of around seven years, she “worked my way up, and all the rest of it”. The company was absorbed by a larger one. O’Neill considered leaving: “I went in and seen the big boss and said, ‘I don’t know if this is for me’.” Long story short, she left and went into investment banking. She ended up doing 25 years, with Smith New Court, acquired in 1995 by Merrill Lynch. “I thoroughly enjoyed it,” she says.
She enjoyed politics, too, becoming active from her teenage years through her family’s involvement with their local tenants’ and residents’ association. Because of that, they got to know local Tory politicians, including Colin Moynihan who, incredible as it may seem today, with the Tories almost wiped off the London parliamentary map, was the MP for Lewisham East. She knew Tory councillors and campaigners, too. “They always wanted to help others,” O’Neill says. “It always felt to me that the Labour ones wanted to help themselves.”
One local Tory, Anthony Salter – the husband of Baroness Patience Wheatcroft, whom Boris Johnson appointed to his forensic audit panel after first becoming Mayor of London in 2008 – persuaded her to run for a seat in Lewisham’s Labour-held Blackheath ward in the borough elections of 1986. “O’Neill T, Ms” finished third, just missing out on gaining one of the ward’s two seats. She had another go in 1990, with the same outcome but a still closer result, finishing just ten votes behind the second-placed Labour candidate.
Her family were council house tenants, which, the way O’Neill tells it, might have boosted her candidacy: “All the council estates had bluebells planted for me, believe it or not, to come up at the time of the election. It was great. I think it was because I worked hard and was trying to represent them and work with them.”
In 1992, by then in her early thirties, she unsuccessfully contested Lewisham Deptford in the general election, finishing second to Labour’s Joan Ruddock. She says she had serious designs on a parliamentary career, but recognised that being an MP could have its drawbacks, notably a lack of job security: “I decided that, being not married, etcetera, that actually the career path was the one to take.” Prospering in her job, she concluded it was time to buy a house. “It was either buy it in Bexley or buy it in Bromley,” she says. “Someone persuaded me Bexley was the place to be.”
She completed her home purchase the day before the 1997 general election. The property was in the newly-created constituency of Bexleyheath & Crayford, which was nominally Conservative. Tony Blair’s landslide ensured that by the time O’Neill was moving in, she was living in a Labour seat. Having previously decided to retire from politics, she changed her mind. Within a year, in May 1998, she became a Bexley councillor, helping her party recapture it from No Overall Control.
The rest is not entirely history – Labour secured a rare and very narrow victory in 2002, having previously won Bexley only in 1964 and 1971. But the Conservatives roared back in 2006. And in May 2008, O’Neill became its leader. Her predecessor, Ian Clement, who, along with other Bexley Tories, had played a significant part in Johnson’s drive to become Mayor with the help of a “doughnut strategy” of mobilising outer Londoners, resigned to join the new Mayor’s mayoral team. In a press release, O’Neill pledged to do “everything I can to serve the best interests of all the people of Bexley” and went on to describe herself as “a south London girl”.
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The public eye hasn’t often rested on Bexley in the years since O’Neill took the helm. Electorally, the borough has been consistently undramatic: Tory majorities have fallen from a resounding 41 seats in 2010 to 21 in 2022 as Labour’s strength across London grew. But the trend has been partly due to a reduction in the number of seats, and the borough has never looked like changing hands.
Meanwhile, scandals in which Bexley’s name has been mentioned have done next to no damage to its reputation. Clement was forced to resign from his City Hall post after just over a year for misusing a corporate credit card (and later given a suspended jail term), but his time at Bexley was over. Much more recently, Bexley councillor, PR man and former London Assembly Tory group chief of staff Adam Wildman left the Bexley Tory group after it emerged that he’d attended the notorious December 2020 lockdown campaign party of mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey, which he helped run.
But O’Neill’s administrations have been regarded in London government circles as solid exemplars of a suburban Conservative way of doing things, and O’Neill herself as a wise head who has brought an important, distinctive perspective to London-wide bodies and debates from which outer boroughs often feel excluded.
Following her party’s last borough win, O’Neill challenged characterisations of the Tories being wiped out in London, a media narrative largely derived from their loss of high-profile fortresses Westminster and Wandsworth. Writing for Conservative Home, she portrayed Bexley Tories as “quietly” delivering “our fifth landslide in a row”.
The secret, she explained, was simply and resolutely honouring pledges to local voters and caring about the place where they lived. She highlighted tree-planting, recycling, building new libraries, children’s services rated “outstanding” by Ofsted and “financial stability, which underpins everything”.
Like several other London boroughs in recent years, Bexley has sought emergency help from national government to balance its books, but though granted that provision in 2021, later withdrew its request. She has long argued that Bexley has had a raw deal from national government and hopes the Fair Funding Review will work out well for the borough.
In her article, O’Neill stressed candour and transparency with residents, saying the borough’s 2021/22 budget planning – an exacting process, as it was for all local authorities amid the disruptions of the pandemic – underwent a full four months of consultation, prompting thousands of responses, all of them read by the members of her cabinet.
Similar themes come to the fore when she is asked to define the principles that have guided her leadership of Bexley. She speaks of “old-fashioned integrity, being straight with people, never forgetting you’re spending other people’s money, that sort of thing. I’m a very straight talker and I want to do right by people. And I think we have done right by people.”
This is an approach, she continues, that she impresses, in person, on new people who come to work for the council, pointing out to them that “a fair slice” of its money comes directly from residents in the form of Council Tax, and that most people will diligently pay it, even if “that might mean them going without eating and heating. If you never forget that in local government, you never waste a penny”.
For O’Neill, that is essential to being a good public servant. But, she adds, those duties don’t end there: “There’s always other things you can be doing. We are here to deliver for others. And I think that’s driven me in a lot of things.” The part of our conversation where she is most animated and speaks at greatest length concerns a project called Bexley Box, launched in response to the Labour government’s reduction of eligibility for winter fuel payments.
When first announced in July 2024, the one-off sum was to be withdrawn from all but the very poorest. O’Neill describes her reaction: “The announcement came out, and I say, ‘How many of our residents is this likely to impact?’ I had a sleepless night We aint got the money to just give them a replacement. How do we help them?”
Eventually, following a September U-turn, 75 per cent of pensioners across the country received the payment last year, as before (£200 in most cases). Even so, the Bexley Box scheme, already in preparation, was announced on 6 November, resulting in 770 people receiving a cardboard carton “rammed full of goodies” to help them keep warm and fed through the coldest months. “These people needed a bit of help, but also they needed to know that we cared. Some of the messages that came back, you would have cried,” O’Neill says.
The whole thing was funded by private donations, some of goods, some of money, including from a local businessman who stumped up £25,000 to underwrite it. The boxes, the majority sent out before Christmas, were distributed to residents known to be housebound or coming out of hospital. Voluntarism and philanthropy, signature virtues and alternatives to state dependency for many Conservatives, were vital to it. “A by-product,” O’Neill says, was “that we contacted the most vulnerable people in our borough at the worst time of year, when they are feeling low.”
That valuing of local knowledge, including of grassroots support networks, is also apparent when she speaks about Bexley’s response to the pandemic. “We were the best vaccination team in London,” she claims. “We set up community champions before anyone else did.” The latter, she says, were in touch with about 70,000 of the borough’s roughly 250,000 people, “covering all the ethnic groups, age groups and geography”. She has lately described local health services as a consistent priority, and has personally encouraged Bexley residents to get flu jabs.
Of course, political opponents have bones to pick with her. Only last week, the most prominent of these, the current Bexleyheath & Crayford MP, Labour’s Daniel Francis, alleged that government money given to the council for fixing potholes was not being put to use. Bexley, not amused, wrote to Sir Keir Starmer, claiming that Francis had given him false information.
Other criticisms have been non-partisan. Last May, following an inspection by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission, the government issued the council with an improvement notice requiring it to “take steps to improve its special educational needs and disabilities services”. The council points out that the inspection was of all SEND provision in the borough, not only the part delivered by the council within a wider partnership, and says it believes its services will soon be shown to have improved.
O’Neill has also been accused of failing to get as much housing built as she could have, particularly the “affordable” kinds. The council’s housing strategy for 2020-2025, in line with its 2017 Growth Strategy, said it would “play a key part in helping London grow sustainably while we continue to respect the borough’s overall character and identity”. There was a very traditional Conservative emphasis on facilitating home ownership in a borough where over 70 per cent of households fall into that category. What has Bexley’s policy meant in practice?
South London website The Murky Depths has highlighted City Hall figures showing that Bexley was the only borough to register no “affordable” starts during the financial year 2024/25. And although the same data show that 92 were completed, 63 of them for social rent, Bexley was still near the bottom of the borough league table. Last month, Sir Sadiq Khan’s deputy for planning, Jules Pipe, overturned council planners’ rejection of a 228-home tower near Abbey Wood Elizabeth line station. Bexley’s reasons included the tower’s height and its proximity to a historic building. It will now go ahead with 35 per cent of the dwellings “affordable”.
O’Neill, though, defends her record on housing and planning issues, pointing to the demolition of the system-built 1960s Larner Road Estate in Erith, now replaced by Erith Park. She takes pride, too, in the Park East development, also in Erith, replacing an old high-rise scheme: “I had a lovely conversation with a lady in a wheelchair, a motorised wheelchair, riding around. She said there is such a lovely community here now. She said, ‘I come out every day and I will always find someone that will have a chat with me’. That, for me, is a success story – you’ve created somewhere people want to live.”
The ongoing regeneration of the Thamesmead Estate, part of which lies in Bexley, is something she has supported, too. But she has rules about getting behind new housing schemes. “I’m a big believer that you need to put the infrastructure in before the housing,” she says, “or else it becomes a dead end”.
As Sir Sadiq Khan and Transport for London try to persuade the government to back extending the Docklands Light Railway to from Newham to Thamesmead in Greenwich, O’Neill would like to see a further link added, taking it to Belvedere, in the north of her borough, by the Thames: “If you put the transport in place, the developers will come forward.”
She’s “absolutely delighted” that the Elizabeth line has come to Abbey Wood, where Greenwich and Bexley quite literally meet – “it has been a game changer, there are people that travel right across the borough to go on the Lizzie line” – but says she would like to see more. “If we could replicate that at Belvedere, Erith and Slade Green, there is so much opportunity to create quality housing that people want to live in.” She adds: “We are always very keen in Bexley, that we like to offer to Bexley people first.”
On transport, she is mindful of local motorists’ interests, saying that in a borough with limited rail connections, she tries to keep parking fees as low as she can, because “you don’t want to stop people from getting around. You want them to use their town centres, etcetera”.
Bexley was one of the four London boroughs, all of them Tory-controlled, to try and fail through High Court action, to stop Mayor Khan extending the Ultra-Low Emission Zone to the whole of Greater London. However, going back, Bexley has also acted on local anxieties about congestion when opposing the Thames Gateway Bridge project that was backed by London’s first Mayor, Ken Livingstone, but canned in 2008 by his successor and Bexley ally Johnson.
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It isn’t hard to see why some regard O’Neill and Bexley as parochial blockers, reluctant members of the Greater London club and spiritually more aligned with Kent, with which, on its eastern side, it shares a border. O’Neill, though says it is important to be in dialogue with next door local authorities, Labour Greenwich and Tory Bromley and Dartford alike. And she has had considerable input into London government far beyond her borough’s boundaries and immediate neighbours.
She had a role advising Mayor Johnson’s City Hall about relations with the outer boroughs as a whole. and has held senior positions with both the Local Government Association and London Councils, the body that represents all of London’s 33 local authorities. In that capacity, she was made a member of the London Finance Commission, which Johnson set up to examine how London government could have more control over taxes raised in the capital.
Her LFC experience and, it seems, her input into London-wide politics and policy more broadly, have reinforced her view that Greater London as a whole is too often seen as homogenous, with the needs and personalities of the outer boroughs, themselves diverse, filtered out: Bexley is very different from Westminster or Southwark, economically, socially and so on. As for the mayoralty, she is clear that, after 25 years of its existence, it’s time “to have a conversation” about the Greater London Authority and “how it works”.
In this, she declares herself a backer of the London Councils proposals for boroughs to be given a joint role with the Mayor in making City Hall decisions over policy and funding – a so-called combined board model, made up of the Mayor and the London Councils executive committee. “I think the Mayors can’t do the job on their own,” she says.
It may be unsurprising that she names Johnson as the best of the three Mayors so far at collaborating with the boroughs, but there are others who share that view, not all of them Tories. O’Neill maintains that there is plenty to be said for “a really good working relationship between the borough leaders and the Mayor, a bit like they’ve done in Manchester”.
The London Councils plan insists a role would remain for the largely powerless London Assembly. “That was very diplomatic wasn’t it?” chuckles O’Neill, who is known to not be a fan. “It does cost quite a lot of money,” she observes.
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In November 2022, O’Neill received a life peerage to add to the OBE she was awarded in 2015, becoming Baroness O’Neill of Bexley. When she announced that she would be stepping down as council leader, she pledged to keep on “fighting Bexley’s corner” in the House of Lords, but would be focusing on her parliamentary work.
After 17 years, wanting a change of scene does not seem unreasonable. Inevitably, though, there was talk in London government circles that O’Neill had decided to jump the council ship before she was removed from its helm – not by a member of her Conservative crew, but by the self-styled pirate ship of Reform UK.
Nigel Farageism, with its cheap nationalism, dark nostalgia and populist bombast, has made few inroads in London in the past. But recent borough by-elections and opinion polls suggest that next May’s full borough elections could see Reform make significant advances in some parts of the capital. Bexley looks at risk of being captured.
History tells us why. In 1989, the British National Party opened a bookshop in Welling, in the west of Bexley. An increase in racist attacks in the area was follow by demonstrations and, in 1993, a riot. The council closed the bookshop in 1995, but a sense that some in this part of outer London are receptive to far-Right ideas in one form or another has endured.
In 2014, when its popularity was at its peak, Farage’s UKIP won three Bexley Council seats. Bexley then voted Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum. Last year, Reform won 22 per cent of the vote in the Old Bexley & Sidcup parliamentary seat, 15 per cent in Erith & Thamesmead and 23 per cent in Bexleyheath & Crayford. Now, the party enjoys big leads in national opinion polls. The omens for the Tories and O’Neill’s successor as Bexley leader, David Leaf look ominous.
O’Neill demurs. She says she had decided on being elevated to the Lords to step down as Bexley’s leader towards the end of her current term, rather than because she feared defeat. And she contends that the Tories’ track record in the borough will see them through. “I think we’ve got a very good reputation with our local residents,” she says. “They know that we deliver some fantastic things.” Reform’s big talk about cutting local government waste does not impress her: “The things they may be offering, we already do. We transform services all the time. We’re always looking for ways to make things better for people and make our money work harder.”
She also express belief in the electorate’s judgement: “I think that people are actually quite mature nowadays in how they think about things. They can tell the difference between national politics and local politics. And normally when you ask people what they think about the council, they say, yeah, they’re happy with what it’s doing.”
I walked to the Civic Offices in Watling Street from Barnehurst station along an Erith Road where lamp posts were hung with flags of St George. Asked about this, O’Neill answers with care: the council has removed flags at roundabouts, judged a danger to road safety; in other cases, it has not. Its approach has been “to take the temperature of our residents, especially those we thought might be at risk”. It has received “a handful of complaints”.
Summing up the resulting position, she says she hopes it’s a reflection of her long tenure as Bexley’s leader: “You want to be sensible, you want to do what’s right by people, and that’s kind of where we’ve got to.” It’s a philosophy that has worked well for her and Bexley Conservatives for a long time. But her once mighty party is now in desperate decline. Her leaving is fittingly timed.
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