Early last June, one month before Labour’s general election landslide triumph, a London politician who had led the party to a succession of such triumphs in east London stepped down as parliamentary candidate for Barking.

The news inspired a lot sympathy. Darren Rodwell was regarded among local government peers and within the capital’s housing and development world as an outstanding local champion. As leader of Barking & Dagenham Council since May 2014, he had encouraged inward investment and led a transformation of the local authority’s organisation and culture.

Before that, he had spearheaded the rejuvenation of Labour in a part of Greater London that had seen little of the soaring economic growth experienced elsewhere in the capital. On the contrary, Barking & Dagenham had gone through a de-industrialisation trauma comparable to those endured in different parts of England that would come to be described as “left behind”.

At the same time, the borough was undergoing a major demographic evolution, characterised by rapid population growth and the proportion of white residents falling markedly since the 1990s and those of Asian and black Londoners increasing. Those changes took place against a backdrop of some of London’s deepest poverty. It was a set of conditions in which the extreme Right thrived. Rodwell was prominent in reversing that tide.

What, then, given this record, ended his pursuit of a House of Commons seat he could not have fitted more naturally? A precise answer to that question remains elusive. There is, though, no doubt that as well as winning friends with his endeavours, Rodwell made enemies, some of them dangerous and in his own backyard, who were determined to thwart him. In September, he stood down as Barking & Dagenham’s leader after ten years in the job and then left the council altogether.

What were Darren Rodwell’s achievements? Why do some denigrate him? What are the lessons of his departure from politics? And will Labour come to regret it?

 

BNP

Darren Rodwell became involved with local politics in the early years of this century, inspired by alarming local events. In May 2006, with Labour embarked on its third successive term of national government and the US sub-prime housing crisis only just setting red lights flashing in bankers’ boardrooms, the British National Party won a dozen seats on Barking & Dagenham Council. It was the biggest electoral breakthrough by a far-Right party in British history.

There had been warning signs: 18 months earlier, a BNP candidate had won a by-election in Goresbrook ward, an area of high deprivation in the heart of the borough, taking 52 per cent of the vote to leave the Labour candidate defending the seat for his party far back in second place.

The BNP man didn’t stick around for long: less than a year later he resigned, complaining that he’d been ostracised at the Town Hall. Another by-election was held, which saw Labour regain the Goresbrook seat with ease. But that proved to be a temporary reprieve. In 2006, the BNP’s two candidates for Goresbrook took first and second places, an outcome colleagues emulated in four other wards. The BNP also topped the poll in a sixth ward, where they stood only one candidate, and took third place in a seventh.

It was a shocking outcome for Labour: all but one of the BNP’s 13 candidates was elected; only in one ward did every BNP candidate fail to finish ahead of all their Labour opponents; all 12 BNP wins were gains at Labour’s expense. Had the BNP mustered three candidates for every one of Barking & Dagenham’s 17 wards, it might well have secured the 26 seats needed to win a majority, take control of the council and make it Britain’s first fascist local authority.

Soon, the BNP would pass a further landmark when, in 2008, Richard Barnbrook, who had finished top of the pile in Goresbrook, was elected to the London Assembly. The following year, eight million viewers watched BNP leader Nick Griffin appear on BBC TV’s Question Time show. With the next set of borough elections due in 2010, Labour in Barking & Dagenham needed to get its act together fast.

Rodwell was one of those the party in London turned to. A resident of the outer east London borough all his life, he referred to the period during a farewell speech last September as being when, “those fucking fascists turned up”.

Asked about his personal history, he provides a sometimes bruising biography: born in the now former Barking hospital in 1970 and growing up in council housing with his father, a warehouse manager, and his mother, a care worker; leaving school at 16 indifferently qualified and being spotted as dyslexic too late to help him. But he had an aptitude for maths. He also quickly passed his driving test, which helped him get a job with the Post Office. “It was good fun,” he recalls. “I went on my first picket line in 1988. I’m a very proud union man.”

The fun stopped when a heavy palette fell on his back, doing serious harm to his spine: “For two years I couldn’t walk properly.” He also describes, during roughly the same period of time, complications with a girlfriend that resulted in his ending up as the lone parent of a baby daughter, living with his mum and dad in Chadwell Heath. As his fitness returned, he went back to work. For a while, he had a job delivering methadone to addicts. “I can tell you about all the dodgy estates in east London,” he says.

His health difficulties continued: two head tumours discovered and removed while he was in his mid-twenties; a knee injured by a leap from a lorry. But, through a precursor of today’s shared ownership tenure, he managed to get his own home on Dagenham’s famous Becontree estate, a groundbreaking “cottage” community of 26,000 homes built by the London County Council beyond its own boundary between the wars.

He also discovered a new interest: dancing and DJ-ing, “from swing music right through to modern”, from a nightclub in Ilford to Essex holiday breaks. He says business was good for a while, though it didn’t end happily (long story). And at around that time, the BNP showed up as well.

Rodwell got a job advising benefits claimants with a charity, the Disablement Association of Barking and Dagenham. Also, he was chair of the Reede Road Tenants and Residents’ Association (TRA) in the Becontree area. From this work, Rodwell felt he gained a close-up insight into why some of his neighbours had voted for a party founded in 1982 by John Tyndall, an Adolf Hitler fan and white supremacist who had previously been a mainstay of the National Front.

“The Labour government had done some incredible things,” Rodwell says. “Better schools, better hospitals. But what they didn’t do was actually listen and learn from those who are the majority. By the majority, I mean blue-collar people that are scraping a living day in, day out.”

Having joined the party at the end of 2005, Rodwell says he soon formed an idea of what was wrong with it at local level too. He says he came to the attention of more senior London Labour figures, including Margaret Hodge, the former Islington Council leader who had been the MP for Barking since 1994. Rodwell says Hodge identified him as “a local champion who could stand up and fight”.

Ken Clark, director of Labour’s London region, says he detected such qualities in Rodwell. Born in Bethnal Green, Clark had maintained deep east London connections. He’d been worried for a while about a lack of campaign energy in Barking & Dagenham. The 2006 result confirmed his worst fears. Clark recalls Rodwell and like-minded fellow local Labour member Dominic Twomey asking to come and see him. They arrived with lots to say.

“I was very impressed with the pair of them,” Clark says. “Darren, you could see, was a bit of a doer. Dominic was more of a thinker. It was obvious to me that the electorate down there had fallen out of love with the Labour Party.” Rodwell and Twomey confirmed for him, too, why that had happened.

“The council wasn’t really functioning for them,” Clark says. “We had to get a grip on who the councillors were going to be. Not many of them were knocking on doors.” Rodwell says the same: contact rates with voters were poor; he describes canvassing with councillors who didn’t know that the very street they were in formed part of their wards.

Rodwell describes many of the sitting Labour councillors as fellow white men with long-standing trade union links, often with the Ford Motor Company. This had, for decades, been the area’s principal employer but had become much reduced by the closure of its vehicle assembly plant. The change in the borough’s demographic mix was already well-established: by 2011, according to the Census of that year, the proportion of white Londoners would stand at 58.3 per cent, a fall from 85.2 per cent in 2001. Yet with very few exceptions, this shift was not reflected in the council chamber.

Rodwell has likened the intensity of the population changes and poverty challenges in Barking & Dagenham at that time to those of Whitechapel in the 18th and 19th Centuries. He says he drew on his TRA experience to try to address that: “I was an inclusive person. We had people from all sorts of backgrounds on it, cos it’s very important to me.” He describes putting on big social events, “six, eight thousand in the local park”, and giving Christmas gifts to local kids. “That building of community. That was very much my world.”

Hodge and the other local MP, Jon Cruddas, were also closely involved in sorting out the borough candidates. Labour had won 38 council seats in 2006. Most of them did not stand again.

The 2010 general and London borough elections took place on the same day, 6 May. Nationally, Labour lost power to the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. But in Barking, Hodge, with Rodwell as her election agent, comfortably saw off a challenge by Griffin, Tyndall’s “modernising” successor as BNP leader, who finished third. In neighbouring Dagenham & Rainham, Labour’s Jon Cruddas retained his seat. The BNP finished third there too. And Labour won all 51 Barking & Dagenham Council seats, completing a clean sweep for the first time in the borough’s history.

Rodwell was elected in first place in Alibon ward, where he lived and where he and his two fellow Labour candidates relegated the leader of the BNP group, Bill Bailey, to fourth. Tellingly, support for Bailey had not fallen by much – he received 1,209 votes in 2010 compared with 1,329 in 2006.

Indeed, support for the BNP in general held up well. Fielding 22 candidates in 2010, they attracted 15,092 votes altogether compared with 8,576 in 2006, representing a slightly improved average of 686 votes per candidate compared with 660. The big change was Labour’s rejuvenation. Rodwell, with 2,245 votes, left Bailey in the dust and even Labour’s third-placed Alibon candidate finished the best part of 800 votes ahead of the BNP man.

Four years later, in 2014, Labour swept the board again. That was despite in the meantime suffering three councillor defections to the Socialist Labour Party founded by former National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill, and, perhaps more tellingly, four to the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which finished as runners-up to Labour in every ward except one.

Led nationally by Nigel Farage, it took a 27 per cent vote share compared with Labour’s 52 per cent and the Conservatives’ meagre 10 per cent, showing again that a significant number of Barking & Dagenham voters were still prepared to back politicians of the extreme Right.

Rodwell received a more modest ward vote total of 1,398 this time, but again he topped the poll in Alibon. And within a week he had been elected leader of the Labour group, which meant he also became leader of the council. And so began one of the more distinctive and, for some, contentious careers at the head of a London local authority in recent times.

 

VISION

Interviewed by the Barking & Dagenham Post, the council’s new leader said the primary focus of his administration would be “community”. Rodwell wanted to restore residents’ pride in the borough and nurture a sense of responsibility. For him, the two things went together – an echo, perhaps, of the respectability ethos enshrined in obligations placed by its landlord on early Becontree tenants.

By this time, four years of public spending austerity under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition was biting hard. Rodwell vowed to do all he could to fight it. That was not an unusual pledge for a Labour borough leader. Less usual was the way Rodwell went about it.

“If all we’d done was make cuts to fit the finances the government was giving us, I’d just have been overseeing decline,” he says, looking back. “I didn’t want to see that for the place.” He describes his approach as being very different – one of “entrepreneurial thinking and management”. Having spoken to, by his estimate, nearly 70,000 borough residents during the fightback against the BNP, it was clear to him what the great majority of them most desired:

“They wanted to live in a home that was warm and safe and truly affordable to them, whether they were renting or buying. They wanted to live in a community that they could respect and would respect them. And they wanted their kids to have more choices and chances in life than they’d had themselves. You tell me anyone that doesn’t want that.”

In November 2014, Barking & Dagenham appointed a new chief executive – Chris Naylor, a chartered account from Rotherham with a degree in social and political science from the University of Cambridge. Almost ten years later, having moved on to a new job in 2021, Naylor wrote an essay for the think tank Demos. Published the month before last year’s general election, it set out the lessons he thought national government could learn from what had been done in the outer east London borough under Rodwell’s political leadership.

Naylor described his essay, titled Only We Can Save The State, as “a story about crisis, reform and renewal” that could also be told about many different places in Britain “that have been grappling with challenge and complexity, while trying to make a difference and balance their books”. He went on: “At the heart of these debates are profound questions about ‘a good life’ and the power to achieve it.”

He characterised the BNP’s advance in 2006 as the “catastrophic political shock” needed to “catalyse and galvanise” a comprehensive reform of how the council related to Barking & Dagenham’s people based on three intersecting themes:

• A “fundamental redesign” of local public services so that they concentrated on preventing problems arising in the first place, rather than only “treating” them.
• Council “interventions to increase the pace and scale of growth” that helped local people and the council’s finances alike.
• Re-establishing trust between residents and their local institutions, a goal seen as essential to achieving the other two.

In relation to that third point, Naylor quotes Rodwell describing how Labour, stung by the BNP’s incursion, had already set about rebuilding trust: “Now we knock on every door we can, and we say to people – I can’t do much about the government, the weather or West Ham, but is there something else I can help you with?”

There were cuts, some of them painful: making the borough’s lollipop ladies and men redundant saved £165,000 a year but brought a lot of grief. Rodwell’s election as leader, though, also brought a fresh energy and vision to the council.

On a visit to the borough soon after he had taken the helm, I was struck by the enthusiasm for him among the council’s communications staff. His predecessor, Liam Smith, was described as a reluctant public figure and Rodwell as the complete opposite. As well as being ready to represent the council upfront in public, he was able to articulate to its senior officers how he wanted the way the council worked to change.

“He cared deeply about the place and lives of the people there,” Naylor says. “He saw it as his job to do something about that.” Another new senior officer of the time stresses, as Rodwell does, how the borough saw itself as one of two parts: Barking, geographically and to a growing extent culturally, a bit closer to inner London; Dagenham, more orientated towards Essex.

That division was seen as being reflected within the working of the council – another form of fragmentation and introversion. An early Rodwell innovation was the adoption of a “one borough” approach, complete with a cohesion and integration strategy that insisted everyone belonged and none should be left behind.

In his Demos essay, Naylor recalls that in 2015 he and his colleagues were “given a clear mandate to plan a radical transformation” underpinned by a “consensus on the need for growth” and a belief in being “more communitarian and less paternalistic” while also recognising that a budget gap of £79 million had to be closed. “The biggest question,” Naylor writes, “was where to start”.

The answer was to make better use of information held by the council about its residents with a view to helping people before something went badly wrong in their lives instead of after. Part of that was about joining-up different departments, so that, for example, a household defaulting on its Council Tax payments might be seen not only as a problem for the borough’s budget but also as a possible early indicator of financial distress.

It was, perhaps, unsurprising that this process found connections between people living in private rented housing, having money troubles or being members of families where someone had a mental health issue or was a victim of domestic abuse, and the likelihood of children in such households entering the care system.

Even so, it brought those links into stark focus and enabled the council to identify other households in the borough where the risk factors existed. These could then be offered greater or better-tailored help. The change programme was a whole was brought together in 2018 under the banner Community Solutions, the name of both a council department and a way of working.

Rodwell articulated its spirit to me when I spent a morning with him touring his territory for a December 2016 article for the Guardian: “I want a society where if Mrs Jones hasn’t collected her milk for a few days, a neighbour will know that Mrs Jones hasn’t collected her milk. What an indictment of our society when a local authority doesn’t know Mrs Jones hasn’t collected her milk, the neighbours don’t know Mrs Jones hasn’t collected her milk and her family that lives wherever they live hasn’t noticed either. That’s a really sad indictment of 21st Century Britain.”

This shift of emphasis was consistent with the council’s other goals under its new leader. A Barking & Dagenham that was better at looking after people was also a more trusted one, and one that spent money on supporting residents more efficiently, as it was cheaper to nip problems in the bud than to deal with them after they had got bigger.

That same desire to pre-empt the slide of people’s lives into deep difficulties and destructive behaviour informed the council’s approaches to developing the borough’s economy and, in tandem with that, altering its built environment – areas in which Rodwell’s values, experience and personality came most strongly to the fore.

But there was something more as well. Driving me round his borough, Rodwell spoke effusively about its history, from the former site of pharmaceuticals firm May & Baker, which invented the drug that cured Winston Churchill’s bacterial pneumonia during World War II, to where his grandmother used to live. At the same time, he wasn’t sentimental about the condition of the borough or some of its recent inheritance.

The term “post-Fordism” was coined to describe the growth of new forms of industrial production and new, less secure, forms of employment associated with them. Rodwell related how, for generations, the lives of many of Barking & Dagenham’s people had been umbilically tied to the Ford production plant.

Their jobs, like their council homes, were secure. He saw both the good in that and, especially in the new social and economic circumstances of the borough, the bad. It meant it now contained, in his view, too much of “one type of housing, which was for one type of community” largely “the subservient workforce of Ford’s”.

Subservient, but also safe. Perhaps too safe. “You didn’t have to be educated and you didn’t have to aspire to want to do better,” Rodwell said. His conclusion? “We’re not in that world anymore.”

 

TRANSFORMATION

Rodwell was not only very different from previous Barking & Dagenham leaders. He soon marked himself out from many fellow London Labour people, politicians and activists alike, by being overtly and unapologetically keen to build partnerships with the sorts of capitalist some on the Left most revile.

The annual MIPIM gathering of the property trade in Cannes is seen in such quarters as grotesquely decadent and predatory, to be loudly rejected and denounced. But Rodwell was not deterred. Ken Clark, by then a Newham councillor, remembers attending one year with the Mayor of Newham of that time, Sir Robin Wales. “Darren used to follow us around when we were talking to developers,” Clark recalls, with amusement. “As soon as we left one, he’d pounce!”

Robert Gordon Clark, founder and now senior adviser of LCA (until recently London Communications Agency), gives a similar account of Rodwell not being backwards about going forward with the global real estate elite: “He was absolutely brilliant. He’d get his business card out and talk to anyone about what a great place his borough was to invest in.”

It would have been a difficult case to make. Although close to the heart of a huge global city – a definite plus point – much of Rodwell’s borough had more in common with the struggling towns of northern England and south Wales – depressed, demoralised and in danger of decaying following comparable experiences of de-industrialisation. MIPIM is a filthy rich gathering. Barking & Dagenham is not a filthy rich place.

But under Rodwell’s leadership, Barking & Dagenham changed the council’s pitch to potential investors. In 2017, the year before Rodwell led Labour to a third successive clean-sweep borough elections win, it founded Be First, a multi-purpose local regeneration company.

Though owned by the council, Be First operated very separately from it and had the goal of bringing about the building of 50,000 new homes and the creation of 20,000 jobs over a 20-year period, partly as a developer and partly as a planner and facilitator of private investment. It was also required to make a profit for the council to help its under-pressure public services.

Many of London’s 32 boroughs had set up wholly-owned housing delivery and management companies. These had more freedom than councils themselves to borrow money for the purpose of building, constrained as councils were by national government rules. Barking & Dagenham had formed one in 2012, called Reside.

But Be First was a much bigger deal and an expression of Rodwell’s ambitions for Barking & Dagenham: rather than supervising its ongoing slide, he wanted it to stage a comeback. That, at a time of public funding scarcity, meant pursuing community ambitions by other means, bringing to mind a phrase the late John Prescott sometimes used – “traditional values in a modern setting”. This included economic development it was people were intended to benefit from. Rodwell calls this “inclusive growth”.

Be First’s first managing director was Pat Hayes, previously executive director of regeneration and housing for Ealing Council and before that director of borough partnerships for Transport for London. He’d had dealings with Barking & Dagenham before Rodwell became leader and been infuriated by its dated insularity and what Hayes calls “a sort of warped pride” taken in keeping things as they were.

But now, it was all systems go with “a leader who wanted change and was confident, and senior officers who could turn that into something practical”. Along with Rodwell and Naylor, Hayes names finance director Claire Symonds, later chief executive of Redbridge, as vital to the new mindset, describing her as “fully in tune”, able to “see the bigger picture and balance risk against reward, long-term”.

Be First enjoyed a lot of independence. There were no councillors on its board, which made decision-taking simpler. It took the lead in planning matters, adopting what Hayes calls “an entrepreneurial approach” which helped open the door to discussions with developers.

Furthermore, says Hayes, the council was “prepared to back us with really serious money” including through substantial borrowing. It also helped that land was plentiful, much of it owned by the council. What wasn’t was among London’s cheapest, if required.

The “inclusive growth” drive took a variety of forms. One is a source of particular pride for Rodwell. When he became its leader, the council had a film locations unit which found and provided places where TV and movie productions could be filmed. Its sole member of staff faced the borough budget chop. However, Rodwell recalls her talking him into giving her a chance to make the unit grow: “She said, ‘I really believe I can get the big productions to come and film here’.”

It started to happen. In November 2014, business park operator SOG Ltd had bought 17 acres of a 108-acre industrial site across the road from Dagenham Heathway – the site where May & Baker had been and was now, following a series of mergers, the base of another pharmaceutical firm, Sanofi.

Collectively renamed the LondonEast-UK business and technical park, it comprised office, laboratory and conference space. SOG’s owner was receptive to buildings there being used as film locations. Scenes from the 2015 Marvel movie Avengers: Age of Ultron were shot within the park. So was part of 2016’s Doctor Strange, along with some television dramas. The film unit took up residence there.

London was already a big player in film and TV production, second only to Los Angles and New York. But a lot of its facilities were old and there seemed to be a demand for more and better. In October 2016, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, in partnership with the council and screen industries agency Film London, launched a feasibility study into creating a whole new studio on an adjacent part of the Sanofi site. Two months later, the council bought nine acres of it from Sainsburys for £12 million. And in January 2019, it bought LondonEast-UK as well. Rodwell hailed “a brilliant regeneration opportunity”.

A would-be film studios developer came forward, but dropped out in October 2019. However, Be First stepped in to keep the project going. It obtained planning permission and kicked off the development work. Then came the pandemic. But in November 2020, Hackman Capital Partners, owners of studios in California, took out a 250-year lease on the site. Eastbrook Studios, as the facility is now called, is now open for business. It is the largest film and TV studio campus in London. Two years earlier, another, smaller film production facility, Wharf Studios, owned by the MBS Group, of which Hackman is the parent, had opened nearby.

“I’ve shown the private sector this is a good place to invest,” says Rodwell. Hackman reckons Eastbrook will contribute £35 million to the local economy each year and produce 1,200 jobs in the UK entertainment industry at large. Rodwell praises the company for funding apprenticeships for local people that “will allow us to train future generations for the world of film. This is what I mean by inclusive growth”. The business park, owned by a council subsidiary, is also home to a sixth form college, a data centre and a research wing of University College London.

A skilled and educated workforce is another key ingredient of a thriving local economy. Under Rodwell, Barking & Dagenham saw strong improvement in educational standards. Reasons for the latter appear to include effective council leadership. In November 2014, inspectors from schools watchdog Ofsted visited the borough “in response to concerns that, while the council was performing in line with national averages, it was still not doing as well as many other London boroughs”.

But in a subsequent letter to its Director of Children’s Services, Ofsted praised the borough’s “ambitious vision” and the “strong leadership” of senior officers and elected members. There were areas in need of improvement and “some way to go” before all of Barking & Dagenham’s children were attending a school Ofsted rated either good or outstanding. However, the letter picked out as a “key strength” the “direct impact on improving schools” of the “relationship between councillors, officers and school leaders”.

In February 2015, Ofsted confirmed that the borough’s schools were “moving in the right direction“. Eight years later, as of September 2023, 96 per cent of Barking & Dagenham’s schools were rated good or better, a little above the London average and well above that of England.

Rodwell’s Barking & Dagenham also attracted a higher education institution. In 2017, Coventry University, branching out, invested £4.5 million in renovating the Grade II listed former Dagenham Civic Centre and began offering a range of higher education and foundation vocational courses (a similar venture, under the now-collective banner CU London, has since been set up in Greenwich).

The council also founded a Future Youth Zone facility, opened by Prince Harry in 2019, to provide activities and opportunities for young people needing a helping hand.

 

It also promoted participation in culture, for example by setting up an artists’ enterprise zone in Barking town centre to help home-grown talent and to attract Londoners from elsewhere who were finding life in other parts of the capital unaffordable. During my 2016 visit, Rodwell evangelised for local arts and culture: “For 80 years, high art was a Saturday night down the working men’s club,” he said. “But we have to be individuals. We have to stretch the mindset of what we can achieve and where we can go. There are people here who’ve wanted to express themselves for so long, but they were not allowed to because we had a conformist community.”

The quest for economic growth took place in parallel with the borough’s rapid population growth: between the Censuses of 2011 and 2021 the number of Barking & Dagenham residents rose from just over 185,900 to around 218,900, a 17 per cent increase that was the third biggest in England after Tower Hamlets (22.1 per cent) and Dartford (19.9 per cent). The same period saw the proportion of households with dependent children in the borough go up from 20.9 per cent in 2011 to 24.1 per cent in 2021, the second biggest increase in England after Slough.

All of this, of course, had huge implications for housing, the policy area in which Rodwell’s influence as council leader was most often admired.

Barking & Dagenham needed more and better places to live. This included regenerating its own housing stock, much of which was deteriorating in the way of many post-war council estates. Furthermore, plenty of it needed to be affordable housing in a borough with high levels of low incomes. On top of all that, in keeping with the overall approach described by Chris Naylor, house-building programmes embarked on by the council had to help its finances rather than be a drain on them.

How were those goals to be harmonised and met? After my 2016 visit I described Rodwell’s recipe for change as “a distinctive combination of protective innovation and a desire to foster change from within, articulated as an independent, working-class philosophy”. He offered me a maxim he would use many times again: “I don’t class myself as a politician. I class myself as a community champion”.

For Rodwell, this meant giving families and individuals in that community options for improving their circumstances that did not, in the process, weaken the community as a whole.

The previous year, Reside had become a private sector landlord by buying a block of newly-built flats and letting them at a range of rent levels below local private rented sector rates. Rodwell said this brought the properties within the range of local people earning £19,000 a year, the annual equivalent at that time of the London Living Wage. His deputy leader, Saima Ashraf, called this innovation a win-win for our council, taxpayers, residents and Generation Rent”. The move was applauded too by Conservative London Assembly member Andrew Boff, a local resident, who said it was “fantastic”.

Soon after, in 2016, the council provided its tenants with the option of buying a portion of their homes – a “right to invest” enabling them to convert from renting to shared ownership, with the council having first refusal if and when they wanted to sell.

Both innovations, hailed as national firsts, were expressions of Rodwell’s wish to nurture what he called an “aspirational working-class”, tailoring housing options and supply to cover a wide price spectrum between social rent – a term he dislikes, regarding it as demeaning and Thatcherite – and the higher levels of “affordable” rent and low-cost home ownership tenures, all of it a preferable alternative to lower-income households struggling to get buy in the borough’s large local private rented sector, often depending on benefits.

Much later, in May 2024, Rodwell was the guest of experienced housing experts Jackie Sadek and Peter Bill, co-authors of the book Broken Homes, on their Home Truths podcast for Building Magazine. Looking back, he described to them the delivery challenge before him after becoming council leader: “What I needed to do was work out what mechanism I could use to make that happen in the quickest way possible with the most flexibility.”

Housing statistics can confuse. City Hall’s London Plan Annual Monitoring Report containing figures from 2017/18 until 2021/22, shows that Barking & Dagenham saw among the higher numbers of planning consents for housing granted by the 32 London boroughs during that period, though not the very highest: Brent, Ealing, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Wandsworth all scored a little higher over those years.

Barking & Dagenham was also in sixth place for average annual housing starts during that period, with Wandsworth doing twice as well. And Rodwell’s borough was decidedly mid-table when it came to net completions, the difference between the number of additional homes ready for habitation and the number lost. Its average was 918 per year. Barnet, run by Nimby-ish Tories during the five years in question, did twice as well. And in 2021/22, only 134 net additional “affordable” homes were achieved in Rodwell’s borough compared with next-door Newham’s 595.

That modest yield, though, obscures the amount of demolition that been taking place in Barking & Dagenham to make way for new homes, and the number in the pipeline across the borough. For example, not until March 2018 were the first homes in the first phase of the Gascoigne project’s eastern side, named Weavers Quarter, fully completed. But after that the pipeline filled and flowed.

Another major development project in the borough was the Barking Riverside scheme on the former Barking Power Station site on the north bank of the Thames. This got started in the 1990s, long before Rodwell’s time, and in 2016 became a joint venture between housing association L&Q and the Greater London Authority. Before that, it had become stalled due to a lack of transport links. But, finally, in July 2022 an extension of the London Overground line between Gospel Oak and Barking to a new Barking Riverside station was opened, enabling building work to start again.

And in November 2022, Rodwell’s Barking & Dagenham had cause for a joint celebration with a perhaps unlikely collaborator, the City of London Corporation: the two local authorities had agreed a deal for the city’s three historic wholesale food markets, Smithfield, Billingsgate and New Spitalfields, to be together relocated to a new, purpose-built at Dagenham Dock, a 42-acre piece of industrial land south of Dagenham itself, beside the Thames.

An estimated 2,700 new jobs were promised. Rodwell declared himself delighted and enthused about “hundreds of millions of pounds of investment” in the local economy, complete with a boost for the local food sector and a “pipeline for local talent with tailored training opportunities, apprenticeships and new business start-up opportunities”.

That was for the future. But if inclusive growth could be measured in terms of local employment rates, the data for Barking & Dagenham in recent years has been encouraging. Office for National Statistics figures show that that between the Censuses of 2011 and 2021, the percentage of borough residents aged 16 or over (excluding full-time students) who had jobs increased from 52.2 per cent to 55.8 per cent.

During the same period, the averages for Greater London were higher but rose by less: from 58.6 per cent in 2011 to 59.4 per cent in 2021. Meanwhile, across England as a whole the rate fell slightly, to, in fact, almost exactly the same level as that of Barking & Dagenham. The “left behind” borough no one described as “left behind” was catching up.

 

TRIUMPH

The results of the borough elections of May 2022 saw Rodwell’s Barking & Dagenham’s continue to be a one-party local authority state as, for the fourth time in a row, Labour won all 51 council seats. And in April, 2023 I joined Rodwell and others on a minibus tour of the borough, one of the ways in which he strove to sell the charms and potential of Barking & Dagenham to anyone prepared to climb on board.

It was almost St George’s Day. Before we set off, Rodwell stood on the steps of Barking Town Hall, where he ran a flag of England’s patron saint up a pole and made a speech about the glories of the borough’s ethnic and cultural diversity.

Among my fellow passengers on the tour were a couple of prospective investors, a couple of people from Be First (“which happens to be the number one planning authority in the country,” Rodwell said), the leader of Hounslow Council, Steve Curran (sadly since deceased) and a gentleman pensioner Rodwell had met a St Patrick’s Day celebration, who had mentioned wanting to know a bit more about all that was going on in the borough.

Rodwell, turning and half-standing to face his audience from the front passenger seat, talked about the history of the place, “the history that builds the aspiration for the future”. We were driving past Abbey Green, where stand the ruins of Barking Abbey, founded in AD 666, a home of abbesses, saints and queens.

Across the road from the green, buildings of at least 20 storeys were under construction. “It’s going to go high,” Rodwell said. “That’s why we call it mini-Manhattan. We don’t do anything in the tens, that’s boring. Hundreds, I get a little excited, but thousands are more like it in Barking & Dagenham. We’re not lying. We’re very aspirational and very proud working-class.”

He pointed out Quaker Gardens, the place where prison reformer Elizabeth Fry was buried. “We weren’t posh enough to keep her tombstone,” Rodwell informed his listeners. “The old middle-class wanted it. But we’ve still got her bones.” He talked up the prominence of women in the area’s history, and later showed us the site of the council’s then soon to be opened Women’s Museum.

His commentary was, all at once, proudly localist, tirelessly upbeat and occasionally eyebrow-raising. To the south of Abbey Green, a short walk from Barking centre, flows the River Roding, on its way from Essex to Barking Creek and the Thames. We stepped out of the minivan to view what Rodwell said would become “the Roding Riviera”. Further on, Barking Riverside was dubbed “Barcelona-on-Sea”. Rodwell’s spiel was well-practised but ebullient – the bravura the performance a salesman-politician at the top of his game.

He was flying high: not only leader of Barking & Dagenham, but executive member for housing and regeneration for the cross-party London Councils, a Labour member of the national Local Government Association and a founding force behind the creation of Opportunity London, a group drawn from boroughs, City Hall, property sector membership organisation New London Architecture (NLA) and promotional agency London and Partners to work together to attract investment to the capital from around the world.

He was a London local government star turn, reaching across boundaries of party and place without diluting his personal style. At a post-MIPIM gathering at NLA’s Guildhall home he amused and entertained the assembled high rollers, rubbing along famously with Elizabeth Campbell, leader of Conservative-run Kensington & Chelsea, and London and Partners chief executive Laura Citron, who, rather delightedly, described him as “outrageous”.

He and I were once fellow guests at a City Corporation dinner at the opulent Drapers’ Hall. It seemed important to tease him about his penguin suit and bow tie. “Not really my scene,” he assured me, “but you need to keep your contacts up.”

I had a question for Rodwell on that April 2023 minibus tour. By then, he’d been selected as Labour’s general election candidate for Barking, a very safe Labour seat indeed. If, as then seemed certain, he soon became an MP, wouldn’t he find that new kind of political life in Westminster a bit dull?

Rodwell replied that for the past three or four years he had settled into the role of ambassador for his borough, having spent the previous six getting the council sorted out. That would continue from the House of Commons, he said, though he would no longer work for 80 hours a week. “I won’t have the day to day headaches,” he said. “I’m going into semi-retirement,” he joked. “It will be nice to realise I’m married again.”

 

DISASTER

In August last year, I spent a morning with Rodwell as he celebrated the completion of two more housing blocks in his borough. The first, at a junction just north of Eastbrook Studios, had seen 63 new affordable homes replace a smaller number of original ones built in the 1950s.

Be First had commissioned construction firm Mulalley to do the work, a Woodford Green-based company it has used for other housing projects. Rodwell posed with Be First’s Tim Porter and Mullaley’s chief executive Eamon O’Malley, with whom there was a bit of West Ham banter. (Had Harry Redknapp won a full cap for England? I thought he had. I was wrong).

We then went to the unveiling of the latest completed Gascoigne regeneration phase, a block of 386 homes, more than of half of them for rent at “affordable” levels or for shared ownership, built by Wilmott Dixon.

In a speech delivered next to some attractive public realm and with further construction work providing background noise, Rodwell told all concerned with the project that their efforts had “absolutely transformed this community” by providing part of “a 30-year journey” begun ten years before. “People tell me there’s problems with regeneration,” he said. “No there isn’t – not if you use inclusive growth”. This endeavour wasn’t just about bricks and mortar, he continued: “It’s hearts and minds.”

But by then, as he acknowledged in his speech, Rodwell’s unhappy departure from the political stage was underway.

Things had begun getting tricky shortly before his selection as Labour’s candidate for Barking at the end of October 2022. The previous month, September 2022, the Guardian reported that Rodwell “has accepted close to £10,000 worth of free Premier League tickets” for West Ham home games from the MSB film studio company in what was termed its “luxury corporate box” at the London Stadium.

The Guardian acknowledged that the hospitality had been declared on the council’s website, as required. Rodwell pointed out that he had invited local young people with learning disabilities to attend with him. He added: “It will help business in the borough which is what I am there to promote as leader of the council.”

Then, a video clip of Rodwell’s appearance at a Black History Month event that took place a few years earlier emerged. It showed Rodwell wearing a kufi, a type of hat worn by men in some parts of Africa, being led on to a stage at a Black History Month event by a smiling black man, unveiling a Black History Month banner that was wrapped around him like a cloak and then, seeking to express his enthusiasm for Caribbean and African music, making a “suntan” joke about himself.

There had been no repercussions at the time. But now the footage prompted a complaint which led to Rodwell being summoned by Labour’s National Executive Committee. Backed by local supporters, who reportedly described him “an ally” against racism, he escaped disciplinary action and publicly apologised for what he called his “stupid and embarrassing” remark.

His subsequent selection in spite of the incident drew criticism from the hard Left, pro-Jeremy Corbyn campaign group Momentum, which had long since pigeonholed him as irredeemably right wing. But Rodwell was accumulating more dangerous enemies in his own back yard.

A year later, in October 2023, he again found himself in the news after a local Labour Party member, Matt Lismore, saw that a banner in support of Rowell’s Barking candidacy had been attached by ropes to two headstones in the grounds of Barking Abbey.

The BBC chose to cover the incident, both in local news and nationally. Its website published photographs Lismore had taken of the scene and reported his saying he had removed the banner and was challenged for doing so by Rodwell in person.

Rodwell told BBC London the ropes had been a temporary measure while his campaign team were fetching more straps with which to tether the banner, which was displayed on the other side of the graveyard wall. But Lismore said the use of the gravestones had shown disrespect to the dead and called for Rodwell’s resignation as council leader. The story was subsequently covered by the Mail, the Express and the Sun.

More media coverage critical of Rodwell was soon to come. Again, the story was told by the BBC and again it featured Matt Lismore. On 11 November 2023, part of the decorative tiling of the balcony of a flat in Weavers Quarter, the first part of the Gascoigne East regeneration to be completed, fell on to the pavement below after the timber strips supporting them had, as Reside put it, “failed”. Fortunately, no one was injured. Unfortunately for Rodwell, Lismore was not only a resident of Weavers Quarter but also a campaigner on local housing issues who was frequently critical of the council.

Following the incident, Lismore said on X (Twitter at the time) that he had previously expressed “serious concern about the management and build quality of the development” and made specific mention of balconies, though Rodwell says those earlier concerns had been of a different nature and he had ensured that action to address them had been taken at the time.

Construction firm Bouygues, which built Weavers Quarter, accepted that responsibility for the latest problems lay with it, not the council, and announced it would be checking the safety of all balcony fascias. And the council pointed out that it was not the Weavers Quarter development manager – that role was performed by L&Q. Even so, Lismore felt the council should have done more.

BBC journalists decided to do more about Weavers Quarter in particular and Darren Rodwell in general. On 12 December 2023, its heavyweight Newsnight programme ran an item in which Lismore appeared. As well as the balconies, Lismore criticised the service charge which he, as a leaseholder, had to pay the council, saying he considered this excessive and poor value for money, with several services barely delivered, if at all.

Most tellingly in terms of Rodwell’s situation, Margaret Hodge, whose election agent and ally he had been and whom he was poised to succeed in the House of Commons, appeared in the Newsnight report too. She described the predicament of leaseholders as a “David and Goliath battle” against a “strong, well-resourced, not very caring council” and said they should receive a partial refund. She also said, “we warned about the lack of safety of the balconies two years ago.”

For a Labour MP to publicly rebuke their constituency’s Labour-run local authority, especially if led by that MP’s chosen successor, was dramatic and unusual. But it was not the first sign of a cooled relationship between Hodge and the council Rodwell led.

For the example, the council had issued an essentially neutral joint statement with the Barking & Dagenham Faith Forum, expressing the hope “that a peaceful solution can be found”. Hodge, a senior Jewish MP, had taken a prominent public stance on the issue, arguing for a “resolute” response by Israel to “the slaughter of innocent Jews”.

Email correspondence shows that Muslim Barking & Dagenham councillors, including members of Rodwell’s cabinet, declined to meet Hodge to discuss the issue. Hodge told them she was “extremely saddened and rather appalled by your response”.

On 22 May 2024, a rain-soaked Rishi Sunak named the date of the general election as 4 July. The political parties rushed to confirm their constituency candidates by the early June deadline. It was at the eleventh hour that Rodwell’s hopes of becoming the next MP for Barking were dashed.

The deadline for confirming candidates was 4 June 2024. The day before that, 3 June 2024, the Independent reported that Rodwell was “being investigated over an allegation of sexual harassment”. It had obtained details of the allegation and published them.

The Independent article also referred to a BBC report published on the same day about Rodwell having revealed in a podcast interview released in January 2022 that at some point in the past he had advised the local police of his intention to visit the home address of a borough resident on the grounds that they had launched a Go Fund Me page on Facebook which aimed to, in Rodwell’s words, “have me taken out”.

The BBC article, which appeared under the byline of the journalist who had compiled the Newsnight report about Weavers Court, mentioned “strict rules” under the Data Protection Act governing access to “personal details like addresses” and also that the Metropolitan Police had “declined to comment”.

Rodwell very strongly denied the allegation of sexual misconduct at the time it was made. And he later said he had already been cleared internally of any wrongdoing over the Facebook page affair.

But the day after the two stories appeared, he issued a statement. In it, he said he had “decided to take the incredibly difficult decision to withdraw my candidacy”. He continued: “I completely refute the allegations that have been made in the press” but added “I don’t want this issue to become a distraction to the campaign.”

He went on: “The Labour Party has made clear that there is no active investigation into complaints about me.” He concluded that he had decided to “step aside” in the best interest of his family. Labour selected Nesil Caliskan, the then leader of Enfield Council, instead of him.

Just over a month later, Rodwell was formally cleared by Labour of the sexual harassment allegation against him. In a further statement, he claimed there had been a “deliberate attempt” to harm his reputation in advance of parliamentary candidacy nominations being confirmed and that the dismissed complaint had left him “incredibly hurt”.

Rodwell says he withdrew his candidacy rather than it being taken from him, but that his circumstance effectively left him with no other option. The timing of the making of the complaint against him meant there was insufficient time for it to be assessed before the nominations deadline.

That meant that Rodwell was at risk of being suspended by Labour during the general election campaign, had the complaint been judged convincing enough to merit it. He says he was advised by officials that this situation, and the publicity that would come with it, meant he would struggle to receive formal endorsement as the candidate if he pressed on with seeking it. And so he bowed out.

As for the machinations that led to his taking that decision, they are a matter of continuing debate. A leaked email is understood to refer to a meeting held prior to the events of early June, attended by people who played parts in the unravelling of Rodwell – politicians, journalists and Labour Party figures.

Whatever meaning and significance of any such gathering, the hard fact is that when, on 4 July 2024, Labour won its landslide triumph and returned to national power with 231 new MPs, Darren Rodwell was not among them.

 

LEGACY

Later that month, I met Rodwell near Liverpool Street station to catch up. He seemed his usual self, until, that was, he started crying. He talked about the strain his family – which includes his daughter Emily, a fellow councillor – had been under and the decisions he faced about his future.

As he spoke, I recalled a previous, quite recent, time we’d met, when he’d told me about the threats and harassment he and some colleagues had become subjected to, not only through social media but also in the form of being followed on the streets by some of his more dedicated local critics. He gave examples of people seeking and receiving police protection as a result.

He had already talked about being subjected to intimidation on his own Dagenham doorstep. In his January 2022 podcast interview he recounted having chased two men down the street with a baseball bat after they attacked his home.

But Rodwell talked, too, about what he hoped and believed he had achieved as a campaigner and borough leader. We went back over the time of the BNP’s advance and its reversal, a victory he expressed firm views about. The anti-fascist and anti-racist group Hope Not Hate had campaigned prominently in the borough along with Jon Cruddas. Rodwell, though, characterised it as a middle-class organisation which, according to him, “actually appeased the BNP” by choosing not to fight against the fascist party in wards it seemed likely to retain.

That latter claim is sharply disputed by Hope Not Hate, which says it distributed newspapers and leaflets in the wards in question and engaged with their black churches. Rodwell, though, reserves his praise for a different group he worked with at the time – Unite Against Fascism, which has a broad range of backers but has had a strong far-Left involvement from the start.

That might seem a strange alliance. Perhaps, though, it is best understood as another example of Rodwell’s readiness to work with a wide range of people and organisations if he and they share common goals. Briefly, he broke off and tried to phone Weyman Bennett, a veteran far-Left activist and UAF stalwart, intending to put us in touch.

Rodwell’s dislike of the extreme Right vies for intensity with his annoyance at what he sees as condescension towards people like himself. He said he was “incensed” that Labour had given Nigel Farage “a free pass” in Clacton during the general election campaign, saying the Essex seaside town, with its economic and historic population links with east London, is known as “Little Dagenham”.

For him, British history shows that the true resistance to such threats, notably in east London in 1936, has always, in the end, come from “the blue collar working-class of many backgrounds”. The disparagement of such communities annoys him: “It’s easier to label them as being dysfunctional than actually listening to them and asking, ‘what do we need to bring them along?’”

He has a point about external attitudes towards some of his borough’s people. Wrong conclusions can be jumped to.

In 2009, with the BNP forming the opposition on the council, I attended a full council meeting at Barking Town Hall for the Guardian. Avoiding the press seats (always a priority) I squeezed into the public gallery and found myself sitting directly behind three hefty white men whose demeanour was not redolent of Eton.

I had done my share of reporting on Sieg Heilling England football hooligans. I knew the look. I thought I knew the type. But when Richard Barnbrook rose to speak, their response confounded my first impression: “Shut up Barnbrook, you twat!”

Rodwell points to Labour’s 100 per cent winning record in elections in Barking & Dagenham since he became a force in the local party: “I’m the only person to beat the far Right in every type of election you can imagine, and I’ve never lost a seat yet in my council. Yet I’ve also had one of the biggest regeneration and inclusive growth programmes in London.”

How successful have those policies been? How different from those of other London boroughs?

Both Barking & Dagenham’s approach to raising the money needed to pay for new housing and its version of the tenure mix and cross-subsidy financial model for estate regeneration, have attracted familiar criticisms from familiar quarters on the Left, including a recent academic study commissioned for an anti-gentrification project. Its conclusions were familiar too: regeneration using cross-subsidy and private finance erodes affordability and old council estates should instead be refurbished by the state.

It did not say, however – and this, too, is familiar – what councils should do if public money is in short supply or if old council housing stock has deteriorated so badly that no amount of refurbishment is ever going to be enough; or that trying and failing to fix the unfixable becomes a long-term drain on resources that could more usefully be spent on something else, housing included.

Neither does it much reflect on the outcomes of ballots of estate residents about regeneration schemes that have been held under rules introduced by Sadiq Khan in other boroughs since 2018. All but one has produced a majority in favour of the regeneration scheme proposed.

Rodwell’s perspective on becoming Barking & Dagenham’s leader in 2014 (by which time Reside’s earliest financing deals and the one for  Weavers Quarter, which dates from 2012, had already been done) was, by contrast, that of a practical local politician confident that he understood the circumstances and desires of communities he had lived in all his life and determined to take action accordingly.

He was not persuaded that trying and maybe failing to patch up existing local council housing was what local low-income, working-class people wanted if he could find a way of giving them something better, including lower heating bills, improved amenities, an enhanced social environment and more opportunities in life.

Regarding the Gascoigne estate, Barking & Dagenham has confirmed that all residents of the old estate who’ve wished to be rehoused in one of the new blocks have been allocated a place, either at a social rent or a (generally slightly higher) London Affordable Rent level. They also had options to move elsewhere (including to vacant dwellings on the Becontree, which some took up).

New homes not wanted by existing tenants are allocated by Reside according to criteria set out in its lettings system. It offers homes of six different tenure types, ranging from social rent to full market rent along with shared ownership and London Living Rent, which is designed to help tenants move into shared ownership.

Not all those tiers are available on every Reside-run housing block, but they are on the Gascoigne East regeneration homes finished so far. Judging by the next dwellings in the pipeline, making the numbers add up will also require 220 homes for private sale or buy to rent. But that is a lower proportion of the expected overall total than is found in other cross-subsidy estate regenerations across the capital.

When speaking to Jackie Sadek and Peter Bill, Rodwell explained that he favoured providing a wide range of sub-market priced properties, reasoning that doing so was consistent with a range of local residents’ incomes. Part of the thinking is that those eager to move out of private renting are content to pay more than a social rent if a new Reside home is of higher quality and cheaper than what they currently have. The council says “expressions of interest” in rental homes let at 80 per cent of local market levels has been consistently high.

The social value of the new housing completed for Barking & Dagenham through Reside and Be First can be measured in different ways and argued about, as housing policies and their outcomes frequently are.

Perhaps it can best be seen as a particular and place-specific manifestation of a model also used elsewhere, one which eschews recreating single tenure estates in favour a very broad tenure mix yet also rejects designed-in separate entrances to the different types (so-called “poor doors”) and offers opportunities for residents to move from one sort of home to another.

Rodwell calls this a “community rent model” with “flexi-tenure” and emphasises its difference from what he has called a rigid “20th Century framework” primarily constructed from council or other social housing, market private rent and home ownership. “This isn’t just about housing,” he has written recently on LinkedIn, “it’s about inclusive growth. A system that works for communities, for investors and for society as a whole.”

Be First can be said to have played a trailblazing role in facilitating inward investment that would not otherwise have come to an unfashionable borough grappling with the problems of economic decline and a BNP-bred reputation problem.

Its board was previously chaired by the late Bob Kerslake, the former civil service head and formidable housing policy expert. Within three years of its creation it had doubled the number of staff it employed to 1,100, including many with private sector experience. Be First also produced revenue – £10 million or more a year, according to Chris Naylor, which, he says, “is a bit like putting up Council Tax by 30 per cent”.

In his Demos essay, Naylor says Be First tripled housing delivery in the borough to between 3,000 and 4,000 a year, including one out of every five affordable homes built by council in London between 2020 and 2024.

Rodwell told Jackie Sadek and Peter Bill that since Be First was established, 5,000 new homes in all had been completed by the council’s two wholly-owned companies and private sector builders combined, leaving 45,000 to go towards the 2037 target. He added that close to a further 3,000 should be completed through council channels by 2026/27 and maybe double that amount by private sector builders. That would bring completions up to roughly 14,000. He also said that Be First had “put 27,000 homes through planning”.

More recently, he celebrated Barking & Dagenham completing more council-owned homes – 879 of them, as Inside Housing has reported – in the financial year 2023/24 than any other local authority in England. A further 1,901 such dwellings are due to be completed in the borough in the next five years.

Not everything has worked out as was hoped. Inside Housing has also reported that as of 2022, not a single tenant had exercised Barking & Dagenham’s Right to Invest. The borough has yet to attract the most prestigious private developers: not necessarily a problem of itself, but maybe a sign that the pull factor of relatively cheap land has not outweighed investor misgivings about the area, be that its limited local market for high-end homes or its continuing reputation as a low-end place.

In the past fortnight, the council has announced the adoption by Be First of a “new business model that prioritises public-private partnerships” with “several officers” of the council being appointed to its board and the appointment of a new managing director. Inside Housing has been been told by the council that this move by England’s largest council-owned developer “isn’t about stepping back” from affordable housebuilding. However, the change does look like a shift to a more more conventional set-up.

As for the matter of service charges levied on leaseholders, such as Matt Lismore, the council said when asked that this was a “live issue” arising from a number of factors and acknowledged that “there have certainly been example of times that the services to residents have not been good enough”. It said it was already trying to do better.

Last year, the City of London announced that it was abandoning its plan to relocate its three historic wholesale markets to Dagenham Dock. Much of the borough’s development activity has been in the Barking side of the borough rather than the Dagenham side, where some residents are said to be asking when they are going to see the vaunted benefits of regeneration and renewal. And Barking & Dagenham Council was lately found to be London’s most indebted, owing over £1 billion.

Naylor wrote in his Demos essay that the “improved outcomes” of the council’s “threefold new approach” since 2015 “are fragile and susceptible to loss”. Yet major council endeavours under him and Rodwell have been judged successful.

In education, alongside the improvements in school standards, the first batches of students at the Dagenham branch of Coventry University reported high rates of satisfaction.

The Community Solutions reorientation of council services has not endured as it was designed, says a council source. But it was described in a 2021 Local Government Association report as already having “a strong track record of achievement”, including “leading an effective Covid response”. It said that although there remained room for improvement, it was demonstrating, “in a practical way, how to use an individual’s needs, rather than service structures, as a starting point”.

In 2023, homelessness charity Crisis praised the deployment of “seven times as many officers” as before to prevention roles. Its assessment said that within two years of Community Solutions starting, the number of households to approach the council for help had almost doubled, yet double the number had averted homelessness than had been the case before. The use of temporary accommodation had fallen by a quarter and money had been saved as a result.

All of this followed the Local Government Chronicle in 2017 naming Barking & Dagenham its Council of the Year.

Would the changes Barking & Dagenham has seen since the closure of the Ford plant and the rise of the BNP have happened without Darren Rodwell? Local government success, like local government failure, can never be attributed to one person. But the reflections of Dominic Twomey, Rodwell’s close ally since 2006 and now his successor as borough leader, are worth reflecting on:

“Darren’s main strength was his passion to change the borough,’ he says. “Having that lived experience here is important to him, and to me. We saw it from the coal face in terms of what people were going through and what they needed in terms of good quality accommodation as a starting point that would underpin so much else.

“Darren worked tirelessly to attract significant investment to the borough and reshape it as a place looking forward to new possibilities. His mindset was to be at every single table that could bring benefit to the borough and for London too. He was about turning up and telling the story – we got rid of the BNP, our residents deserve better and so on. I call it a mission. He helped to put Barking & Dagenham on the map.”

 

LESSONS

No one else did borough leadership like Rodwell. He composed his own tune, riff, choruses and all. He stood up and sang it loud. As the face of Barking & Dagenham local government, he was his own homegrown creation, woven from threads of experience and conviction not often combined.

In his Brexit-voting borough, one of London’s minority handful, he backed staying in the European Union. At the same time, he had a picture of Queen Elizabeth II on his Town Hall office wall. At different times, he could sound more like Rachel Reeves than Rachel Reeves and more like Jack Dash than Jack Dash. “The Left think I’m Right, and the Right think I’m wrong,” he likes to say.

The comparison is highly inexact, but he had some similarities to Ken Livingstone, another white working-class London politician who made a mark on his home city. As Mayor of London, “Red Ken” was not afraid to appall some on his own side with his hunger for growth and courting of capital. Like Rodwell, Livingstone was a MIPIM attendee and once candidly remarked that he could get more affordable housing out of private developers than he could the Labour government. Some call that outlook corrupting, indeed corrupt. Others call it getting results.

Livingstone also had a similar view to Rodwell’s about why some electors in Barking & Dagenham had gone off Labour towards the end of its last long spell in power. In the 2008 election for Mayor, the victorious Boris Johnson received more votes in the borough than Livingstone. The blame for that, Livingstone assured me when I accompanied him on a visit to Dagenham just after the council elections of 2010, lay with Labour under Tony Blair. “They neglected the traditional working-class base,” he said.

The differences between the two were huge: for example, Rodwell, though he made common cause with some of such leanings when campaigning against the BNP, had none of Livingstone’s deep roots in the far Left. But there is a further comparison to be made. From his smaller stage, Rodwell, like Livingstone, had an ability to command attention that often worked in his favour, though not always and not with all.

Some in the London milieu where he had – and still has – many fans found Rodwell’s front-foot, no apologies, Old London-accented depiction of himself and his borough winning and engaging, but some could harm his cause. “He didn’t always read the room,” says one experienced London regeneration and development practitioner. “Telling people who might be thinking of investing in your patch that this is how we are, love it or lump it, doesn’t necessarily make them like you”.

Another observer, this one more enthusiastic, was struck by how obvious it was within the council’s orbit that he was very much the boss and not to be gainsaid lightly. And enemies maintain that Rodwell became overbearing, too often doubling down when challenged when a conciliatory note would have been more productive and more apt. With, quite literally, no political opposition on the council benches and Be First largely untethered from the council itself, concerns about accountability have been raised.

Yet a seasoned London government officer who worked beside him has nothing but praise for how Rodwell energised the culture of the Town Hall. “Barking & Dagenham was 20 years behind everyone else,” they say. “The council was fragmented and lacked focus. Darren stopped all that. His ‘one borough’ strapline was very powerful. And if he made mistakes he tried to learn from them.”

Views vary too, about the validity of the hostile media coverage he received. One colleague thought his accepting the hospitality at West Ham, while not improper or even remotely for personal gain, was a hostage to fortune and ill-advised. Rodwell’s view remains that if you’ve persuaded a global investor to bring a prestige industry to your home turf, you turn down the chance to strengthen that relationship watching football matches with them that you, as a West Ham fan, would have probably gone to anyway.

As for the “suntan” joke that came to haunt him, it was obviously asking for trouble. But conclusions some choose to draw from that are either mischievous or mistaken. Von Edomi, born in Nigeria, and with long prior experience as a London borough press officer, worked at Barking & Dagenham Council from 2005. The state of the borough astonished him: “I couldn’t believe any part of London could be so backward.” Soon, he had the BNP group to contend with, finding himself being referred to as “coloured” but maintaining, with difficulty, his professional poise.

Matters improved for Edomi after the BNP was expunged in 2010. They got better still after Rodwell became leader. “I was working with someone who believed in me,” Edomi says. “And Darren tried his best to bring the borough together.”

Few question Rodwell’s work rate. Many admired his demotic style. He once took part in a pre-Christmas virtual On London event wearing a full Santa suit, having just finished handing out presents to local children. “He had this cheeky chappie personality, which could be very charming and disarming,” a former colleague says. “He would meet these rather dry civil servants and bowl them over. He brought multi-millions of investment to the borough. It was local leadership at its best.”

Did those same strengths become a weakness? Rodwell has long contended that what he has called a “smear campaign” designed to stop him becoming Barking’s MP was motivated by class prejudice. In the run-up to Christmas 2022 at a London government event at the House of Lords, shortly after he was selected and a full year before Newsnight broadcast its piece about him, he told me that himself.

There are some, including admirers, who wished at times he’d wind it down. One, from a background just as proletarian as his, jokes that when they see him they go out of their way to remind him of this before he reminds them about his own blue-collar credentials. Another, also a stranger to silver spoons, worries that Rodwell had started to sound boastful towards the end, perhaps because he was feeling besieged and under-appreciated.

There is conjecture that some with decisive power and influence in today’s Labour Party, even though almost every member of Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet was educated at state schools, recoiled  from his individuality and big personality, feared he would become a liability in the House of Commons. Or else that they concluded that, having been such an upfront local leader, operating very much like a mayor, he would struggle to be a national team player.

But can there be any doubt that certain individuals, perhaps just a very few, were hell bent on bringing him down? Labour’s complaints procedures can drag on for many months, but the dramatically-timed sexual harassment allegation against Rodwell was given short shrift. He points out that he has never been found guilty of the various allegations of wrongdoing made against him. And he is right.

 

LABOUR

A few days after I met Rodwell near Liverpool Street station, Southport went up in flames. This followed the savage murder of three children there. False claims that their killer had been an illegal migrant had prompted the unrest, which led to further anti-migrant and anti-Muslim riots in other parts of England. Nigel Farage, these days leader of Reform UK, wondered out loud “whether the truth is being withheld from us”.

Today, Reform is vying with Labour to lead national opinion polls. It is winning local government by-elections. Farage’s political vehicles have made few inroads in London in the past, but Reform has just taken an 18.4 per cent share of the vote at Barnet Council by-election, finishing a close third behind the Tory runner-up in a contest that saw saw Labour’s winning share, though a commanding 45 per cent, fall by 18.2 per cent compared with May 2022.

The other week, Farage received celebrity interview treatment from The Standard. I’m told the BBC is planning further unfriendly coverage of Barking & Dagenham Council. Reform might fancy its chances there at the May 2026 borough elections. Meanwhile, polling for New Statesman has shown that support for Labour among council and other social housing tenants has been falling. Across Europe and, of course, on the other side of the Atlantic, populist nationalist politics are on the rise.

As for Darren Rodwell, he has set up a consultancy called Inclusive Growth. Its website says that this is “growth that everyone can share in, regardless of where they started in life”. The consultancy offers to “join the dots between communities and the corporate world” and to “build partnerships between public institutions and private enterprises”.

Rodwell is keen to share the knowledge and experience he gathered while in local government. Maybe Morgan McSweeney should give him a call.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things that other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. Main photo from X feed of Barking & Dagenham councillor Michel Pongo.