Days after becoming the first Green Party leader of Haringey, Mark Blake is confronted by some hard truths. The council’s auditors, KPMG, have just warned it about the dire state of its finances.
“The overall financial health of the Council has deteriorated to the point where it is no longer able to set a balanced budget without relying upon significant amounts of EFS [exceptional financial support, a form of borrowing from central government] to fill any shortfall,” they say. “The Council has not demonstrated an ability to successfully deliver relatively modest savings programmes, nor has it committed to and subsequently implemented large-scale transformational efficiency savings.”
It’s quite the reality check, and Blake is required to respond immediately, addressing the failings in public. A full council meeting has been convened for that purpose. Ahead of that, and shortly after we meet, he is due to shoot a video explaining the council’s predicament directly to the people of Haringey. Getting the excuses in early, some may say. Just being open, honest and transparent, he says, adding that he wants to adopt a style of proactive communication inspired by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
In a situation inherited from Labour, Haringey is set to borrow £80 million in EFS this year on top of £50 million over the last two years. Blake describes these as “payday loans” with punishing repayment terms. Within three years, he claims, Haringey will face a debt of nearly £350 million.
It is a “contagion,” he says, and the council “cannot afford to suffer in silence”. With the possibility of external commissioners – accountants who choose to cut where they think fit – being sent into Haringey, he says he is opting to go on the offensive with a campaign to have the government support scheme dismantled and more sustainable funding put in its place.
“A lot of people say to me, ‘you’ve taken on this poisoned chalice’,” he says. “But actually, for me, I quite relish the opportunity of taking on what I would call absurdities. I think the EFS is absurd. It’s been established somewhere in the Treasury. It feels as though it’s highly punitive. I can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. I want to have a dialogue with government. This is unsustainable.”
Blake was not widely expected to take the helm at this north London council after May’s local elections, not least because he was a Green candidate in a borough that Labour had controlled without a break since 1971. And he had only joined the Greens in June 2025, following a long, up and down relationship with Labour.
His membership of the party preceded the 2003 onset of the Iraq War, which prompted him to resign from it. He rejoined under the leadership of Ed Miliband, which began after Labour’s general election defeat of 2010, and he was a fully-fledged supporter of the Jeremy Corbyn project. He was first elected as a Labour councillor in Haringey 2014 and remained one until 2023, when he resigned from Labour over Keir Starmer’s position on Gaza.
For a while, Blake sat as one of a pair of councillors under a “green socialist alliance” banner before being lured to the Greens after they won their first council seat in a by-election last year. He was drawn by the “camaraderie” of that local campaign, during which Zack Polanski himself suggested he join the party. “I suppose it is flattering when someone does that,” he says.
Labour’s loss of control of Haringey was a shock, including to Blake. He says he had been optimistic about the Greens winning winning 10 to15 seats and forming a strong opposition to Labour. But at the election count came a “penny-dropping moment” when the Labour leader of the time, Peray Ahmet, lost her seat in Wood Green ward to a Green, even though the Greens had not mounted a serious campaign there.
It showed that the Greens would do better than Blake had expected, and they ended up being the largest party with 28 seats, though this fell agonisingly short of a majority, with Labour holding on to 21 seats and the Liberal Democrats winning eight. As Lewis Baston has reported, two by-elections last month failed to change that overall picture.
Unlike in Lambeth and Southwark, Blake was unable to make any arrangement to govern with the backing of the Lib Dems, although he claims he thought he had an understanding with them until being surprised by manouevres at the decisive annual general meeting at the end of May. Labour and the Lib Dems did not oppose him becoming leader, but joined forces to reject his choice for the role of civic mayor and voted to divide up between them – and exclude the Greens from – the chair positions on all but one of the key council scrutiny committees. That is an important potential brake on Green ambitions.
Blake says he is happy to “fess up” to naivety over the inability to get the Lib Dems onside, but does not want to criticise his opponents when he is now actively seeking their buy-in and involvement in sorting out the current financial crisis. He dismisses what he calls “the idea that I’m going to hold grudges in this context where we’ve got the threat of a bunch of accountants running the council, which I think will be a disaster, not just for the council as an entity, but more importantly for the people in Haringey.”
I ask him if Labour and Lib Dems were happy for him to become leader because they were confident that he would fail. “That could be their grand plan.” he replies. “Who knows? The consequences of that too, in terms of, as I’ve said, commissioners coming into the borough, I think will be awful. And it will be our poorest, most marginalised constituents who will bear the brunt of that.”
Despite the financial straits, Blake says council officers are telling him that much of what he wants to do is achievable, adding that he went into the election with limited spending commitments. “We deliberately set a manifesto that didn’t have a lot of large ticket items, and if there are large ticket items which are not going to be realistic, then that is something I will have to go back and explain to my party.” The noticeable change is going to be “cultural”, he says, including setting up a “popular assets commission” to ensure the community is getting maximum benefit from council properties and being more responsive on housing repairs.
There is no word yet about how much it will cost to deliver a two-year service charge freeze for tenants, or to stop using bailiffs to evict tenants, although Blake says the latter could save money in court and enforcement costs. He cannot guarantee not having to sell off some council property, but promises “no fire sale”. The cost of landlord licenses will rise, but it has not yet been decided by how much.
On housing, Blake praises the social housing programme of his Labour predecessors, but says it should have delivered more, citing the development of three and a half thousand homes around Tottenham Hale in the last decade – much of it on land owned by Transport for London – of which 18 percent was affordable. “I don’t think that is a great return to be honest,” he says. “And it is source of disappointment and resentment.”
He insists he is not “anti-development” but is critical of developers waiting for the right market conditions and calls for an annual land-bank charge for sites left undeveloped for more than five years. He cites the major High Road West regeneration plans for the Tottenham area that have been in gestation for more than a decade. “I don’t think it is acceptable for sites to hang in limbo for that length of time.”
Blake said there were “delicate negotiations” going on with lead developer Lendlease around next stages, after plans for 61 social rent homes came forward last week, but he suggested they should sell up and “exit” if the scheme no longer works for them. “I would like to see them engage with us about how we take this schedule forward, and if they can’t, how they can exit it in way that is beneficial to all parties.”
Wasn’t there a danger in such an approach that developers would simply look to build elsewhere, to the detriment of Haringey? “I think they will adjust to market conditions. But if we are building more social homes, that might be a general stimulus to the market across the board. In London the housing market has got out of kilter with the real economy because we have so much investment-led housing and people parking money.”
There are firm words too for Tottenham Hotspur FC, which moved into its new stadium seven years ago. Blake says they are a key partner with the council, but that Labour signed a “bad deal” with them and he and the club have “lots to discuss” at a first meeting next month.
“The stadium sits in the midst of one of the poorest wards in the country in a ward that desperately needs investment,” Blake points out. “I’ve knocked on a lot of doors in Tottenham, and people are not happy with the level of events they have at the stadium, the disruption. So we think there’s a lot more that they can do. We’ve suggested that they can contribute to an endowment fund for the locality. So we’ll be discussing that.”
As he prepares for the painful budget-setting and cost-cutting process ahead, Blake is frank about the political landscape shifting with the arrival in Down Street of Andy Burnham, who he says is “assumed to be progressive” and wanting to “park his tanks on our lawn”. The Greens will need a “re-think” on policy and positioning. In the course of our chat, he is positive about Burnham’s views on devolution, council housing, a national care service and Gaza.
Blake also reveals that he and the capital’s five other Green Mayors and leaders recently (10 July) met Sir Sadiq Khan at City Hall. The Mayor was “undoubtedly” courting Green support, in his view. He left the meeting with a strong impression that Khan might want to run for a fourth term, potentially buoyed by the arrival of Burnham, though he was talking ahead of the announcement Khan’s peerage, which many are interpreting as indicating he will not stand again.
What does this all potentially mean for the Greens, if some of their vote in May proves to have been a protest against a Labour leader and a Labour Party in a previous shape that has now changed?
Blake thinks the Greens have established deeper roots than that among younger, poorer and ethnic minority voters. He says, “We’re going to have to do some thinking in terms of how we position ourselves. But I think that’s fine. Look, I think we’ve had an incredible rise within the last year. We need to consolidate. We’ve got a base. We’ve got six councils across London where we are Mayor or in a leadership position. That’s a real platform to show what we can do. We’ll have to assess what Mr. Burnham comes forward with in his first six months in terms of devolved powers, shifting the economy, and on housing which is so crucial.”
Tim Donovan is the former political editor of BBC London and now a trustee of Centre for London and political adviser to Kanda Consulting. Follow him at LinkedIn. Photo of Mark Blake from Haringey Council.
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