Some remember it as the night Frank Dobson took a swing at an opposition party activist. The late local MP was said to be wound up as tensions spilled over and control of Camden Council slipped away from Labour for the first time in 35 years. As dawn neared, there was a recount or two and then the final scores were in. The Liberal Democrats, with 20 seats, had become the largest party. Labour had won 18, the Conservatives 14, and there were a couple for the Greens.
Labour leader Raj Chada had lost his seat in Gospel Oak. One of the Tories who defeated him was a young entrepreneur called Chris Philp, now a London MP and shadow home secretary. Another unsuccessful Labour candidate was Howard Dawber, these days the capital’s deputy mayor for business. His was one of many Labour careers dashed, or at least stalled, that night as voters gave free rein to their anger at Tony Blair’s third government. In Camden it was time for a first: the Lib Dems and the Tories running the show together.
It is very likely that what happens this May will resemble – or surpass – the experience of 2006. In that year, eight councils, a quarter of those in the capital, were left with no party in overall control. There was not a uniform pattern to this municipal upheaval. Like Camden, the boroughs of Brent and Waltham Forest also came to be run by Lib Dem-Tory administrations. In Hounslow, the Conservatives governed with the help of community group councillors, and in Merton they did it by bringing independent residents’ association members onside. Southwark and Islington had been in the hands of minority Lib Dem administration since 2002, and that continued. Finally, Labour won the mayoralty in Lewisham but lost control of the council.
The then leader of Camden Lib Dems, Keith Moffitt, remembers 2006 clearly and fondly. “From quite early in the evening it looked good for us,” he says, “although we never really thought we would take complete control.” He became the leader of the council – a high point in his political career, though he is still involved locally as the agent for the party’s candidates in this year’s election. “I am certainly proud of what we achieved,” he says. “I think we did remarkably well.” So too does the then leader of the Conservatives in Camden, Andrew Marshall. “Those four years when we were in power were a lot of fun,” he tells me in a call from New York, where he works as a communications consultant.
In the days following the count, the two leaders thrashed out a deal they could put before the council’s chief executive, and then full council. It was a decision to work together and run Camden under what they were keen to call a “partnership administration”. They didn’t want to use the word “coalition”, although four years later, thanks to David Cameron and Nick Clegg, such an arrangement was to go national and mainstream under that name.
Councils being run by an executive cabinet – usually of around 10 members – was a relatively new thing, introduced in the Local Government Act 2000 to replace the traditional system of committees. It was largely untested as a model for when no party had overall control of a council. It had been Tory and Lib Dem policy to oppose the cabinet system, but in Camden they decided to make it work for them.
The two leaders negotiated over a policy programme which preserved their most cherished individual asks but found common ground in a wish to freeze Council Tax and get on top of the borough’s council housing repairs. They agreed a cabinet of six Lib Dems and four Tories. Both leaders got it in the neck from some of their own councillors over the deal, but Moffitt suggests it actually worked out better having four experienced Conservatives involved rather than newly elected novice Lib Dems.
Both former leaders feel people exaggerate the perils of so-called No Overall Control councils leading to logjam and uncertainty. Inheriting what they admit was a strongly performing local authority, led by a capable team of officers, made it easier. There was a triangular relationship to decision-making – two parties instead of one working alongside the chief executive.
They agree that success depended on them getting on well personally, building trust and being prepared to compromise, not sticking rigidly to party philosophy. “Let’s be honest, there aren’t purely Conservative ideas on how to collect your rubbish,” says Marshall. “We were prepared to talk like grown-ups,” says Moffitt. In next door Brent, he says, the situation proved more problematic because the two leaders involved did not get on.
But how realistic are hopes that this rosy picture of civic co-operation could be replicated in current times? For a start, the fragmentation of support for parties has transformed a landscape where a main three vied for a Town Hall presence to one where there are five are in contention. It feels hard to predict what kind of political stasis might result in the weeks after May’s elections if the numbers get messy and you have five sets of players feeling they are in with a shout of a role in a coalition.
Who is and who isn’t prepared to do business with whom? How easy will it be to make coalitions work in cabinet? We must wait to see what happens in councils where Labour loses overall control but remains the largest party. Will it be legitimate for them to continue if their opponents cannot agree to form an alternative administration? Is it safe to assume that the Greens and Lib Dems would not work with Reform? How will Independent groupings act?
London’s councils continue to face big financial problems, spending more than £5 million a day on housing people in temporary accommodation alone. Room for manoeuvre and executing bright new promises of spending and saving is limited. That applies whether voters opt to retain a hitherto entrenched one-party fiefdom or decide to mix it up a little. But some areas of vital future growth will surely be affected by the uncertainty that comes from coalitions, not least the time they may take to settle. Regeneration and the built environment are good examples of areas that are susceptible to uncertainty and volatility.
With three months to go until the elections, public affairs and communication specialists are trying to reassure their clients they know how to navigate the political upheaval coming down the track. In chaos, there is opportunity. But such is the potential for change (and joint administrations) in many boroughs that it is difficult to map likely shifts in policy and tone, let alone identify the characters who will end up on the next planning committee.
How much more complex will the operating environment really become? At a recent housing event, the developers, planners and architects I spoke to were curious about the possible widespread changes in the capital’s town halls. What, in particular, might a Green or a Reform council mean for them? But they argued that political change was always factored in. Electoral cycles, general and local, don’t in any case align with regeneration schemes that can be long, long years in gestation. Heed was already paid to the political calendar when navigating the planning system, they told me. It’s already the case that they approach different boroughs in different ways. This will only change by degree.
After four years of the Lib Dem-Tory partnership running things in Camden, it was time for the voters to give their verdict. Marshall describes the strange sensation of campaigning at the 2010 election, when they resumed their fight against the Lib Dems, as if their partnership had not happened. Creative campaign leaflets stressed the unique part the Tories had played in the preceding four years.
It all came to nought as Labour again won a majority. Moffitt claims that this had little to do with the competence of the partnership administration. It was the local elections being held on the same day as the general election that brought out the Labour vote. “We were unlucky,” he says. “We weren’t rewarded for what we did. As we know, no good deed goes unpunished.”
Tim Donovan is the former political editor of BBC London and now a trustee of Centre for London. Follow him at LinkedIn. Image of Camden Town Hall interior from Camden Council.
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