Lambeth Goes Down The Plug-Hole as Star Rating Sinks

4.02.56pm UTC (GMT +0000) Sat 24th Feb 2007

Lambeth's services have gone down the plughole

Labour Lambeth is now the worst Authority out of all the 32 London Boroughs - and that's official.

The latest Audit Commission survey of Council Service Performance for 2006 has seen Lambeth uniquely lose one of its existing two stars and be rated overall at only one star. This also means that Lambeth is now officially rated worse than Hackney for the first time - another strife-ridden Labour-run authority.

No wonder the Press are talking about Lambeth going down the plug-hole.

What is Labour's response to this shaming news? First Labour Leader, Cllr Steve Reed tries to blame the way the Audit Commission compiles its statistics - castigating, incidentally, his own Government for focusing so much on libraries - then, predictably, he starts to blame the Liberal Democrats.

Except, of course, the Liberal Democrat-led administration of 2002-2006 raised Lambeth from no stars, to one star and finally to two stars. And it chimes a bit hollow that after his May 2006 election victory, Cllr Reed boasted how he would turn Lambeth into a four star authority within four years. Maybe his latter-day Charge of the Labour Light Brigade is going in the wrong direction?

There's also an inescapable irony that it is precisely the detested Labour library closures of their 1998-2002 administration that has come back to haunt them. They successfully closed two popular branch libraries in Streatham Vale and Clapham Park and soon afterwards the Government introduced new minimum standards for residents to have access to libraries.

But for a vigorous campaign by library users supported by local Lib Dems, Lambeth Labour would have closed the South Lambeth library in Stockwell, the Carnegie in Herne Hill and the Durning library in Kennington. It would have made today's situation even worse.

So now we have the worst-run Council, offering the worst services, while Labour push through one of the highest Council Tax increases in the capital, plan to operate some of harshest care criteria and make the deepest cuts to voluntary groups, and operate the highest parking charges in the country.

Labour councillors were all laughing after their surprise May election victory - but who's laughing now? Only the same Labour members who pocketed some of the largest pay rises in the Capital.

Liberal Democrat Leader, Cllr Ashley Lumsden, said, " It is deeply disappointing that all the hard work raising Lambeth from rock-bottom has foundered already. Labour is showing itself by every thought and deed to be bankrupt of ideas let alone the determination to succeed."

Lib Dem Chair, Cllr Brian Palmer, added, " Labour's attacks on adult care, libraries, adult education, and the mess they are now creating in housing only threatens to undermine their credibility and may well mean Lambeth losing the remaining star it is clinging on to. It's not Back to the Future, it's Forward to the Past."