Hackney Council is today seen as a typical Inner London local authority, facing very significant challenges and responding well to the needs of its citizens in a range of policy areas. Its able and long-serving mayor, Jules Pipe, would not claim that it is perfect. Like any other public authority it can get things wrong from time to time, but he is justifiably proud of many of his council’s achievements, and he has even more reason to be proud of the transformation of Hackney Council over a 15-year period. For it was not always like this. In summer 2001, when I was appointed Minister for Local Government, Hackney Council was widely seen to be in deep trouble. Its record in delivering most council services was abysmal. In its core responsibilities such as housing, social services, education, leisure services and street cleaning it was visibly failing. Perhaps even more telling was the extent to which many local residents had simply given up on getting any response, let alone positive action, from their council.

More than any other area in the country it was wallowing in a culture of excuses, attributing its dire performance standards to the poverty of its area and the claimed lack of government funding rather than to its own managerial incompetence. Yet, as became crystal clear within a few minutes of examining the brief I was given by my civil servants, the London Borough of Hackney was failing to collect no less than one-third of the Council Tax revenue owed to it.1 While there was no doubt that Hackney was an area suffering from real poverty, the inability of the council to make use of the revenue to which it was entitled spoke volumes about its failure to rise to the admittedly serious challenges it faced. Nor was this just a short-term aberration. Hackney was known to have been plagued with problems for decades. Almost 20 years earlier in 1983 I had seen this at first hand, when invited by the then council leadership to advise Hackney on how to remedy its disastrous failure to administer the newly introduced Housing Benefit scheme. Although many other councils had faced difficulties with this challenge (see Chapter Three) Hackney was widely perceived to have been among the very worst in the country at that time.