Greenwich Council is set to spend up to £85,000 on creating jobs for political assistants – at the same time as the town hall’s auditors have raised the alarm over the council’s finances.
The council’s Labour leader, Anthony Okereke, wants to employ a political assistant for his party’s 51 councillors, at a cost of up to £55,600. A part-time assistant would also be offered to the Conservatives’ three councillors.
Political assistants are employed by other London councils, including Lewisham, Southwark and Newham, to carry out research and provide administrative support to groups of councillors.
The proposal will go to councillors next Wednesday, at the same meeting where they will hear that auditors found “significant weaknesses” in the town hall’s budget plans – issuing a red warning over the council’s deficit, meaning the council is spending more than it receives in government grants, taxes and charges.
Grant Thornton said the council had not acted on some of its past recommendations and warned the council would be “at considerable risk” of collapse by 2025/26 if it did not “make substantial recurrent savings”.
The report applies to the 2022/23 financial year, and in March councillors made £33.7 million of cuts for this financial year, including cutting street-sweeping services and reviewing library opening hours.
More cuts are on their way, with the council facing a £27.3m gap in next year’s budget – up half a million pounds on the last forecast, issued four months ago, according to a report going to the council’s cabinet on the same day.
The council’s deputy head of finance, Hitesh Jolapara, warned that as the political assistant posts were not in this year’s spending plans, “compensatory saving will need to be found from elsewhere within the budget”.
Greenwich is one of a number of councils – which also include Tory-run Bromley and Bexley – which do not have assistants. Greenwich’s Conservatives have always opposed the idea, while some Labour councillors have privately expressed reservations.
Okereke included employing assistants in his pitch to be Labour leader in 2022, while a recent outside review of the council recommended a shake-up in how the town hall was run, noting that councillors needed to be supported “appropriately and effectively”.
With just two party groups on the council – the sole Liberal Democrat, Chris Lloyd, would not be eligible for an assistant – Greenwich would still be spending less than some other boroughs.
Lewisham has assistants for both Labour councillors and its elected mayor, Brenda Dacres – with the latter role commanding a salary of up to £50,000, far more than the Greenwich post.
The recommendation that councillors needed more support came from a “peer challenge” overseen by the Local Government Association last summer, where officials and councillors from other authorities scrutinised how Greenwich worked. The reviewers included Grace Williams, the leader of Waltham Forest Council, and Andy Donald, the Haringey chief executive.
The review criticised some of the ways in which the council worked, particularly in how councillors understood their roles and the support available to them. It followed an inquiry that found council staff had helped organise a Labour fundraiser during working hours and had offered tea with the borough’s elected mayor as a raffle prize. The Grant Thornton audit said it supported the peer challenge’s recommendations.
Conservative leader Matt Hartley said his group would be voting against the idea.
“Labour’s complaints about stretched budgets will ring even more hollow after this latest costly vanity project from the leader of the council,” he said.
“Cllr Okereke has previously said he needs a political assistant to help with policy and communications – but he already has 50 Labour councillors to draw on. Instead he wants to increase the cost of local politics even further.
“And the idea that this proposal is somehow being made in response to the recent peer peview is absurd. Cllr Okereke included hiring a political assistant in his private pitch to Labour councillors to get elected leader two years ago. To pretend otherwise is just insulting everyone’s intelligence.”
Okereke said: ““Being a more strategic, efficient and adaptive organisation is a core part of being a strong vibrant and well-run borough that can provide the services that residents deserve.
“Sometimes that can mean doing things differently. We have heard the peer challenge team loud and clear. Although the team said we are an ambitious council delivering solid services for residents, it also made some recommendations about how we can do things differently and I believe that creating two political assistant posts, as is common in other London councils, will improve governance as well as supporting our elected councillors and political groups appropriately and effectively to realise the ambitions of the residents that they represent.”
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