Greenwich Council leader Anthony Okereke has tightened his grip on the town hall in a cabinet reshuffle less than five months before the next election.
As well as being leader, Okereke will now also be cabinet member for planning and regeneration, The Greenwich Wire can reveal.
The deputy leader, Averil Lekau, has been effectively demoted with a new role as cabinet member for “co-op innovation and co-op partnerships”, which will involve developing “new models of co-operation across council services”.
Lekau’s old job, as cabinet member for climate action, sustainability and transport, will go to Calum O’Byrne Mulligan, who had stood in for her since September during a period of ill-health.
The upheaval in the transport department follows the scrapping last week of the disastrous “sustainable streets” scheme to implement controlled parking zones across much of the north and west of the borough. The scheme will now only be implemented around Woolwich.
A confusing consultation and poor communication about the proposals, followed by overwhelming hostility among residents, had led to the council backtracking on most of its proposals. O’Byrne Mulligan, 35, who represents Creekside, will now have to pick up the pieces.
Okereke will now take direct charge of the council’s planning policy and negotiations with developers. While most London borough leaders will effectively control this behind the scenes anyway, it is unusual for one to take both jobs so openly.
In an email to Labour councillors sent late on Tuesday night, he said this would “ensure stability” as the council starts consulting on a new Local Plan, the planning bible that will guide the future of development in the borough until the late 2030s.
Majid Rahman, an East Greenwich councillor, had held the role, but he stepped down last week, saying on social media that he had struggled to balance the role with his family life.
At the last council meeting, Rahman struggled to answer a questions from a resident about the future of the borough’s archive and why the council had ruled out using Woolwich Barracks as a home for its heritage centre, which has been homeless since 2018. He was rescued by a backbench councillor, Jo van den Broek, who sits on the board of the trust that looks after the archive.
Rahman will now become “cabinet assistant” to Okereke, being paid an extra £5,227 on top of his backbencher’s pay of £11,537.
Cabinet members such as Lekau and O’Byrne Mulligan get an extra £23,216. As leader, Okereke gets an extra £54,845.
Relations between Okereke, 35, and Lekau, 69, have long been known to be frosty, but the deputy leader post is chosen by Labour councillors rather than the leader. Part of her cabinet role was taken away from her in the summer following Labour’s defeat in the Shooters Hill by-election. Party sources said this was because she had been blamed for council staff letting fly-tipping linger outside a key polling station on the Barnfield estate in Plumstead.
In her new role, Lekau will be joined by John Fahy, the borough’s longest-serving councillor and a longstanding champion of the co-operative movement, who will co-chair a “co-op commission board” and work closely with cabinet members. Fahy, 83, who represents Kidbrooke Park, has served on the council since 1990, and was deputy leader himself in the 2010s.
The co-operative movement was a force in the Woolwich side of the borough for much of the 20th century, with the old Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society – whose motto was “all for each and each for all” – building housing in Abbey Wood, owning farmland in Shooters Hill and becoming one of south London and northwest Kent’s dominant retailers. The Woolwich-based co-op merged into the national Co-op group in 1985.
Some councillors have sought to recapture that spirit in recent years: most Labour candidates stood on a joint platform with the Co-operative Party, a sister party of Labour, at the last election.
The reshuffle comes as Labour faces its toughest election in decades in May, with the party under pressure from the Greens in the north of the borough and the Tories and Reform in the south, while Sir Keir Starmer’s government has plummeted in the national polls.
Three Labour councillors quit the party this year and joined forces with the newly-elected Green councillor Tamasin Rhymes to form an Independent and Green group on the council, which is now also an official opposition group along with the Tories.
In September, The Greenwich Wire revealed that ten female Labour councillors had opted to stand down at May’s election – a number that is now understood to have grown to 12.
Matt Hartley, the Conservative leader, said: “Ultimately it’s up to Anthony who serves in his cabinet and in what roles. But I do think the public should be given an open and transparent explanation for why he’s making this major change to who will be making decisions on transport and regeneration – two of the biggest issues for our borough.
“As usual, I suspect this is more to do with managing the Labour group’s internal politics than anything else. With the elections just months away, it’s going to take more than a reshuffle to avert the drubbing Labour is heading for, after four years of getting things wrong.”
The council had not publicly commented on the reshuffle by 1pm on Christmas Eve.
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