Elmgreen School in Lambeth is Britain's only parent-promoted secondary school - but Michael Gove's obsession with ideology is preventing this kind of innovation elsewhere

One of the first things the new Conservative-Lib Dem Government did on taking office was cancel Labour’s school-building programme. As a result, London faces a dramatic shortage of places, particularly at primary school level. According to London Councils, there will be 80,000 children across London without a permanent school place by 2014. They’ll either be in classes with more than 30 pupils in them, in portakabins, or being taught at home. It’s a worrying time for parents right across the capital, including here in Lambeth.

Our Labour council has been pushing the Government to think again. Giving children the best start in life – including a place at a good local school – is one of the most important investments we make as a society. We all benefit from it.

Last week I went to see the Government Education Secretary Michael Gove MP. I made the point that his cuts had left Lambeth £70m short of the funding we need to provide new primary school places. The problem is most acute in the south of the borough in Streatham and West Norwood. What’s strange is that although the Government says there’s no money to build the schools we need (remember, that’s primary school places in the south), he has announced funding for secondary school places in other parts of Lambeth. He’s given Durand Academy in Brixton £17m to build a secondary school in Kent for just 200 local children, and he’s offered Katherine Birbalsingh, known in sections of the press as the ‘Tory teacher’ because of her attacks on state schools at Tory Party Conference, around £10m to set up a secondary school in the north of the borough. I asked Mr Gove why he was offering money to build secondary schools when we already have enough secondary places, rather than the primary school places parents need. His thinking makes no sense at all.

Lambeth will soon run out of primary school places in Streatham and West Norwood unless we find the money to build new ones. So, reluctantly, we have had to sell off some council-owned land to raise funds. The old Lilian Baylis school site in Kennington has been used as a community sports and arts centre since the school relocated to a brand new building. The Lib Dems and Tories tried to sell off the whole site to developers when they ran the council. Labour saved it so the community could continue to benefit from the well used facilities. We came up with an innovative idea – we handed half the site to a community trust so that the sports and arts activities could continue, and we sold the other half to raise money to build the new schools local children need. A sensible approach. Unless you’re Michael Gove that is. He had his eye on the site for Katherine Birbalsingh’s so-called ‘free’ secondary school (the one we don’t need, remember, because we have enough secondary places already). Ms Birbalsingh has taken to the media to attack Lambeth for this decision – although all we’re doing is making sure there are school places for children where they are needed, rather than where they are not.

It’s a very strange world indeed where Tory politicians’ vanity projects are considered more important than providing school places for the children who need them. Lambeth’s pragmatic about who runs the schools – all we want is good schools that have the confidence of local parents. What a shame we have a Government that seems to be ignoring the fate of children at the 24,000 state schools while they pursue their ideological obsession with 24 free schools.

I spent a day out with Lambeth's child protection teams to gain a better understanding of the vital work they do

Protecting children at risk of abuse is one of the most important things a council does. The work carried out by teams of professional social workers only hits the headlines if something goes tragically wrong. The social workers do a tough and demanding job, and on the whole they do it extremely well in very difficult circumstances. I spent a day out with our child protection teams finding out more about the work they do in Lambeth. All the cases I refer to in this article have been anonymised to protect people’s identities.

I sat in on a case conference to see how the professionals decide whether a child needs protection and what that might include. The mother – let’s call her Miss A – was a foreign national who, because of her immigration status, was not entitled to public support in terms of housing or financial benefits. She appeared to have some difficulty understanding the process taking place despite very sympathetic treatment from the social workers. Miss A has recently had a baby but is living in temporary lodgings with a co-tenant she doesn’t know and who objects to having the baby in the communal living areas. The baby has no separate sleeping area of its own. Miss A has a medical condition that she is failing to treat properly despite being at risk of collapsing unconscious. If that were to happen she has no plans for who would look after her child. The father lives elsewhere in London, she appears to have no close friends, has never worked, and her family all live abroad in her home country. There are clear risks to the child’s wellbeing and the team are keen to try and minimise these.

The case conference includes social workers, police, health visitors and an experienced social worker who chairs the proceedings. Decisions are taken about the kind of support the mother should receive. It strikes me that she seems rather confused by what’s going on and I later suggest that unaccompanied adults who are involved in this kind of process might benefit from the support of a volunteer who’s gone through a similar experience and who could act as their friend, explaining what’s going on in a friendly and impartial way.

After the case conference, I join a social worker on a home visit. We get in her car and drive a mile or so away to a flat in a converted Victorian house. We meet Mrs B, an African woman in her late 40s, mother of six children. Two of her daughters, both under 16, have got involved with a violent youth gang and Mrs B is at her wits’ end with worry about how she can regain control over them. They frequently stay away for days on end, apparently abusing drugs and alcohol. They are not present, as they should be, for the social workers’ visit. They have lost all respect for their heritage and culture, both have been arrested for involvement in offending – some of it seriously violent. Both have been excluded from school. Frequent appearances at court mean little to them as they receive extensions to their community sentences – wearing electronic tags and taking part in community reparations that they simply ignore without any serious consequences.

Mrs B feels she has been prevented by British law from using traditional models of discipline common in her home culture that she believes would have kept her daughters out of trouble. There seems to be a real issue about the lenience of punishment given to the girls – instead of learning to respect the law they are learning that it won’t do anything serious to stop them. That cannot be right. I discuss with Mrs B and the social worker whether we need a different approach. The Boston model, first trialled in the United States, brings together community leaders and public service leaders to confront young offenders with two stark choices: either they accept the support on offer to steer them away from offending, or they face serious consequences that might include custodial sentences or intensive foster care placements with foster carers experienced at controlling unruly young people. It seems to work in the US and I wonder whether a similar approach here would help mothers like Mrs B regain the control they have lost over their children.

I’m also impressed by another initiative to help struggling parents recently introduced in Lambeth. The Council has joined up with Home Start UK to get volunteers who have experience in bringing up children in difficult circumstances to support parents who need their help. This is a great project, offering support that really makes a difference for families in addition to the support available from the Council. It strikes me as a great example of what we’re trying to achieve with our cooperative council proposals.

Back at the office, I join the referrals team to see how vulnerable children are identified and allocated support. I’m astonished to learn that there are 22,000 referrals a year, including from the police and schools. That’s nearly 500 a week, most of them highly urgent. The majority of cases involve some kind of domestic violence and this is often associated with drugs or alcohol abuse. The assessment team officers review the cases and pass them on to the social work teams best able to investigate and offer support. The council is keen to support children in their own families where it’s safe to do so, but will take them into care if there is a serious and immediate risk of harm. In a few weeks’ time the council’s referrals team will be relocated to work alongside the police so that it’s easier to cross-refer past criminal records of adults who are reported to them, leading to better decision-making about which children are at risk.

I was deeply impressed by the professionalism, dedication and commitment of Lambeth’s child protection teams. They really do an important job for which they get little public thanks. What could matter more than protecting some of our community’s most vulnerable children from harm? It was a privilege to spend some time with these people, and I will continue to work with them to explore some of the ideas for improving the excellent service they offer.

Curry's in Brixton was one of many stores attacked by gangs of looters

Two weeks after a wave of riots shocked the nation a debate is raging about what caused them and what we do about them. Thousands of people have been arrested and the courts are handing down tough prison sentences. They are right to do that because the looters are not just being punished for the goods they stole but for the widespread fear and panic they helped create as part of a lawless mob.

 So what lay behind the riots? Was it a sudden outbreak of lawlessness that inexplicably gripped thousands of people over a few nights in August? Was it, as the Prime Minister says, a sign of the moral decline of the nation?

Reducing this to a simple matter of morality misses the point. I do not for one second excuse the behaviour of the looters, but there is a problem that’s been festering in parts of urban Britain for decades that successive governments have failed to address and the current government is making worse. That is a sense of disaffection from mainstream society felt by too many young people in our poorest communities.

Lambeth is like many other urban areas across Britain. On our poorest social housing estates, the majority of children are born into a household on benefits; three in five adults of working age have no job; one in every two children lives in a single parent household; and there is a much higher proportion of dysfunctional families than in the population as a whole. With some of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Europe, many teenagers are having children of their own with little experience of good parenting to draw on and no stable relationship to rely on for support. Many young people do not know adults with steady jobs and many have no experience of a stable home life with clear boundaries set for their behaviour. They feel they have no legitimate way of accessing the affluent lifestyle they see beyond the boundaries of the estate where they live, and the only people they know making plenty of money are in gangs dealing drugs. Children learn the lessons they see around them, and the lesson some children are learning is that mainstream society has little to offer them.

Many of these young people have adopted the ‘gangsta’ culture imported from cities in the United States and fed to them through films, videos and music. They seem blind to the fact that, unlike impoverished American communities, they have access to free world-class healthcare, free and generally good state schools, a relatively generous benefits system, better social housing, a more supportive criminal justice system, a much less violent community in which to live, and for young Londoners even free public transport. But disaffection is not just about the reality of their situation, it is about how they perceive their lives compared to what they see in other communities around them. They need to be made to understand the value of what is available to them, and withdrawing elements of it from serious law-breakers is one part of doing that.

Most of the rioters came from poor, urban areas. They got involved not because of any lack of morality in society in general, but because the higher levels of poverty and social exclusion in the communities where they live have led to them becoming alienated from society. It’s a fact seen across the world that poor people are more likely to be involved in this kind of disorder than the better off. There’s a reason the riots hit Tottenham and Brixton but not Windsor and Reigate. Of course there are exceptions. The cases of well paid professionals who got involved are there for all to see, and the vast majority of poor people are decent and law-abiding. But that does not detract from the fact that the majority of looters came from poor urban backgrounds, and this was a factor in what happened.

It’s important we identify the right causes if we want to find solutions that work. There’s not been much finger-pointing at the way the Government’s targeted their cuts because no one wants to be accused of excusing the looters’ criminal behaviour. But understanding the problem is not the same as excusing it. The places that were hardest hit by rioting are all inner-city areas that have been singled out by the Government for a disproportionate share of funding cuts. Lambeth is losing nearly one third of our total available budget, while wealthier areas like Surrey, Richmond and Berkshire are losing almost nothing.

The problems that led to the rioting date back many years before the current Government was elected, but cutting funding for poorer areas on the scale the Government has chosen makes it much harder to maintain programmes that tackle gang membership, reduce teenage pregnancy, get people back to work and fund positive activities for young people living in crowded estates. On top of that, the Government is making direct cuts that fall most heavily on these same communities. The slashing of the Education Maintenance Allowance affects poor young people who otherwise can’t afford to stay on in education. The Government’s 23% cuts in youth offending services earlier this year closed many early intervention services that prevent young people from offending because the Government insists that the reduced budget must be spent instead on services that shepherd young offenders through the court system. We’d do better to stop them getting there in the first place. Poorer people on estates, if they work at all, are more likely to be in low-paid or casual jobs at greater risk of redundancy because of cut-backs. Youth unemployment is soaring. This Government did not cause the problem, but they are piling the misery on our poorest communities and should not be surprised when signs of disaffection become visible.

Violent youth gangs are a grim feature in many of London’s poorest communities. On some social housing estates in south London a majority of young people are gang members, not because they necessarily want to be but because they are coerced into joining by peer pressure including threats of violence if they refuse. Once involved, they are pressured into adopting the gang’s norms of behaviour, including taking part in violent assaults often involving knives or guns, drug dealing, and sexualised behaviour including rape. Many parents are at their wits’ end with worry, feeling unsupported and unable to prevent their children sliding into criminality that wrecks their lives as well as the community they are part of. Government threats to evict parents such as these, people who have done nothing wrong themselves, would only make matters worse. The problem with gangs is not new – Lambeth published a ground-breaking report on the matter in 2008 and followed it up with a big increase in funding for services designed to break the cycle of gang violence. But Government funding cuts that disproportionately target poorer areas like ours mean we now have fewer resources to carry out this work.

So what is needed to put things right? Above all, we need a national assault on poverty of every kind – not just financial poverty, but poverty of aspiration and poverty of opportunity. To be effective, this must be delivered locally, estate by estate, family by family, with the full engagement of the local community so it’s not seen as yet another top-down strategy imposed from the outside. This is what Lambeth is already doing with our limited resources, and it is why local government must be central to any solution: it is councils that have the detailed information about local communities, existing relationships with community leaders, and knowledge of local voluntary and community organisations that will be key to meeting the different needs of each community. These interventions will include help for parents who are struggling to bring up their children, support for community leaders to impose moral pressure on young people at risk of joining gangs, more positive activities for young people to keep them busy and develop new interests, after-school classes and homework clubs to improve learning, financial support to keep young people in education and higher education, training for jobs, peer mentoring, activities designed to expose young people to the opportunities available to them in one of the world’s greatest cities.

Doing this effectively will cost money, and that could come from a reversal of the Government’s decision to hit poorer areas with the biggest cuts and sharing the burden fairly instead. Not doing it will cost even more because society will have to pay the price of failure – including more people living on benefits rather than in work, more people in jail rather than contributing to society, and higher levels of crime to tackle and clear up after. Responsibility is a two-way street: we want people to feel more responsible to society, but we also need them to feel they are a full part of that society.

Whenever a social problem suddenly explodes there’s an urge to simplify the causes then promote simplistic solutions that miss the point. The rioting was inexcusable and lawless, but on its own inflicting tougher punishments on law-breakers from poor backgrounds doesn’t help them learn that society has something positive to offer them. It’s more likely to entrench them in the belief that society is against them, leading to further disaffected behaviour. Evicting parents who are already struggling to bring up their children makes their task even harder and, as a consequence, their children are more likely to become repeat offenders. We must retain a sense of proportion in our response. The causes behind the riots are many and complex, but we must identify those causes honestly if we are going to solve the problems that saw Britain’s cities explode on those dreadful few nights in August.

I went on a walkabout around Brixton first thing and saw the clean-up operation in full swing. The damaged shops are being secured. Broken glass and litter – some of it left over from the Brixton Splash event yesterday afternoon – was being cleaned away. The Council is working with businesses and the police to make sure our town centre is restored to normal working as quickly as possible.

With the tube station closed and the high street cordoned off by the police there were crowds of people wondering how to get to work, but the buses were still running through. The media were very visible with TV cameras, notepads and interview mics out in force. But the good people of Brixton were making one thing very loud and very clear – this is a great place to live, community relations are good, there is strong support for the sensitive policing we’ve seen in recent years. No gang of looters is going to jeopardise that. This is a community that works and we will all rally round to condemn those responsible for last night’s hooliganism.

The Council has offered the police our full support. We have CCTV footage that will be made available to help identify the ringleaders. There were some extraordinary reports of people driving up to Curry’s on Effra Road in cars to help themselves to electronic goods. If their number plates were caught on CCTV they can expect to be brought to book. Brixton is an open and tolerant place, but we do not tolerate lawlessness.

This afternoon the council will host a meeting for community leaders and business owners to share information about what happened last night. More importantly, we will also offer help to get our businesses and communities back on their feet where they’ve suffered any damage. We are calling on London’s Mayor and the Metropolitan Police to make sure there are enough policein Brixton over the coming days to prevent any attempt to repeat last night’s disorder.

I was astonished to find Ms Cupcake, owner of a bakery on Brixton’s Coldharbour Lane, out in Brixton this morning handing out brightly-coloured iced cakes. She told me this was no day to sell cakes, and she wanted to show the world the true face of Brixton –smiling, generous, and big-hearted. So she came out to spread a little love in the form of her cupcakes. That for me is what Brixton’s really about. And that’s why last night’s incidents will not scar our community. This is a community that is strong, cohesive, and proud of itself. No mindless thugs are going to damage that.

Lambeth is working with the community in a radical new approach to get young people out of violent gangs

Lambeth is set to become the country’s first council to put the community in charge of tackling violent youth crime. At an extraordinary meeting of community leaders held at the town hall last week the community made their position crystal clear telling the council ‘we are ready to lead’.

I chaired the event at which participants heard harrowing stories of the dangers facing young people who are targeted by the menace of violent youth gangs. Rosemarie Mallett from Brixton-based Word Against Weapons talked about how girls as young as 9 are sexualised by older gang members who force them to stand in sexual poses and threaten them with violence, and even rape, if they refuse to comply.

Carl Lokko, a young man from the Myatts Field Estate in north Brixton, talked about a friend of his who had been killed on the streets. He said it was time for the community to take control because “after this meeting we will go back to those estates, but the professionals will not, so we are more determined to make change happen because we don’t want to bury any more of our friends”.

A follow-up summit, held within days, brought together councillors, senior council staff and MPs to plan how to meet the community’s demands. The new plans – radical, because they involve a transfer of power and resources from the council to the community – will be a significant early example of Lambeth’s cooperative council in action.

Under the plans, youth centres and council funding will be moved into a community trust. The trust will pool its resources with whatever’s already available in the community including voluntary-sector schemes. Each neighbourhood or estate will then be offered professional support to analyse their own specific needs and choose what support they want, including better parenting support, help for dysfunctional families, youth activities, employment initiatives, or peer mentoring schemes helping younger children avoid getting pulled into gangs. People in each neighbourhood affected by high levels of violent youth crime will choose the services they need, which organisation will provide them, and how they should be run, all within the budget that the community trust makes available to them.

This model of community empowerment will give people in the most affected communities the chance to take back control over what happens to their young people. Their insights, as parents, neighbours or as young people themselves, will shape the kind of support that will be available to their community. Instead of being told by professionals what will happen to them, the professionals will be put under the control of the community. It’s radical, it’s cooperative, and I believe it gives us a real chance of getting vulnerable young people out of gangs and giving them back their future.

I joined Ed Miliband in Rochdale at the launch of the Cooperative Councils Network

I joined Ed Miliband and a group of Labour council leaders in Rochdale today to launch the Cooperative Councils Network. This new grouping of leading Labour councils will work together to set a new agenda for Labour local government based on handing more power to local communities.

The cooperative tradition is very strong in the north of England, and traces its history back to the Rochdale Pioneers who set up Britain’s first cooperatives over 150 years ago. We paid tribute to that proud history by launching our own pioneering network in Rochdale’s magnificent Victorian town hall.

The idea for cooperative councils was developed in Lambeth, but it is an initiative with a history that goes way beyond our borough. Labour has always had a cooperative tradition running through it, based on values of fairness, accountability and responsibility. But other impulses have sometimes led Labour governments to take a big-state approach that delivered real benefits but also created a dependency culture that is unhealthy for people and communities. Our job now is to take the power and resources of the state and put them at the disposal of local communities. Not rolling back the state, but changing the role of the state so it’s firmly under the control of local people.

Each cooperative council is trying out different ways to run services, and we will learn from each other what works best. Rochdale plan to convert their housing service into a cooperative giving all their residents a real stake in the place where they live and the way their homes and estates are managed. Stevenage are turning their adult care services into a social enterprise – setting frontline staff free from layers of management and giving older and disabled people a bigger say in the care and support they receive. Salford in Greater Manchester are setting up community trust schools answerable to local parents and the wider community. And in Lambeth we plan to hand control over youth services to local communities so that each neighbourhood can choose the balance of services that will most help their own young people. We are all finding new ways to hand ‘power to the people’.

I’m often asked if this is the same as the Tories’ Big Society. The answer is no, it isn’t. Lambeth announced our cooperative council plans months before David Cameron ever mentioned the Big Society. And the Big Society has a hidden agenda revealed in the longer name it once had – ‘Big Society, Small Government”. For the Tories, the Big Society is about using the language of cooperation to mask an agenda based on cuts, privatisation, and replacing skilled professionals with volunteers. By contrast, our cooperative councils are about strengthening public services by giving the people who use them more control over how they work.

Labour’s cooperative councils are shaping a new agenda for public services that will end the top-down, get-what-you’re-given approach of the past. And in doing that, we will strengthen the bond of trust and confidence with the public. I believe that will guarantee the survival of stronger, more responsive public services into the future.

The Tory Communities Secretary is slashing funding for Lambeth Council while making us waste money by printing information that could go on line for free

Eric Pickles, the Tory Secretary of State for Local Government, is forcing councils to waste millions of pounds that could be spent on frontline services. He recently approved frontloaded cuts that will see one in every three pounds cut from services in Lambeth. He tried to create political cover for this by pretending that senior pay cuts could somehow make up for the £90,000,000 this will remove from Lambeth’s budget – even though the total pay for all Lambeth’s senior directors amounts to less than half of one percent of this sum.

Then, adding insult to the injury he’s already doing to local people, he issued a diktat forcing councils to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds in subsidies to local newspapers while services for the elderly, disabled, schools and street cleaning all face cuts.

Pickles’ publicity code continues the perverse Government requirement that councils must pay local newspapers to print what are called ‘statutory notices’ – the small adverts that inform residents about things like planning applications and road closures. In Lambeth local papers charge us around £200,000 a year to print these notices. We told Mr Pickles we could put the information online instead where it’s easier for residents to find it and the costs would be close to zero. But Mr Pickles decided to ignore us and instead insisted we put the adverts in print.

In an attempt to try and reduce the cost to the public purse, we set up our own newspaper – Lambeth Life – and put our notices in that. The advantage is that we could attract other advertising to offset the costs of publishing the paper making it cheaper, overall, than paying an existing paper to print them. Lambeth Life was so successful that the net cost of publishing our notices in print reduced from £200,000 to around £50,000 – freeing up around £150,000 to be spent on protecting frontline services.

But Mr Pickles stepped in again. He forced us to close Lambeth Life intending to use our money to subsidise a local newspaper instead. Why would he do this? In my view, to try and buy favourable coverage in the local press for the Tories and Lib Dems. Another example of the corruptly cosy relationship between national politicians and the press that has led to the scandal currently engulfing Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

Lambeth however is not prepared to let Mr Pickles waste money that could be saved to fund local services. So, instead of meekly handing over taxpayers’ cash to a local paper we set up a tendering process inviting local newspaper publishers to compete to get our advertising in their paper. The winners were the publishers of the Lambeth Weekender. The bidding process saw the costs for carrying council advertising slashed from £24 per column centimetre – the amount they used to charge us – down to below £10. As a result, we are now saving around £100,000. Not as good as the £150,000 we saved before the Government interfered, but better than we would have got otherwise.

So what are Lambeth’s Tories and Lib Dems saying about these savings and their Government’s behaviour? Unbelievably they are demanding that we scrap the deal and put the advertising back in another paper at higher cost. And they are refusing to join Labour in demanding the right to put council notices online where we could save even more money. They are more interested in cosying up to self-serving journalists to try and grab a few headlines than in protecting the services local people rely on.

Rewards for recycling include free meals, keep-fit classes and treats from local businesses like Ms Cup Cake

Lambeth today launched a new scheme that rewards residents for recycling more of their household waste. The scheme, run in partnership with Recyclebank UK and Lambeth’s waste and cleaning contractor Veolia, is intended to boost recycling in Lambeth, helping Labour make the borough greener and improving local people’s quality of life. I was delighted to join Cllr Lib Peck and Cllr Lorna Campbell in Brixton’s Windrush Square to launch the new initiative.

The scheme is being rolled out on council housing estates first. Recycling rates in these areas are traditionally lower because it’s more difficult to collect recycled waste from high-rise blocks compared to the kerb-side schemes that operate elsewhere. If it’s successful, the scheme will be extended to all other residents in the borough within twelve months. Labour councillors expect the scheme to boost Lambeth’s figures above the 22% of household waste that’s currently recycled.

Residents have to register to join the scheme and can then check their recycling points by telephone, online or using a mobile phone app. Points are awarded for enrolling and every time waste is put out for recycling. All residents on a particular estate earn bonus points based on the total weight of recycling materials collected. Communities that recycle the most get the most points.

Over 100 local businesses have already signed up to offer rewards in exchange for points, alongside major national retailers including Coca-Cola and Nando’s. Rewards include free meals, keep-fit activities, and health and beauty therapies. Residents can choose to donate their points to local schools to support green projects as long as the school is registered to receive them.

Lambeth is the first borough in London to launch a recycling reward scheme, and the first in the country to pioneer the scheme on high-rise council estates. 

More information about the scheme is available here.

Community-run youth activities are successful at engaging young people and keeping them out of trouble

Mimi Asher is a single mum living on a tough inner-city estate in Brixton.  The estate is plagued by violent youth gangs whose activities include drug dealing, street robberies, and violence involving knives and even guns.  One gang member was pictured on the front of the Sun newspaper brandishing a sub-machine gun.  You can imagine why Mimi was terrified when her young teenage son got involved with one of the gangs.

Mimi decided to take action herself.  She got together with other worried parents on the estate, involved the local youth club, the church where she is a pastor, and set up a range of activities to give the young people positive things to do.  They set up a football team, cookery lessons, dance classes, prepared healthy meals, and got the young people access to computers and information about training courses.  Over three years Mimi and her neighbours helped 60 young people out of gangs and put their lives back on track.  The young man pictured with the sub-machine gun is now respected as a mentor helping other young people get out of gangs.  All that, and the only public funding they received was a £15,000 grant after they staged a demonstration at a police consultation meeting.

Many councils spend several hundred thousand pounds a year to steer at-risk young people away from gangs, but with success rates barely any different to what Mimi achieved.  So why was this community-led initiative so successful?  It’s because the community itself understands the social networks, individuals, families and highly localised circumstances far better than any outside professionals could do.  They use all this, driven by their urgent concern for their own children, to engage with the young people and divert them away from the ruinous path they are following.  It works, delivering better results for the community but at a fraction of the cost of what the public authorities were spending.

The lesson for councils is that closer involvement with the people who live in communities and who rely on public services can deliver better results, even at a time of severe financial constraints.  Mimi Asher’s story, and that of many other parents on estates across Lambeth, led us to ask what would happen if we started running our youth services in a new way.  What if we were to give people on estates their share of the total budget for diversionary youth activities then give them the professional support and advice they need to analyse their own local needs then bring in the services they need to fix the problem?  How much more impact would we get in tackling violent youth crime, and how much more empowered would people feel if we shared power with them in this way?  It’s not a wholly new model – organisations like Turning Point are already pioneering it, they call it community-led commissioning.  It’s about putting real power in the hands of the people.  It’s a model of services co-produced with the community, and it works.

Sharing power with communities can deliver better results in many other services too.  The precise model is different from service to service, but the approach – working together, building self-reliance, encouraging innovation – is the same.  In Lambeth we are now exploring cooperative housing as a means of helping people on low and fixed incomes to meet their aspiration to own, without running the risks of defaulting on a mortgage.  We are looking at micro-mutuals of personalized care budget-holders as a way of improving care services for older and disabled people by putting them back in charge of their own lives.  We’re planning community-run children’s centres, neighbourhood micro-plans, community-led clean-up operations, a cooperative model for mental health care that brings together users, carers and professionals as equals.  By redesigning all our services in ways that hand power to people we aim to reshape the settlement between the citizen and the state to strengthen our communities and the people who live in them.  It will give communities back control over their own destinies with the support they need to make change happen.  We call it the cooperative council because it’s about a new partnership where both sides – provider and user – work together.

Lambeth is just one of a number of Labour councils that are developing a new cooperative vision for what Labour councils can become.  We believe it better meets the needs of our communities, taking us beyond the Blair-Brown era while reconnecting with traditions that are hot-wired into our party’s psyche.  Where the Tories aim to roll back the state, we aim to change the role of the state to help people take back control of their lives.   The Big Society, insofar as it means anything, is an attempt to steal progressive language to mask an agenda of cuts and marketisation.  We cannot allow the Tories to prostitute our language in this way.

Labour may be out of power nationally, but as this week’s council elections show we are gaining power locally.  There is a bold and progressive localism now taking shape in Labour-run town halls.  The leadership to make this happen will come from the growing number of Labour councillors who are winning power across the country.   We can use the trust voters have placed in us locally to reshape our party’s destiny nationally.

Labour's Julie Dore is the new leader of Sheffield City Council after voters threw out the Lib Dems in Clegg's backyard

I spent election day in Sheffield where Labour’s been fighting a hard battle to win control of the Council from the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems ran the council with 41 seats against 40 Labour, 2 Greens and an independent. Nick Clegg is one of the city’s five MPs so a defeat for his party here on his home turf would be highly symbolic.

Labour’s leader in Sheffield Cllr Julie Dore is a local woman, a working mum who cares passionately about her city. I’ve got to know her well over the past few months. She’s unassuming but has a determination about her that’s as strong as Sheffield steel. I’m certain she’ll make an outstanding leader of the City Council. The results in Sheffield exceeded even her expectations as Labour won 9 of the 12 seats the Lib Dems were defending, giving Julie’s Labour team a comfortable majority and a mandate for change.

Out in the Sheffield Heeley constituency with Labour MP Meg Munn I met students, numerous across this university city, seething over Lib Dem lies on tuition fees. I met council housing tenants bitter that the Lib Dems had put Tories in power to cut spending on their homes and their children’s schools. Working people I spoke to felt betrayed over Clegg’s refusal to provide Government help for the Sheffield Forgemasters, crippling this local steel manufacturer’s chance of winning a big international contract that would have brought new jobs to this great northern city. On issues local and national I picked up a real sense of betrayal and a hostility to the Lib Dems that was open and heartfelt.

What people started to perceive is how the outgoing Lib Dem administration set a budget full of booby traps timed to go off after their defeat. They masked their own Government’s massive funding cuts to local services by using the council’s meagre savings to tide them over for a few months – fully aware that once that money’s used up their cuts would kick in. This was a deceitful trick, and they covered it up by refusing to publish a budget for the following years that would have exposed how they’d set a trap to make it look like the incoming administration is responsible for these Lib Dem cuts.  A low trick that, of itself, justifies voters’ decision to crush this disreputable party.  Even that hasn’t stopped Cllr Dore announcing, in her very first interview as Leader, that Labour would reverse Lib Dem cuts to children’s centres and Police Community Safety Officers.

What’s interesting to me is how similar the Lib Dems in Sheffield are to the Lib Dems in Lambeth. They’re all about short-term opportunism, electoral tactics, saying one thing while doing the opposite, and playing a blame game intended to deceive the voters. It’s what they’ve always done in local government because they used to get away with it. But yesterday that game came to a shattering end. Now the Lib Dems are propping up a Tory-led Government in Westminster their broken promises on issues like tuition fees, VAT rises, and savage cuts are all too plain to see. They can no longer say it’s someone else’s fault when their own MPs voted for it all. 

The voters have rumbled the Lib Dems and that’s why it’s the Lib Dems who bore the brunt of voters’ anger yesterday. For the Lib Dems this election was as much about their lies as about the cuts they’re forcing through too hard and too fast. The Lib Dems have learnt a big lesson the hard way: that trust is a political commodity slow to build up but quick to lose, and I sincerely believe the way Nick Clegg has thrown away the trust he won before the last General Election could yet spell the end of the party he leads.