In the run-up to Council elections, a number of outrageous RBKC Tory claims must be challenged.
The temerity of the Council, claiming in electoral literature that RBKC is ‘Britain’s most efficient Council’, is a total disgrace.
Let’s look briefly at precisely who has stated this: ‘iMPOWER’ who released this so called ‘independent study’ is a management consultant who use ‘theory of change, influence, and applied behavioural science’ (nudge theory I imagine) to create ‘change’ and cut costs.
A few brief clicks will tell you that the ‘independent’ study has come at quite a cost to the Council. The first use of this consultancy was in 2014, £80,000 to work with children’s services. Most recent note showed a contract for 2019-20 costing a whacking ‘£325,000-£805,000’. In essence, the cost of this shameful PR exercise is over £1m – and that’s just what we found in four minutes, it could have cost a whole lot more to be that ‘efficient’.
Now, let’s unpick this ‘efficiency’. In November 2025, the wholesale hacking of the Council’s entire website and structure behind it, including IT, comms and cc200 software applications, threw the Council and the entire borough into disarray which continues to this day. We are not informed as to how this happened, but well remember from the past their woeful record (remember the chaos and financial losses of Tri-borough?) of updating software to keep safe our money, our personal data, and the systems that pay out benefits and take our Council tax and all other fees and payments. They still don’t know whose data has been stolen, or how many tens of millions of our money has been spent correcting this avoidable crisis. ‘Efficient’?
They will crow about ‘best-rated’ adult social care, ignoring the care homes they closed and sold off for profit, forcing hundreds of our vulnerable elders out of borough, replaced by private ‘caviar care’ homes for over 65s, with ‘speakeasy’ bars (I kid you not), starting at £2,750,000 for a one-bedroom flat.
Below, the end of Edenham Care Home, vs ‘The Auriens’ caviar care home, which replaced Thamesbrook Care Home.
And yes we do have good schools, but over half are private, and one-third of our children are schooled out of borough.
When you curate your statistics so carefully, you can prove pretty much anything.
Your parking permits and fines give the Council a humungous profit of around £60m a year. Once they have smoothed our streets and dug up and relaid perfectly good pavements, a £10-£20m Slush Fund is available to spend on their ‘Amazing Spaces’, with planting, paving and supposed ‘rain gardens’, many of which collect rain and become mud baths. They ignore the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 which states that the parking reserve can be used for ‘environmental improvements and reduction of environmental pollution, improving or maintaining the appearance or amenity of roads and public open land, the provision of outdoor recreational facilities available to the general public without charge’. We have zero cycle paths which would be an excellent use of these funds. And would they set aside a penny to create the desperately needed refurbishment of Westway Bays 17/19? After eight long years, we are waiting – see the ‘Amazing Space’ at Maxilla Gardens below.
They will endlessly carp about ‘efficient’ financial management. Let’s remember that their efficiency cut cc£300,000 from the budget of the Grenfell Tower refurbishment, costing 72 precious lives, thousands of residents with life-long trauma and accompanying damage to physical and mental health and indeed career prospects. The eventual cost of the Inquiry, police investigation, and work to demolish the Tower and create a memorial, is estimated to have cost the country £1bn. Since 2017, despite tens of millions spent in the area, multi-deprivation in the ‘Grenfell ward’ has risen, and life expectancy has dropped quite dramatically, putting it for the first time in the top ten worst for multi-deprivation in the whole of London. And remember that Golborne ward, where they spent a small fortune on repaving the Golborne Road market, continues to be THE most multi-deprived ward in London.
So when they knock on your door and want you to agree that twice-weekly bin collections are the be-all and end-all of Council ‘efficiency’, ask them about why they need to beg £100m from the government to finish the refurbishment of Lancaster West estate, and ask them about the link between ‘sound financial management’ and the total disgrace of enduring and worsening multi-generational poverty in the wards they don’t control – or care about.
Their claims of ‘efficiency’ belong – in the bin.