Jack is the Leader of Lambeth Council.

You hold a leadership role in your organisation. What’s your motivation?

I grew up in public service. I believe in it. I believe in making the world better. So, it’s a great opportunity to do that. To improve the lives of my residents, my neighbours, businesses and shops in the place that I live. 

What’s been your direct experience of Covid-19 – both professionally and personally? 

So I think personally, obviously lockdown: you start to see the world a from a different perspective. I was talking to you earlier and about recognising that ten year olds can manage an hour of unsupervised play, and that’s it! And then an adult needs to be in the room. And the things that you miss when you’re just rushing through life. So it’s been a time for reflection. 

Professionally it’s been really, really intense. I’ve effectively just worked seven days a week. And, certainly at the start, from 6 in the morning I’d get up and start doing stuff, phone calls with the Chief Exec five times a day, you know, emergency control meetings, key decisions, emergency decisions, lots of questions, a whole bunch of councillors to point and direct and to get information from. Professionally it was really, really intense, but, you know, satisfying, and Lambeth’s done fairly well out of it so I’m fairly proud. 

What were the main challenges you faced in your role before the pandemic, and what were the causes of those challenges? 

I suppose at a macro level, the challenges before the pandemic have just been the same ones that have been exacerbated. People on low incomes, bad wages, no access to green space, overcrowded conditions, precarious work, danger on the streets. We’ve had a lot of young people killed in our borough on the street. That hasn’t been happening but we’ve had other people dead from being on the street. 

And the causes of those challenges – I mean, they’re huge. Structural racism, generational poverty, poor social networks, higher prevalence of co-morbidity indicators anyway within certain communities.

So, the challenges are clear: inequality’s causing it, poverty’s causing it but there are so many different ways of trying to get out of it. And I suppose that’s been the biggest difficulty of this, the same challenges organisationally – how do you turn as much resource as you need to solve some problems, and who does it?

The council can’t do these things, we know that; we can’t solve youth violence and poverty, but working with other people we can. How do you get the resource that exists in that area focused on solving a problem together? But, you know, Covid has made us work in different ways, it’s been great – a lot of stuff I was trying to push beforehand to try and get the organistion into a better space, working around people’ sneeds,  around where communities operate, working across departments, or agencies or public sector partners or whatever… that’s all happened.

So Covid has super-charged our ability to transform the organisation. I suppose it’s now about catching it on the other end and saying, ‘what was good, what do we want to keep, what did we miss and reshaping the organisation to be fit for what the post Covid world is going to look like.’

Many people are talking about Covid-19 being a game changer for society, about recovery and reset. What do you understand that to really mean? What do you think ‘reset’ means and what do you think other people think it means? 

I think it’s quite difficult at the moment, because in my head I’m in this space right now. And it’s just time limited. I am thinking a little bit about the future, the far future, what would the world be if I could click my fingers and say, ‘right, let’s get there’. A lot of my thinking over the last week has been about what are the immediate challenges, like schools opening, community centres opening, people going back to work, second spikes, contact tracing. You know, what are we going to do with all those kids who’ve just missed months of education. What can you do safely. So I think about all those sorts of things and make sure that we’re dealing with them. 

The thing that’s been great about this is the solidarity. But the second that some people starting getting let out, that solidarity goes out the window, because people just want to get back to work and they forget about the fact that someone who lived across the road from them for ten years has been going to food banks for ten years, but they only just realised that these things existed. Now how do you make sure that people retain a sense of, ‘I don’t think it’s good enough that people who live on my street don’t have access to green space, or get paid bad wages from companies I buy stuff from?’ How do you get people to care about the situation of their neighbour they don’t know, that’s different from their own? And to say, ‘Ok, I’ve got some choices I can make in my life. I’m going to stop buying from Amazon because their warehouses are terrible and they crush union labour and they treat their workers really badly. You know,  air quality in our part of London is the best it’s ever been because people aren’t driving. You’ve got kids cycling around in the streets – that’s great, isn’t it? That’s nice.

So people have choices to make. Government and local government cannot make people behave better to each other, so the solution has got to come from everyone. That’s why you’ve got to co-produce the solution with people, They’ve got to recognise their role in it and their stake in it. When we come out of this, we’ll come out with a Lambeth Recovery Plan. But it won’t be a council plan. Everyone will have contributed to it. Because we need them to do their bit and recognise where they fit in the jigsaw. If they just say, ‘Right, oh good, this is what we want you to do, the council, then kids will still go back to dying on the streets, we won’t be able to properly fund services, people won’t change their behaviour and sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others, whether that’s not buying stuff from Amazon or getting on your bike to go to Sainsbury’s rather than driving. So they’ve got to be part of that solution. Or otherwise they’re not going to do it. 

What do you think has to change? From a political, economic, technological, institutional and behavioural perspective, for example? 

Well, I think one of the problems that we’ve got in a place like Lambeth is that people don’t know enough about how other people live. Big issues like the climate emergency, people either don’t care or they cheat. There are very few people in the world who are really good environmentalists. The problem is that they’re so bitter about it that no one listens to them. Hair shirtedness and holier than thou – I’m talking about the green lobby. I’m not necessarily talking about new groups, like Mums for Lungs, which is groups of local mums getting together to stop people driving and improve air quality and all that stuff. 

So perhaps the outcome will be that there will be more ways in which people have connected with each other. To encourage each other to behave well, to recycle more, to save us money. That might be an outcome, but that’s very self directed.  We can be a partner but we can’t mandate that from government because it doesn’t work. So there’s a whole nature of government change because if the solution to this that’s going to work it has to be co-produced, which means that government has got to give up power and share it with their citizens. Central government has got to give up some power and share it with local government. And I suppose the tension will be if neither of those things happen and we have a bad response to a second wave and loads more people die, then people’s trust in government institutions is broken, even further than it was before Brexit, right? If it is co-produced and it does work, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. So you’ve got a very different style of democracy and decision making that’s a lot closer to the front line. I mean, we’re still the most centralised country in Europe politically, you know. That’s why we need money from government; I mean, Jenryck has just turned round to us and said, ‘You’re not going to get all your money back.’ Well, we will need that. Right at the start he said, spend whatever you want, then they started rowing back and we started lobbying hard on it, they put some more money out and then today he turned round and said, ‘you won’t be recompensed for everything’. Local government took ten years of austerity because of the bloody banking crisis. We didn’t cause that, the bankers caused that. But we got ten years, 60p in every pound from our budgets, gone. And they’re going to do it to us again.’

What do you think will change?

It’s really difficult because thinking about it from a council perspective there’s the different politics of it, much more grass-rootsy, direct democracy. Economically? God knows. God knows what’s going to happen. You’d have to ask an economist for that. I mean a lot of people are going to be unemployed Lots of people are going to get depressed. So there are all sorts of ramifications on health. 

Technological… I don’t know. Christ, I going to have to do more Zoom calls.  I’ve got no excuse not to be somewhere.

Institutionally, everything changes. One of my pals, he’s done very well for himself. He runs a make-up business. Got factories in China. Made a fortune. Lives in Hampstead. In the most amazing house. And he’s shutting his office. He’s like, ‘Don’t need that’. He’s just going to hire a fancy, private members club to do team meetings and away days all over London. We’ve proved we can work from distance. Get everyone together once in a while just to make sure no one’s switched off. So how is that going to change the market for people working locally, what does that mean for out of London, what does that mean for central London? House prices? If people aren’t going to want to get on a tube for a long time, what’s the value in living near a tube station? They reckon that forty grand in my part of London in Vauxhall is the price of a parking space or a garage. Is that still going to be the case? How are we going to value things going forward? And I mean that on a personal level as well. We were talking earlier about a different pace of life. Still getting to do what you need to do. Less expectation on you because everything is a bit slower. People being nicer. Actually saying, ‘How you doing? You alright? How’s your family?’ And really meaning it, instead of the normal, ‘You alright Dan, yeah, right, down to business.’ 

Lots of futures are possible. It just depends who’s pushing and who’s in the ascendant. I’m bloody glad that Keir Starmer is the leader of the Labour Party now. The level of coherence, professionalism and diligence, God, it’s marked. It feels like a much better place to be and this is when you need a government held to account.

And what’s interesting is that in local government we’re sharing our thinking and our strategy and we’re co-producing solutions. We couldn’t do it without healthy living platforms, Sue Sheehan or our business improvement districts… we wouldn’t have achieved anything. Because we co-produce it. What Keir Starmer’s asking of government is: ‘why aren’t you showing us the working?’ We can agree to the plan, but you’ve got to show us the working. Why are you trying to do everything in a room?’ And you think, well, that’s not a plan that’s going to work, is it? 

Thanks Jack.