Community Neighbourhoods: a political row of the Mayor’s own making
Newham Mayor Forhad Hussain’s Community Neighbourhoods initiative was touted as bringing decision-making closer to residents. Instead, it has become a running dispute about political representation, accountability and the Mayor’s apparent unwillingness to recognise that Labour no longer controls the council.
Following May’s elections, no party secured an overall majority on council and Hussain won with less than a third of the vote. Yet the Mayor initially proposed appointing Labour councillors to lead all eight neighbourhoods, including areas where the party has little or no elected representation.
Opposition councillors challenged this through Overview and Scrutiny, and Full Council subsequently passed a motion calling for neighbourhood leadership to reflect the political composition of each area. The proposed distribution was four Newham Independents, two Greens and two Labour.
The Mayor eventually conceded that opposition councillors could be appointed, but retained the right to make the appointments himself, rather than allowing neighbourhood councillors to choose their own representatives.
The resulting appointments have now triggered further political upheaval.
Newham Independents leader Mehmood Mirza declared via Instagram and TikTok that his group would boycott the arrangements. Yet two of his councillors, Moniba Khan and Nasreen Shamima, accepted neighbourhood lead positions. Yesterday they were suspended by their party and sat at last night’s council meeting as ungrouped independents.
Meanwhile, Green councillor Ibrahim Alom has resigned from his party group, citing disagreements over its boycott, among other matters. He too has accepted a neighbourhood leadership position, taking over Forest Gate and Maryland from Labour’s Rachel Tripp.
The current line-up is therefore five Labour councillors and three ungrouped independents, with no Green or NIP group representation.
There are legitimate arguments about whether opposition councillors should participate in a scheme whose governance they fundamentally disagree with. But the deeper issue remains unresolved: why should the Mayor, rather than the councillors elected to represent each neighbourhood, determine who leads it?
The Mayor has the authority to make executive appointments, but community lead councillors aren’t part of the executive. And that doesn’t mean he should simply disregard the democratic principles expressed by Full Council or the concerns raised through scrutiny.
What began as an initiative to strengthen local democracy and resident engagement has instead exposed divisions between political groups and created further tensions among councillors.
Newham’s electorate delivered a council with no overall control. The Mayor needs to adapt to that reality. Collaboration cannot simply mean inviting opposition councillors to participate in arrangements designed and controlled by the ruling party. It requires a genuine willingness to share influence and respect the democratic choices residents have made. The departures and suspensions yesterday shouldn’t obscure the underlying question: whether Community Neighbourhoods will genuinely give local councillors and residents a voice, or simply provide another layer of mayoral control.
