COMMENT - Labour's Spin - A Reality Check

8.05.09pm BST (GMT +0100) Wed 22nd Apr 2009

Labour pumps its upbeat messages relentlessly through residents' doors in a fortnightly printed Spin Cycle they call Lambeth Life. Does all this unremitting gloss, though, actually square with real life experience of Lambeth's services?

Take the story (15 March 2009) that applauds a drop in the number of teenage pregnancies. A good news story if ever there was one. Or as our American cousins would have it, a motherhood and apple pie story - in this case quite literally.

Yet an in-depth article on the same subject in the Guardian newspaper paints a slightly different picture. Official statistics show that Lambeth actually tops the league table for teenage pregnancies, not just London-wide but in the entire country.

So whilst the numbers in Lambeth may be falling, they are clearly not falling anything like as fast as they need to. Is this a deliberate deception or merely not telling the full story? Who benefits?

Certainly not those most intimately affected by teenage pregnancy.

In his Leader's column, Cllr Steve Reed creates a terrible vision of calamitous Lambeth Life (no not that one) before he took over the helm. In the column he says that Lambeth Planning Department as recently as 2006 was under threat of being taken over by the Government. Really?

What he fails to say is that things were so bad under Lambeth Labour that the Government actually put the Planning Department under its direct control in December 2000 - and the Liberal Democrat Administration of 2002 that improved things to such an extent that Lambeth Planning was taken off special measures in July 2004.

That puts a different spin on the spin, doesn't it?

Elsewhere in Lambeth's expensive 'freebie', there's much trumpeting of Lambeth retaining its coveted Three Stars and, as if to emphasise the point, that Lambeth was now "improving well". The clarion call being that this was Lambeth's best result ever. Odd that.

Closer analysis reveals that Lambeth actually slipped from its previous position of Improving Strongly.

So the big push to achieve stardom stalled despite attempts to hoodwink the inspectors with ghost libraries and library membership figures fortified using Lambeth's own staff.

We also remember Cllr Reed proudly proclaiming that he'd raise Lambeth to Four Stars within four years - something he now stands no chance of doing.

Running-up the biggest debt in Lambeth Housing history (£23 million and rising), blame anyone but those in charge, keep taking the special responsibility allowances without taking any responsibility, and make the tenants pay through the nose just to bail Labour out of an enormous mess.

That's the reality.