By an observer of English politics and local government with 0ver 40 years of experience watching the slow decay of civic accountability
There are moments in English public life that crystallise, in a single act, everything that has gone wrong with how we are governed. On 20 May 2026 — just weeks after a local election — every single councillor in Tower Hamlets voted unanimously to increase their own pay. Not one abstention. Not one vote against. Every Aspire member, every Labour councillor, every Green, every Conservative, every Liberal Democrat in that chamber raised their hand and helped themselves to more of the public’s money.
In any other context, you might call that a consensus. In Tower Hamlets — a borough where 50.3% of children live in poverty, the highest rate of any local authority in England — it looks rather more like something else.
This article is about what happened, who is behind it, and why Tower Hamlets: voting yourself a pay rise while children starve is not just a local story. It is a window into a broken model of local democracy that is playing out across England, and which most people have not noticed because the machinery that enables it was designed to make sure they don’t.
What They Actually Voted Through — And Why the Numbers Matter
Let’s be specific, because the details are important and the general headlines miss most of them.
At the 20 May 2026 full council meeting, Tower Hamlets councillors approved a package of allowance increases totalling more than £178,000 per year. The basic allowance for every councillor rose 8%, from £11,898 to £12,792. That alone is a modest number — reasonable, even, given that allowances had been frozen for four years. But the basic rise is not where the money is.
Executive Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s salary rises 13%, from £81,579 to £92,000 a year. Cabinet members receive an increase of £13,749 — that’s a 63% jump — bringing their allowances to £48,292. Deputy Mayors now receive £56,874, up by £11,451. The chair of the Licensing Committee — a role most residents could not name — receives a 130% pay increase. The Strategic Development Committee chair goes up 70%.
And then there are the two new paid posts — Ambassador and Deputy Cabinet Member — created at £6,000 and £8,000 respectively. Not existing roles given a raise. New roles, invented by the same people who will occupy them.
The council’s justification? An independent panel recommended the increases. Allowances hadn’t risen in four years. Neighbouring boroughs like Hackney and Newham pay more. These are not invalid points — in isolation. But context has a habit of making reasonable-sounding arguments look very different. The context here is a borough in which one in every two children grows up in poverty, where the council’s own budget consultation acknowledges it is spending £1.4 billion a year on public services while demand continues to rise, and where council tax went up at the same time as these allowance packages were nodded through.
The framing of “we’re still lower than Hackney” tells you everything about how these decisions are justified. Not: can we afford this? Not: is this what our residents need right now? But: are we getting what other councillors get? That is a different question — and it is the question of a professional political class, not civic servants.
The Man at the Top: A Criminal Past and a Gall That Takes Your Breath Away
Before we go any further into the structural problems, we need to talk about Lutfur Rahman. Because the story of Tower Hamlets: voting yourself a pay rise while children starve cannot be told honestly without explaining who this man is and why his presence in that mayoral office is, in itself, a scandal that England appears to have simply decided to accept.
In April 2015, Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey found Lutfur Rahman personally guilty of corrupt and illegal practices during the 2014 Tower Hamlets mayoral election. The judgment was comprehensive and damning. Rahman was found to have made false statements about his Labour opponent John Biggs, accusing him of racism in what the commissioner described as a “ruthless and dishonest campaign”. There had been instances of “personation” — ghost voters — postal vote fraud, and what Mawrey characterised as “undue spiritual influence” placed on Muslim voters, telling them it was their religious duty to re-elect the mayor. Council grants were handed out to ineligible organisations, and funding was slashed from legitimate charities like the Alzheimer’s Society to help bankroll Rahman’s personal popularity.
The 2014 election was voided. Rahman was removed from office and ordered to pay £250,000 immediately toward legal costs estimated at £1 million. He was banned from standing again.
He came back anyway.
In 2022, once his ban had expired, Lutfur Rahman returned to Tower Hamlets politics, won the mayoral election, and resumed office as if the previous eight years were an unfortunate administrative inconvenience. In May 2026, his Aspire party didn’t just hold on — it grew, going from 24 seats to 33 out of 45 ward councillors. And within weeks of that election, he voted himself a 13% pay rise.
Here is the blunt truth: Lutfur Rahman should not be in office. A man found guilty of electoral fraud — of corrupting the democratic process, of rigging the vote, of manipulating religious communities for personal gain — should not be allowed to occupy any public position of trust again. The fact that no criminal charges were subsequently brought does not change what the Election Court found. That court operated to the criminal standard of proof. The findings were not administrative. They were not “balance of probabilities.” They were findings of fact, proven beyond reasonable doubt, of corrupt and illegal conduct.
The English political system allowed this man to walk back through the door, collect a six-figure salary, and vote to increase it. That is not accountability. That is its absence.
The “Independent Panel” Cover — How Councils Launder Pay Rises
One of the most effective pieces of political machinery in English local government is the Independent Remuneration Panel (IRP). Every council has one. When a council wants to raise its own pay, it commissions a review. The IRP produces recommendations. The council then votes to adopt them. And when the public complain, the council points to the IRP.
“It wasn’t us,” the implicit message runs. “An independent panel said this was appropriate.”
There are two problems with this. First, those panels are appointed by the councils they review. The word “independent” is doing a great deal of work there. Second, councils do not always follow IRP recommendations — they follow them when it suits, exceed them when they can get away with it, and ignore them when they’d rather not have the scrutiny. The pattern, documented across boroughs from Waltham Forest to Cambridge, is consistent: the IRP provides political cover, not genuine oversight.
In Tower Hamlets, the unanimity of the vote tells you everything you need to know about the IRP’s function here. Not a single elected representative — across six different political groupings — thought the rises were inappropriate. The IRP recommendation was not a constraint on councillors’ appetite. It was permission.
This is worth sitting with. In a borough with the highest child poverty rate in England, every single elected representative concluded that the right thing to do, in the first weeks of a new term, was to vote themselves more money. The IRP didn’t make them do that. It just made it easier to defend.
Tower Hamlets Is Not the Exception — It’s the Pattern
It would be comforting to dismiss this as a Tower Hamlets problem. An anomaly. A rogue borough. But spend any time tracking English local government and you find the same pattern repeating itself almost everywhere.
In Waltham Forest, in the same budget meeting where councillors voted to raise council tax by nearly 5%, they also voted to increase their own salaries by 2.5%. Separately, of course. Quietly. The council tax rise made the headlines; the pay rise was buried in the agenda.[14]
In Cambridge, Labour councillors overrode the spirit of IRP advice to construct a stacking allowance system — basic allowance, plus an enhanced leadership payment, plus additional responsibilities — that allowed the new council leader to earn over £40,000 a year in a role classified as non-executive.[15]
This is the structure of the problem. It is not that Tower Hamlets: voting yourself a pay rise while children starve is unique to that borough. It is that the combination of factors — the poverty of the residents, the wealth of the payments, the criminal history of the mayor, the unanimity of the vote — makes Tower Hamlets the clearest possible case study in what happens when the mechanisms of local democratic accountability are quietly hollowed out.
Every reform that was supposed to constrain this — public accountability, transparency, independent oversight — has been absorbed by the system and turned into cover.
What English Local Democracy Was Supposed to Look Like
This is the angle that rarely gets discussed, and it matters enormously for understanding why what is happening now feels so wrong even when it is technically legal.
For most of English history, local office was not a paid career. Aldermen, justices of the peace, churchwardens, vestry members — these roles were civic obligations carried out as a duty by people who had standing in their communities. They were not jobs. They were service. The concept of payment — of an allowance — only entered English local government in the modern period, as councils became larger, more bureaucratic, and as the complexity of governance increased.
The transition from civic duty to professional role changed the incentive structure fundamentally. When local office carries no financial reward, the people who seek it tend to be motivated by something other than money — civic pride, political conviction, community attachment. When it carries a salary, it attracts people who want a salary. Neither group is inherently better or worse. But the incentives are different. And the decision-making looks different.
In 1981 — the year Parliament quietly stripped the English of their birthright citizenship — the political class was already well advanced in treating public office as personal opportunity. What we see in Tower Hamlets in May 2026 is that logic taken to its natural conclusion: a council in the poorest borough in England, unanimously voting to pay themselves more, governed by a man who was found guilty of corrupting a democratic election, comfortable in the knowledge that the systems designed to hold them accountable will, when tested, provide cover rather than consequences.
The Question You Are Allowed to Ask
I have spent nineteen years watching English political life. I have watched quangos multiply, local authorities grow, councillor allowances rise, and the connection between the governed and their governors stretch thinner and thinner. And the question I keep coming back to — the question that Tower Hamlets makes inescapable — is this:
Who is this system for?
It is not for the 50% of children in Tower Hamlets who go to school without enough to eat. It is not for the residents who watched their council tax rise while services contracted. It is not for the voters who turned out in good faith at a local election and sent representatives to manage their borough on their behalf.[2]
It is for the people in the room on 20 May 2026 who raised their hands.
The argument for paying councillors a reasonable allowance is not wrong in principle. These are demanding roles. Time commitments are real. If you only allow wealthy people to hold office, you simply entrench a different kind of corruption. All of that is true.
But “reasonable allowance” and “130% pay rise for the Licensing Committee chair” are not the same thing. And the willingness of every single representative — across every party — to vote for their own enrichment in a borough defined by its poverty is not a governance question. It is a moral question. And the answer, delivered unanimously, tells you where these people’s priorities actually lie.[4]
Tower Hamlets: voting yourself a pay rise while children starve isn’t a headline. It’s a verdict.
What Needs to Change
For the sake of offering something constructive alongside the outrage:
Remove council self-determination on allowances entirely. The conflict of interest is obvious and irresolvable. A genuinely independent national body — one whose members councils play no role in appointing — should set allowance bands for every tier of local government, with binding caps. No council should vote on its own pay. Ever.
Restore meaningful electoral disqualification. A finding of corrupt and illegal electoral practice in an Election Court — to the criminal standard of proof — should result in a permanent bar from seeking elected office. Not a time-limited ban. Permanent. The electorate’s ability to re-elect someone found guilty of manipulating elections is precisely why permanent disqualification matters; it removes the decision from a process that person has already demonstrated they are willing to corrupt.
Require poverty impact statements on allowance increases. Any council proposing to increase member allowances should be required to publish a concurrent assessment of poverty, deprivation, and service delivery in the borough. Not as a legally binding constraint — but as a transparency mechanism. Make them say, in black and white, that they are voting for this knowing what they know about their residents. Let the public see the two numbers side by side.
None of this will happen quickly. None of it may happen at all without sustained pressure from people who are paying attention. Which is why stories like this one need to be told, and read, and shared.
Conclusion: England Is Watching, Even When It Looks Away
There is a particular English habit of finding outrage, muttering about it, and then moving on without demanding consequences. It’s why the same abuses recur. It’s why a man found guilty of electoral fraud can return to office and vote himself a pay rise. It’s why every councillor in every party, in the borough with the worst child poverty in England, can raise their hands in unison and know that the story will be on the front page for two days and then forgotten.
The only antidote to that habit is memory. The keeping of a record. The insistence that these things are connected — that the 1981 Act, the Windrush scandal, the Lutfur Rahman story, the anonymous unanimity of that council vote — are all part of the same long unravelling of the contract between the English state and the English people.
England, then and now, deserves better than this.
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FAQs
Q: How much did Tower Hamlets councillors actually vote to pay themselves?
The total package of increases amounted to more than £178,000 per year across all allowances. Executive Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s salary rises from £81,579 to £92,000. Cabinet member allowances increased 63% to £48,292. The Licensing Committee chair received a 130% rise. Two new paid posts — Ambassador and Deputy Cabinet Member — were also created.
Q: Who is Lutfur Rahman and why is his background controversial?
Lutfur Rahman is the Executive Mayor of Tower Hamlets, leading the Aspire party. In 2015, Election Commissioner Richard Mawrey found him personally guilty of corrupt and illegal practices during the 2014 mayoral election — including ghost voters, postal vote fraud, false statements about a political opponent, and using religious influence to pressure Muslim voters. He was removed from office, banned from standing, and ordered to pay £250,000 in legal costs. After his ban expired, he returned to politics, won the 2022 mayoral election, and was re-elected in 2026.
Q: Was the pay rise legal?
Yes. English local government law permits councils to set their own allowances, typically following recommendations from an Independent Remuneration Panel. All parties voted in favour and proper council procedures were followed. Legal and appropriate are not the same thing.
Q: How bad is child poverty in Tower Hamlets?
Tower Hamlets has the highest child poverty rate of any local authority in England, at 50.3% — meaning more than half of all children in the borough live in poverty. The national average is 21% and the London average is 31%.
Q: Is this kind of pay rise unusual for London councils?
It is unusual in scale — particularly the 130% rise for the Licensing Committee chair and the creation of new paid roles — but the practice of councils voting through allowance increases recommended by panels they appoint is widespread. Waltham Forest raised salaries in the same meeting as a council tax increase. Cambridge’s Labour group constructed an allowance-stacking system allowing a non-executive leader to earn over £40,000. Tower Hamlets is the most extreme recent example, not an isolated one.