Haringey Council in top ten for budget cuts across London this year

The civic centre is facing tough decisions about its financial future under the new Green administration, reports Joe Ives, Local Democracy Reporter

Haringey Council is in the top ten for budget cuts per person across all London boroughs this year, BBC analysis has revealed.

The findings, released last Thursday (20th), come as part of research by the BBC’s Shared Data Unit looking into council finances across the UK.

The local authority is set to make £87.93 in savings per person in the current financial year, which started in April – the tenth highest rate across the capital.

Westminster City Council, meanwhile, topped the table with plans to save £160.96 per resident. The local authorities for Newham, Lambeth and Kensington and Chelsea were not far behind: each set to save more than £145 per person compared to last year.

At £23.2m, Haringey’s total planned savings for 2026/27 also ranked tenth among all 30 of London’s borough councils represented in the data.

Although the capital has 32 borough councils, the BBC reported that data relating to savings in Harrow and Tower Hamlets could not be verified.

The Greens took minority control of Haringey’s local authority in May – ending more than half-a-century of Labour rule.

One of the most significant final acts of the outgoing Labour administration came in March, when its budget for the current financial year was voted through at a full council meeting.

Then-leader Peray Ahmet said she was “really proud” of the budget, despite the council’s financial difficulties. Cost-cutting for 2026/27, Ahmet said, had been achieved through “efficiency savings” that were “in line” with Labour’s values of delivering “a fairer, greener Haringey”.

These “efficiency savings” included cuts to human resources spending and the council’s communications team.

Despite these efforts, the local authority still needed tens of millions of ‘exceptional financial support’ (EFS) from the government in order to balance the books – the second use of the emergency measure in as many years.

Speaking ahead of the budget vote the leader of the Liberal Democrats opposition group, Luke Cawley-Harrison, said the budget was “clearly not a recovery plan for the financial mess the council is in”.

Nevertheless, Ahmet said the local authority was still “picking up the pieces” of underfunding caused by austerity measures enforced by previous Conservative and coalition governments.

Indeed, by the 2025/26 financial year, the council was operating with around £143m less in core government funding (in real terms) than it did in 2010 – a 55% drop.

The government’s Fair Funding Review, which concluded last November, means the local authority is benefiting from a £75.6m financial uplift over the next three years.

However this sum, although welcome, is unlikely to move the dial on the council’s fortunes – a fact that the local authority’s new Green leader Mark Blake is all too aware of.

Speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) in July, Cllr Blake said that there were “a lot of decisions” made by previous administrations he did not agree with.

Nevertheless, Haringey’s first Green leader argued that the borough’s financial issues were mostly systemic; something that, fundamentally, no party at the council could have fixed.

“It’s not a great situation to come into,” Cllr Blake admitted last month, warning that the local authority is facing a “great shadow of an increasing debt burden”.

Cllr Blake argued that the government must be collectively lobbied by councils to introduce the major policy shifts needed for local authorities to be able to carry on delivering essential, statutory services like temporary accommodation and adult social care.

“We’re not looking for a bailout, we’re looking for a dialogue with the government,” Cllr Blake said.

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