'In Lammy’s view, councils like Kensington and Chelsea simply don’t know how to do civic any more. “They believe they are there for the upper middle class folk of Notting Hill, who rely on their bin collections, and want their roads fixed, and don’t want high-rise blocks looking like eyesores so they get them cladded. That’s about it for them in terms of public services.”
He describes the borough council as the epitome of “light-touch” regulation, which puts every service out to competitive tender or outsources it, a tendency that has infected all local government since the 1980s. The result of this philosophy, he believes, was that when the crisis happened it was not only that the council failed to act, it was more that the habit of intervention was not in their make-up. “Ironically, if they had asked a private company like Capita to come in and take charge they would have had more skills than the local authority,” Lammy says. “But they didn’t, because presumably even they could see it wouldn’t have looked right.” '