Six social homes where hundreds were possible, in a borough where 30,000 families wait. A drought, a data centre, and a Labour group with questions to answer.
Water For The Servers, None For The Flats
England is brown. This summer may turn out to be the driest on record, and pictures from space show a country the colour of a doormat. In Tower Hamlets the drought stopped being a picture and became something you could taste. Residents, most of them in social housing, turned on the tap and got nothing. The national press picked it up.
In the same few weeks, the government approved a data centre at the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. Not homes. A building full of machines that drink.
Campaigners linked the two. A public meeting was called for 10 August at the Brady Arts Centre, so I went to hear the case made properly rather than shouted online.
A Full Room, and One Empty bench: Where Are The Labour Councillors?
I arrived just after the six o’clock start and could barely get through the door. People sat on the floor. The organisers split the crowd into smaller groups and kept the main room for questions.
In that session, the speaker from Global Action Plan set out the link. As things stand, a water company cannot simply turn down the supply to a data centre when water runs short. The last resort is not the server hall. It is you: the households and small shops in the streets around it.
Read that again, because it is the whole argument in one line. In a drought, the cooling system has a better claim on the water than the family next door.
The room also noticed who had stayed away. Councillors from Aspire came. Councillors from the Green Party came. From Labour, the party that runs the government that approved this, nobody. That was not an oversight. It was a choice, and the room treated it as one.
One resident took the microphone and blamed Labour, locally and nationally. He named Abdal Ullah, leader of the Labour group in Tower Hamlets, and accused him of gaining personally from the decision. The applause was not polite. It was the noise people make when they think they already know the answer.
Is the anger fair?
Are Labour Really To Blame?: What The Record Shows
In 2023, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, working with the Guardian, paid for a series of investigations on a local news site. One piece followed the money between Labour councillors and developers, the owners of the Truman Brewery among them. It named two men: Tarik Khan and Abdal Ullah. Both were councillors when Labour councillors granted the first Truman Brewery application, against the objection of the chair of the planning committee.
What happened next tells you what the local party made of that reporting. Tarik Khan still holds a senior post in Tower Hamlets Labour. Abdal Ullah was not pushed aside; he was made leader of the Labour group. Elsewhere, being named in work of that kind damages a career. Here it seems to have helped one.
Councillors do not pay the price. It is paid in bricks. The data centre decision brought six social homes where hundreds were possible, in a borough where more than 30,000 families wait for housing. Six. That is not a compromise. It is a rounding error dressed up as a concession.
Truman Brewery and the Right Type of Bangladeshi: Cash For The Few Not Homes For The Many?
There is more, and it deserves a straight answer. After the decision, an organisation linked to Tarik Khan took money from consultants working for the Truman Brewery. Residents in the borough understand that the organisation helped the Brewery answer complaints about its consultation. Those complaints, backed by independent researchers at the University of Sheffield and University College London, were that the consultation discriminated against local people based on their ethnicity; the help, as residents describe it, took the form of drumming up friendly responses. If that account is wrong, the men involved can say so, in detail, with papers.
None of this is peculiar to Tower Hamlets. Sir Alistair Graham, once chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, told the Guardian in 2021 that the overlap between councillors and the property trade “undermines trust” and threatens the national effort to build affordable homes. He was describing a common disease. Some boroughs have it badly. In Tower Hamlets, it appears to be chronic.
It Does Not Have To Be Like This: Another Tower Hamlets is Possible!
When I was a Labour councillor here, from 2018 to 2022, I went to Islington and put my worries about that overlap to colleagues there. They were appalled. Not weary, not defensive. Appalled. They told me that every councillor was given the ethical rules plainly, and that anyone who came near a developer in that way would be frozen out and then deselected at the next round.
That comparison is the embarrassing part. Being clear about ethics is not hard or costly. A Labour group three miles away does it as a matter of course.
In four years in Tower Hamlets, nobody drew me a single clear line about developers. The pressure ran the other way. When another councillor and I asked for a fresh look at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry decision after it was called in, senior members of our own Labour group opposed us. The site to this day remains empty and undeveloped.
So do not wait for this to mend itself. Its upto residents and stakeholders to demand a change of this culture. Left alone, the machine gives the same result every time: fewer social homes, fatter margins for developers, and residents told to be grateful for six flats and a hosepipe ban. It is a way of kicking your own voters in the stomach and calling it regeneration. Creating the perverse situation of the highest child poverty rate in the third richest borough in England, the largest contributor to the poverty being the lack of social housing.
Which brings us back to Abdal Ullah, who now says he opposes the Truman Brewery scheme. The timing is handy, and the statement costs him nothing. Residents at the meeting asked for something that would: his bank statements and his phone records. A leader with nothing to hide would welcome the chance.
I look forward to reading them. I am not holding my breath
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