Oldham Council Has Had No Leader Since May. Last Night It Voted a Patch That Still Cannot Make Children's Services Legal.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
In short. Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council has had no Leader, Deputy Leader or Cabinet since its Annual Meeting on 20 May 2026. Four further meetings, on 15 June, 1 July, 15 July and 20 August, did not produce one either [1] [4]. The council's own monitoring officer told members on 31 July that this had become a statutory breach, in a report prepared under Section 5 of the Local Government and Housing Act 1989 [1]. Last night, 16 September, councillors were asked to approve an interim fix built around four advisory "Lead Member" posts, one per party. The council's own report recommending it states plainly that the arrangement will not fulfil the statutory requirements of the Children Act 2004 [2].
Oldham went to the polls on 7 May 2026 and came back with no majority. Labour held on to the most seats, 18, but lost eight since the previous election. Reform UK took 16. The remaining 26 seats split across the Oldham Group, the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives and a handful of independents, with no group holding as much as a third of the 60-seat chamber [5]. Under the council's constitution, adopting anything other than a Leader-and-Cabinet model of governance is not an option: national legislation that took effect at the end of April 2026 removed councils' ability to move away from it [1]. Full Council, and only Full Council, elects the Leader. On 20 May, it did not.
Five meetings, no leader
The Annual Meeting on 20 May 2026 adjourned without a Leader. A reconvened meeting on 15 June elected a Mayor, Conservative councillor Pam Byrne, but again put off the Leader question. A third meeting on 1 July lasted around thirty minutes and adjourned again without a vote. A fourth, on 15 July, saw multiple candidates nominated, including Reform's group leader and Labour's outgoing leader, and none secured a majority; a proposal for a shared, rotating leadership was rejected by Reform as unworkable [1]. An extraordinary meeting called for 20 August put seven separate proposals to a vote, from minority-administration bids by Labour and Reform to committee-based and rotating-leadership models from the smaller parties. All seven fell [4] [6]. The Local Government Association has offered peer support to each group leader in between, and the chief executive has spent what the council's own report calls "significant time" trying to broker an agreement [1]. None of it has produced a Leader.
What the council's own lawyer told it in July
Between the fourth failed meeting and the fifth, Oldham's director of legal services and monitoring officer, Alex Bougatef, prepared a formal report under Section 5 of the Local Government and Housing Act 1989, a provision that exists to bring a legal breach to members' attention before the position gets worse [1]. Dated 31 July 2026, it does not mince the finding: "the issue has progressed beyond ordinary political disagreement" and now raises questions of "constitutional compliance, effectiveness of governance, accountability, executive decision making and public confidence" [1]. The report is specific about which statutes the council is breaching. Under Section 19 of the Children Act 2004, a council must designate a Lead Member for Children's Services; without a Leader to make that appointment, the report states, "the ongoing vacancy prevents this statutory appointment, meaning the Council is acting unlawfully" [1]. It sets out the same conclusion for the council's duty under Section 9I of the Local Government Act 2000.
The risk section of the report is unusually direct for a document written by the council about itself. It names the endpoint of continued failure as intervention under the Local Government Act 1999's Best Value duty, which "can include issuing binding directions" or "an Order transferring executive functions from elected members to appointed independent Commissioners (Envoys)" [1]. It goes further than most councils' risk registers by pricing that outcome: "the financial risks for the Council should commissioners ultimately be sent to Oldham are significant. Based on previous instances where commissioners have been sent to local authorities, it is likely there would be a need for multiple commissioners. This cost is not currently budgeted for and would need to be" [1]. Council officers, in other words, were budgeting in public for the possibility of their own council being taken out of elected hands, months before that became a live prospect.
What Whitehall did after 20 August
Following the fifth failed meeting, the monitoring officer notified the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government of the ongoing breakdown, as the Section 5 report had said would happen if no appointment was made [1] [6]. Trade press reported within days that the ministry had responded by formally designating Oldham as an authority requiring additional oversight, with a stewardship team due to meet the chief executive within a fortnight; reporters characterised the step as one that normally precedes statutory intervention and the appointment of commissioners, rather than the appointment itself [4] [5]. This site has not located a government letter or published statement confirming the designation in those terms; the council's own 16 September report corroborates that contact took place, recording that "regular discussions will continue to take place with the Government in respect of the mitigating governance arrangements" and pointing members to a related letter to the ministry attached as an appendix [2]. What is established, from the council's own account, is that government contact followed the 20 August meeting and continued into September. The precise content of that contact has not been published in a form this site could verify independently of the council's summary of it.
The patch that went to a vote last night
The report placed before Full Council on 16 September, titled "Interim Governance Mitigations" and written by the chief executive's office, proposes to keep the council running without a Leader for as long as it takes to elect one [2]. Executive decisions would continue to be taken by the chief executive alone, using emergency powers, after consultation with a fortnightly meeting of all six group leaders [2]. On top of that, the leaders of the four largest groups would each be given an advisory "Lead Member" title over one of the council's four directorates: the Liberal Democrats over Resources, Labour over Place, Reform UK over Children and Young People, and the Oldham Group over Health and Adult Care [2]. The report is explicit about the limits of the role: Lead Members "do not constitute an Executive, do not exercise executive functions and may not direct officers" [2].
That limit matters most in the one area the Section 5 report flagged as an outright legal breach. The 16 September report proposes that Reform UK's group leader take on the Lead Member role for Children and Young People "as far as practicable," while stating in the same recommendation that the appointment "will not fulfil the entire statutory requirements set out in the Children Act 2004 and related statutory guidance, as the role has no executive decision making powers" [2]. Put plainly: the fix the council itself is proposing for the one gap its own lawyer called unlawful [1] comes with a written admission that it does not close that gap.
The gap is not abstract. An appendix to the 16 September report lists more than forty individual "key" and "principal" decisions taken by the chief executive under emergency powers since 22 June 2026, without a Cabinet Member accountable for any of them: contract extensions for care at home, a SEND reform and programme grant, foster carer allowance uplifts, capital funding for a bridge repair scheme, and the establishment of a Mayoral Development Corporation, among others [2]. Each was signed off by an officer, not an elected member with a portfolio.
The council's director of legal services, again Alex Bougatef, signed off the legal implications section of the same report with a description rarely seen in a council paper about itself: the absence of a Leader, Deputy Leader and Cabinet "represents an unprecedented constitutional position" [2].
What last night's vote did not settle
As of publication, Oldham Council had not published minutes or a decision record from the 16 September meeting [3]. Local reporting ahead of the meeting described the interim arrangement as likely to pass, with sources said to be "quietly confident" [7], but this site has not found a published record confirming the outcome of the vote itself, and does not report one. What is not in doubt, because the council's own reports say so directly, is that whatever passed or failed last night, the underlying vacancy at the top of Oldham's administration remains, the Children's Services gap the Section 5 report identified in July has not been closed by the mitigation the council itself proposed for it, and the prospect the council's own lawyer costed in July, of commissioners appointed to run the authority in elected members' place, has not gone away.
Sources
- Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council, Monitoring Officer, "Statutory Report of the Monitoring Officer under Section 5 of the Local Government and Housing Act 1989 - Failure to Appoint a Council Leader and Form an Administration", 31 July 2026. https://committees.oldham.gov.uk/documents/s160945/FINAL%20STATUTORY%20REPORT%20OF%20THE%20MONITORING%20OFFICER%20UNDER%20SECTION%205%20LOCAL%20GOVERNMENT%20AND%20HOUSING%20ACT%2019.pdf
- Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council, "Interim Governance Mitigations", report to Council, 16 September 2026. https://committees.oldham.gov.uk/documents/s161436/Council%20Report%20Governance%20Arrangements%20v9%20WITHOUT%20NAMES.pdf
- Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council, committee management system, documents for the Council meeting of 16 September 2026. https://committees.oldham.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?MId=9913
- Local Government Chronicle, "Oldham faces intervention after failure to elect leader", 21 August 2026. https://www.lgcplus.com/politics/governance-and-structure/oldham-faces-intervention-after-failure-to-elect-leader-21-08-2026/
- Place North West, "Oldham still without Leader as govt steps in", 21 August 2026. https://www.placenorthwest.co.uk/oldham-still-without-leader-as-govt-steps-in/
- LocalGov, "Oldham Council refers itself to MHCLG after failed leadership vote", 21 August 2026. https://www.localgov.co.uk/Oldham-Council-refers-itself-to-MHCLG-after-failed-leadership-vote/64840
- The Oldham Times, "Oldham Council deadlock finally set to be broken under deal", 15 September 2026. https://www.theoldhamtimes.co.uk/news/26550243.oldham-council-deadlock-finally-set-broken-deal/