> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.oldham-owl.co.uk/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Extraordinary? Tonight's council meeting is way more important than that - URL: https://www.oldham-owl.co.uk/extraordinary-tonights-council-meeting-is-way-more-important-than-that/ - Published: 2026-08-20T16:13:03.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-20T19:42:07.000Z - Author: Will Holdaway - Tags: News It would be easy and fun to write this preview of tonight's Oldham council extraordinary meeting as a long-ish riff on the inability of 60 allegedly grown-up elected representatives to sort themselves out, but the briefing published ahead of tonight’s extraordinary council meeting by Alex Bougatef, the council’s director of legal services and monitoring officer, leaves no room for levity. This situation – the political and numerical impasse leading to the failure to form a functioning council administration – is far beyond a joke. Tonight is the final opportunity for the 60 councillors to form an administration from within. If they cannot - and all the signs are that they are still a long way off rising to the challenge - then the council will be run by Whitehall commissioners until at least after next May's elections. Mr Bougatef has a statutory duty as monitoring officer to prepare a report when the failure of a council function gives rise to the potential breaking of the law or the rule of law. At the not-too-bad end of the spectrum, the council might breach health and safety law if your rubbish isn’t collected. The situation in Oldham is at the other end of that continuum. In Mr Bougatef’s words: “Under Section 19 of the Children Act 2004, the Council is under a mandatory duty to designate a Lead Member for Children’s services…The ongoing absence of a lead member in this role” means that the council “does not have a political champion for corporate parenting and there is a lack of political leadership on partnership bodies.” Later in his report, Mr Bougatef whacks all 60 Oldham councillors over the head with this: “The absence of statutory political accountability” in the area of children’s services “heightens regulatory risk from Ofsted and creates the possibility of central government intervention under Section 497A of the Education Act 1996.” In the opinion of Mr Bougatef, “Full Council has repeatedly failed to discharge a constitutional responsibility to elect a Leader…beyond a reasonable time period”. In other words, the politicking has, in Mr Bougatef's opinion, gone on long enough, and the first casualty is, of all things, the provision of children's services. The response of Oldham’s elected representatives to the crisis has been somewhat short of what the situation demands. They need to end the impasse or speed the arrival of commissioners – there is no other way – and there is nothing on the table tonight or in their positioning going into the meeting to suggest that they can. The first proposal to be considered tonight is that Councillor Arooj Shah once again becomes council leader. She remains as leader of the Labour group, the largest party, even after presiding over the party’s electoral collapse in May, when it went from 27 seats to 18. The proposal is not a total non-starter – not far off, but not quite. Councillor Shah showed that she can make common cause with enough non-Labour councillors to establish a confidence and supply arrangement for 2025-26\. She promises in her amendment not to do anything dramatic in the coming year, recognising the electoral situation, and instead pledges to stick to a previously agreed medium term financial strategy. None the less, Councillor Shah’s star is waning. She’s on the hook – fairly and unfairly – for a long series of failures and perceived failures. Agreements with other groups and/or individual councillors will be harder to come by this time around. The next proposal to be considered is for Councillor Lewis Quigg, the leader of the Reform group, the second largest group, to become leader of the council. Councillor Quigg offers no concessions to other parties and no information on his programme for leadership. Since the elections in May, he has claimed again and again that the Oldham people have voted for change generally, and specifically for him to become leader of the council. Unfortunately for him, the numbers matter in politics: with a total of 16 Reform councillors, he remains 15 short of the necessary number to carry a motion on paper clips, never mind anything more contentious. The people have spoken, but they did not say exactly what Councillor Quigg claims they said. The rest of the proposals are a depressing reflection of the problems facing the borough. There are proposals for a new electoral system, for a whole-council election next May, for a new constitution, for a rotation of leadership that would include a period in the hotseat for Kamran Ghafoor, leader of the Oldham group and part-owner of a building that collapsed with people in it in March this year. In most boroughs or indeed counties, that would disqualify a person from any kind of civic leadership role, but Councillor Ghafoor carries on as if the building is still standing, as if nothing at all happened. By far the saddest item on the agenda is a proposal for the council cabinet to be selected at random from the 60 councillors. Councillor Mark Kenyon, leader of the Liberal Democrat group and representative for Saddleworth West and Lees, is in such a state of despair that he reckons the lead officer for children’s services should be randomly selected, and that this is preferable to all other suggestions. The way things look ahead of tonight’s extraordinary meeting, the appointment of Whitehall commissioners to run the civic shop – whatever that means – cannot come soon enough.