Stable leadership is an essential ingredient for turning around failing councils, says Daniel Forman.

John Prescott has made improving local government standards a key plank of his department’s work.

It was to his acute embarrassment then that the first council the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister had to place under its direct control was in his own backyard.

Kingston-upon-Hull Council was put into the political equivalent of administration by the government in November last year. With the local MP being none other than the deputy prime minister himself, the decision was formally made by his ODPM number two, local government minister Nick Raynsford, with Prescott having removed himself from the role for fear of a conflict of interests.

Raynsford had previously resisted invoking the ultimate sanction, preferring to put his faith in a new chief executive and political leadership in Hull in 2002. This was despite a heavily critical Audit Commission report which outlined the authority’s extensive failures in housing, budgeting and the management of its staff. Particularly singled out for criticism was the mis-spending of a £263 million windfall from the part-sale of a telephone company which was squandered on a football stadium and the upgrading of council homes that are now facing demolition.

But when the Commission went back to Hull last year it found there had been next to no improvements at all. It named Hull as one of Britain’s worst authorities and revealed a catalogue of failures. The biggest problem was "poor political leadership and governance". The culture was "immature and confrontational", the watchdog warned. "In some respects it is even worse than last year," said one official. "Serious measures are needed to turn things round."

The Liberal Democrat leadership the government had given its backing to had also since been overthrown by the voters and chief executive John Brooks forced out after being accused of leaking a memo alleging a bullying culture among councillors. "It seems almost accepted practice to question officer advice aggressively, to appeal to a higher authority routinely, and to regard unpalatable advice as being an attempt to undermine members’ wishes," it said.

Having threatened to do so once, Raynsford was left with little choice but to use the extensive intervention powers granted to the government by the 1999 Local Government Act. An ODPM "hit squad" moved in and troubleshooter Tony Allen was appointed to oversee a rescue strategy. Since he arrived in Hull, Allen has remained quiet. He has preferred to communicate privately with Whitehall but is understood to have drawn up an action plan for the troubled town hall.

Can Allen turn the North Sea town around? As yet, no new chief executive has been appointed to replace Brooks and the ODPM has been forced to deny that it threatened to remove the political tier of the council altogether and replace it with its own executive. It is a difficult dilemma for a department that has made much of its commitment to handing powers back to communities: What to do when local elected representatives do not provide high quality leadership or services?

In Hackney the government took a different approach. The under-fire council there, routinely described at the time as the "worst in Britain", was bailed out with a £25 million package from Whitehall in February 2002. Former local government secretary Stephen Byers had threatened to impose his own hit squad on the London borough under the 1999 Act the year before. Like Hull, Hackney had fallen into serious budgetary problems, running up an annual debt which peaked at £40 million, forcing councillors to slash services and education spending at the same time as increasing council tax.

But Raynsford and Byers both held off, allowing the new regime of a directly elected mayor to take charge in October of that year. And Labour’s Jules Pipe has made progress in bringing the budget under control and beginning to improve services. The council was still classed as "poor" in its first Comprehensive Performance Assessment, but inspectors did recognise that it was "moving in the right direction".

However the mayoral model has been neither universally popular nor widely successful. Among the relatively small number of councils that have adopted it, voters infamously elected a football mascot monkey in Hartlepool. Democracy provides no guarantee that the best man, woman or indeed mammal will get the job. Far better, the ODPM may feel, to send in an expert with a proven track record such as Allen.

What the Hackney and Hull examples do have in common is that they are both now operating under stable leadership. The mayoral system does at least provide a single point of power with a fixed term of office. Similarly, the government’s special measures assure that clear leadership will be provided for the duration of their imposition. In contrast, almost annual local elections can deliver regular changes in control under a simple majority system, especially in troubled councils. While a calm consensus can obviously be achieved in the vast majority of authorities, when town halls do run into difficulties decisive leadership is essential.