Labour councillor Rachael Saunders has accused mayor Lutfur Rahman of failing the people of Tower Hamlets.

Her criticism came in response to the council’s report on its third quarter which showed some key performance indicators to be “RED”, meaning they fell below their stated targets.

Among the mayor’s missed targets was his bid to deliver 637 affordable homes from October to December, with just 353 delivered.

The council also failed to meet its target to deliver more than 3,000 “job starts” and fell short of its target for the number of pupils achieving five or more A*-C grade GCSEs.

Cllr Saunders said: “The council’s own performance figures reveal the failure of mayor Lutfur Rahman.

“The council is missing its targets on the provision of affordable housing, job starts for our residents and GCSE achievement.

“This is something we must work to change.”

She went on to accuse the mayor of failing to keep streets clean and trying to shut public services.

“Lutfur Rahman is failing local residents,” she said.

“This is evident from his attempts to shut public nurseries, his failure to properly consider all the options for our borough’s waste management strategy, his failure to keep our streets clean and now with these performance statistics.

“Tower Hamlets deserves better.”

But Tower Hamlets First, which backs the mayor, has hit back at Labour.

“Labour should actually read the report – it’s made perfectly clear that performance gaps in one quarter are not a fair measure and we remain likely to be fully on target throughout the year as a whole,” a spokesman said. “We still have created national record numbers of social and affordable homes, our school results are above both the national average and what they were under Labour and a record number of residents have been helped in to work.”

“There’s always room for us to do better, but the Tower Hamlets Labour/Tory alliance should stop throwing our excellent frontline staff under the bus to make cheap election points.”