The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 27,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
This was posted as a comment on my About page a couple of days ago (I’ve tidied up the punctuation a bit so it’s easier to read):
Please someone help.
Maud Street car park is closing due to another bit of incompetence by the councillors. We gave 1800 objections to the closure; Ian Corbett blocked these objections.
This will put business and jobs at risk. Guess who carried out the consultation? Helen Edwards.
This is money scheme by the council as the proposed social housing was sold to Chinese investors.
This morning Andrew Boff, the leader of the Conservative group on the Greater London Assembly, submitted a string of FOI requests to Newham Council about the consultation:
I’m not sure why all of these couldn’t have been submitted as a single request, but the questions seem pertinent in the light of the allegation that the overwhelming public response to the consultation was rejection of a proposal that has gone ahead regardless.
If anyone knows any more about this, please post in comments.
The Newham Recorder has finally got round to reporting on the Newham Collegiate 6th Form and East Ham Town Hall debacle.
And entirely predictably it has regurgitated the mayor’s line that this is all the fault of officers.
It even has a quote from Lester ‘3 jobs’ Hudson:
“There has been a complete and utter failure by senior officers in the governance process in this project.”
That’s some brass neck you’ve got there, Lester!
Are we really expected to believe that governance has nothing to do with elected members? That the executive mayor, his cabinet lead for finance and chair of the audit board have no responsibility for ensuring that major spending projects are running to budget, or that the authority pays heed to leading counsel’s advice on the legal status of a new school?
The supine and pointless Recorder obviously does.
If our deputy mayor were being honest he’d have said “There has been a complete and utter failure by elected members to do the jobs residents elected them to do and for which they receive extremely generous allowances.”
That would be swiftly followed by the words “I am very sorry and I resign.”
In my previous post I described Councillor Lester Hudson as double-jobbing, being both Newham’s deputy mayor and its cabinet member for finance.
It appears I did the poor man a disservice: he is triple-jobbing!
He combines his other two roles with being chair of the council’s audit committee.
Yes, that’s right. The cabinet member for finance also chairs the audit committee. Which surely amounts to a major conflict of interest, especially when there are serious questions to be answered – as there are right now with the East Ham Town Hall campus overspend and the unlawful expenditure on the new 6th form college.
Councillors would be remiss if they did not challenge this very peculiar and unhealthy arrangement.
Lester Hudson: too busy eating cake to notice a £9.8 million overspend
At the cabinet meeting held on Thursday 25th September 2014 the mayor and his advisors received a report on progress with the redevelopment of the East Ham Town Hall campus.
The report stated that additional funding of £9.8 million would be required and that
“there has been a clear breakdown in Governance and reporting procedures for this project, hence these issues have not been properly reported to the Mayor and Cabinet previously.”
Now cabinet has been summoned for an emergency meeting to consider the fall out from the investigation into what went wrong.
That includes the ‘discovery’ that the council opened a new 6th form college without any legal authority and has, therefore, acted unlawfully.
The investigation reveals both systemic incompetence and an extraordinary laxity in project governance:
One problem is that the programme board overseeing the East Ham Campus works appears to have changed into a project board focusing solely on the delivery of the Sixth Form element of the Programme. This shift was not discussed, or approved by any of the Council’s Statutory Officers…
… financial matters across the whole Programme were not discussed at project board meetings. The Board became concerned only with the September 2014 opening of the sixth form centre. Officers assumed its role was to oversee the correct fit out, the appointment of staff, communications etc. and it is clear that cost reports were never submitted to the Board.
… There were no terms of reference or oversight of the whole project.
… Minutes of the project board were taken by a member of the Programme Team, meaning there was a possible conflict of interest and reducing the impartiality of minute taking.
… [Cost and budget management] is the monitoring of actual expenditure, committed expenditure and forecast expenditure to project completion, against the approved budget. On reviewing the documents it is apparent that this has been at best poor or non-existent.
… Not only was there no cost reporting until March 2014, the reports produced do not show all necessary information, in that they do not differentiate between actual and committed expenditure, nor is there a detailed breakdown of works.
… It appears that arrangements for Contract compensation events (these are similar to contract variations) were agreed on an informal basis. An automated system was in place with thresholds for authorisation that did not align with the Council’s authorisation limits and there were inadequate controls or documentation within the Programme for compensation events exceeding authorised limits.
… There were a number of compensation events that were found on the application system which were over £100,000, and above officer delegated authority levels.
… Formal contractual arrangements for the Sixth Form project were never entered into by Officers… the builder was requested to provide a price for the Sixth Form. No report was not submitted to the Mayor, Members or Statutory Officers and, in addition, the Council’s procurement rules were not followed. [see note below – MW]
… There was no sponsorship or Programme Board for the East Ham Campus works since spring 2013. This meant that progress in terms of delivery (time and budget) of the East Ham Campus works as a whole was not challenged or scrutinised by the Programme Board for a period of at least six months.
And on and on (and on) it goes. Page after page of toe-curling detail.
So far three officers have lost their jobs over this, including the executive director for Resources and Commercial Development and the director of Legal Services and Governance. More will follow.
But what about the well remunerated cabinet members who should have been keeping an eye the project: how were these failures not spotted? Why were questions not asked?
Whose portfolios included oversight for the East Ham Town Hall development and the opening of the new 6th form college? Who among our elected representatives is ultimately accountable?
As Sir Robin has thus far declined to publish details of what his army of ‘mayoral advisors’ are supposed to be doing, beyond vague job titles, we can only guess.
Deputy mayor Lester Hudson double-jobs as the cabinet member for finance and regeneration. He previously also had ‘Property and Assets’ in his portfolio. If his job title actually meant anything you’d expect him to have taken at least a passing interest in what was going on.
That he didn’t either means his job is meaningless or he’s monumentally incompetent. Either way, if he had a shred of decency, he’d be drafting his resignations from both cabinet and council.
Note: As the cabinet report points out, “It should be made explicitly clear that the liability for the failures in establishing adequate or compliant contractual arrangements rests entirely with the Council and there is therefore no evidence of poor practice or impropriety on the part of the Contractors.”
From the cabinet papers for next week’s meeting:
it is apparent from the investigations led by the Chief Executive [into the East Ham Town Hall overspend and reporting failures – MW] that the Newham 6th Form Collegiate was opened without any officer delegated decision notice being prepared as expected under recommendation 5 of the Cabinet decision of 21st February 2013, and that therefore the decision was not properly implemented in accordance with Council procedures.
Further it is also apparent from an investigation into the handling of Legal advice during the development of proposals for the Newham 6th Form Collegiate that the Council has no specific statutory powers to open a Centre without formal public consultation.
Legal advice obtained by the Chief Executive from leading Counsel also indicates that the Council does not have the power to establish a 6th Form under the current statutory framework.
Coupled with an overspend of £9.8 million on the re-building and the failure of elected members to even notice this, the whole East Ham Town Hall Campus project looks like a cock-up of monumental proportions!
Could the gagging order sent down from chief whip Steve Brayshaw this week be in any way connected to the investigation into Sir Robin’s behaviour at the Newham Show and the report of the standards committee?
The last thing the mayor wants is to be publicly embarrassed by questions about the findings – whatever they turn out to be. Much better for a response to be agreed in private at Labour group, then have the report ’noted’ by council on a whipped vote without further ado.
The standards committee is scheduled to meet on 10th December – 2 days after council. The next full council after that isn’t until late February. If Brayshaw can keep his troops on message it will be all-but-forgotten by then.
At the last council meeting, in late September, two backbench councillors – John Gray and Rokshana Fiaz – took the opportunity to ask the mayor questions about the Focus E15 mothers’ campaign and the future of the Carpenters Estate. These followed on from his statement and half-hearted apology. They were doing no more than their constituents would expect of them.
In any other local authority, councillors asking questions at a council meeting, in public, would have been unremarkable. It is what should happen. But in Newham it was exceptional.
And Sir Robin has, predictably, taken exception to it.
This email was sent yesterday to all Newham councillors by the Labour chief whip, Cllr Stephen Brayshaw (via the group secretary Cllr Susan Masters):
From: Susan Masters [mailto:xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.com]
Sent: 11 November 2014 15:02
Subject: Message from our whip
A MESSAGE FROM OUR LABOUR GROUP WHIP TO LABOUR GROUP MEMBERS
Dear Comrades,
Concern has been expressed among group officers relating to the growing appearance of cracks within group and the use of Council meetings rather than Labour Group as a platform for airing disagreements and debate.
When arguments are played out in public there are only losers: The Labour Party and our constituents.
The officers agreed that we should draw a line now and move forwards towards a more cohesive group. Disagreements, questions and motions should be put to group and discussed at group. We are one Labour Party and we should show respect for the group and our colleagues. It is polite and proper that this should be the case.
Moving forwards; where people break the rules or behave in a way that could embarrass the group, executive, party and leadership in a public forum we feel at such a key time that we have no option but to push for the highest sanctions possible within the rules.
Let’s move forwards and ensure that we are working for our constituents, our party and our group.
Best
Steve Brayshaw
It is a clear and unambiguous attempt to muzzle councillors and stop them publicly raising serious questions at Council meetings. Debate can only happen in private, behind closed doors.
The “highest sanctions possible within the rules” means expulsion from Labour Group and – if the councillor were not later reinstated – automatic deselection at the next election.
Ironically, this threat is itself a breach of Labour Party rules:
Labour recognises that individual members, to fulfill their representative duties, may without consultation speak and ask questions in meetings of the council on behalf of their constituents or other community interests. (chapter 13, clause XI, sub-clause 1)
Any councillor expelled from Newham’s Labour Group on these grounds would be entitled to appeal: they’d have an unanswerable case for immediate reinstatement.
But the more important point for ordinary Newham residents is that Sir Robin and his cronies are using heavy-handed threats to stop councillors doing the one job we elected them to do: publicly scrutinise the executive mayor and hold him to account for the decisions he makes. It is undemocratic and unacceptable.
forestgatedotnet 