From the ‘Knees up Mother Brown’ website:
More than half the free tickets for West Ham United home matches distributed by Newham Council have gone to their own employees, it has been claimed.
From a total of 5,970 tickets handed out thus far by the Council as part of their arrangement with West Ham, just 2,728 reached members of the local community – with the remaining 3,242 being allocated to employees of Newham Council, according to a KUMB source.
The 3,242 tickets snapped up by Newham employees were used for the Europa League qualifiers against Domzale (1,433 tickets) and Astra Giurgiu (1,010) plus the recent EFL Cup tie with Accrington Stanley (799) – resulting in 55 per cent of the available tickets intended for local residents going to unnamed Council workers.
“Newham previously stated that ‘the tickets are used to reward residents for being active and resilient members of the community’,” said the source.
“Lead councillors for each of our community neighbourhoods will have a role in managing these rewards, and settling the criteria for distributing tickets to their residents who are making a contribution to their community.
“Why is it, that in each of the three games referred to, there were more tickets given to Newham Council staff than went to those ‘active and resilient members of the community’?”
Those ‘free’ tickets are among the supposed benefits of the £40 million ‘loan’ the council made to help cover the enormous cost of making the stadium ready for multi-millionaire-owned West Ham United.
Can anyone at the council explain this?
forestgatedotnet 
My sources tell me that they had trouble giving away the tickets for the Accrington Stanley match. There was a similar lack of interest in the Europa League qualifying games, but people took up the offer out of curiosity, just to see what the stadium looked like.
They “give away” these tickets for non Premier League games in order to generate a crowd – but we are supposed to be grateful that the “community” is getting some sort of payback for our £40m “loan” to enable two millionaire former porn barons to get their football club into a bigger stadium.
There’s a further mystery that the audited attendance (i.e. not total sold tickets which was 57,000) was given as 37,000 for the Watford game and 39,000 for the Middlesborough game ,which was obvious to anyone there. Will be interesting to see how many spare seats are visible this coming Sunday when season ticket holders are allowed to sell back their tickets through the club website (minus 10% commission of course)