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The Casual Vacancy

20 Mar

Charlene McLean

There is going to be a council by-election in Stratford & New Town ward.

Charlene McLean has been removed from office under section 85 of the Local Government Act 1972: 

if a member of a local authority fails throughout a period of six consecutive months from the date of his last attendance to attend any meeting of the authority, he shall, unless the failure was due to some reason approved by the authority before the expiry of that period, cease to be a member of the authority. [emphasis added]

The circumstances in which the by-election has been triggered and the timing – so close to the general election – reflect very badly on the leadership of Newham Labour party, which has done nothing to support a young mother in exceptionally difficult circumstances.

As (now ex) councillor McLean explained in a letter sent to all ward members last week, before her removal was confirmed:

Last August, I gave birth to my baby daughter Esme two months prematurely. Prior to that I had to go on sick leave due to serious pregnancy complications, which risked both my life and that of my baby. Following her birth, I spent over three months monitoring her care at the specialist neonatal intensive care unit at the Royal London Hospital, and then at Newham General. Once she was allowed home, I had to provide specialist care for her, which required my full and uninterrupted focus. 

That is why I believe that what has happened to me warrants a full and urgent discussion among Council Members concerning the Council’s maternity leave policy for expectant Members, and those who have become new parents. 

As you can imagine to now have to deal with this situation is agonising, but with the support of Ward Members, my fellow Councillor colleagues, Terry and Richard, and the wider Newham Labour Party; I am hoping that I can come through this. 

I am in the process of discussing next steps with the national Labour Party and London Region, as well as the Chief Whip of Group, if a by-election has to be called because of the mistakes made by the Council. As such, I do intend to seek selection as the Labour Party Candidate for Stratford and New Town ward if such a situation arises. 

Charlene McLean was led to believe she was on approved leave – as the Local Government Act allows – but she wasn’t. And no-one bothered to tell her.

Although she points the finger at poor advice from unelected officers, the real culprits are her own comrades. The mayor, the Labour group chair, the chief whip and other leading councillors knew what was going on and did nothing. 

I am old enough to remember a time when Labour whips in parliament carried dying MPs through the lobbies on stretchers to ensure the government survived. This lot couldn’t be bothered to organise a babysitter and a taxi.

Backbench councillors and ordinary members need to ask why not. If Labour chief whip Steve Brayshaw doesn’t offer his resignation, councillors should demand it. Others within the leadership group need to take a long hard look at themselves too.

A borough as diverse as Newham needs a council made up of people from a wide range of backgrounds and at different stages in their lives, not just middle-aged men. The council has a moral responsibility to ensure that people are not excluded from taking part just because they are starting a family.

But as it is led by a mayor who thinks it’s okay for his Equalities lead to do her work unpaid that is not a priority in Newham.

Members in Stratford ward passed a motion last week calling for Charlene McLean to be immediately reselected as their candidate.

Last night, on direct instruction from Labour’s London regional office, the Newham local campaign forum voted unanimously to do just that. It is overwhelmingly likely she will be back on the council before the end of April.

Nonetheless, local Labour party members are furious. Or as one person put it to me, they are “going fucking mental.” They’ll have to spend time and resources fighting a council by-election when they should be out campaigning for the general election. Nearby Ilford North is a key Tory-held marginal. If Ed Miliband wants to be prime minister it’s a seat Labour must win.

They also know how embarrassing this is. Residents are being asked to go to the polls two weeks before the general election to re-elect a councillor they only voted into office 10 months ago. All because the overwhelmingly white and exclusively male cabal at the top of Newham Labour party failed to support a young working class black woman facing immense personal difficulties.

It would be harsh on Charlene McLean but if voters decided to punish Newham Labour for this, who could blame them?

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The job’s a joke – and it’s on us

23 Feb

Some residents want to talk to Richard Crawford about their experience

After much delay Newham council has finally published details of what the mayor’s fleet of advisors and cabinet members are supposed to be doing in exchange for their ‘special responsibilities allowances’.

And what dismal reading they make.

Far from being detailed job descriptions, with performance measures that we can use to judge whether they’ve actually done what they’ve been paid to do, they are insultingly brief – a few bullet points of meaningless management jargon.

Take this example:

Advise the Mayor on all matters relating to resident experience, including:

  • To take a strategic overview of all resident experience – across the whole organisation.
  • To understand and learn from what residents value.
  • To interpret the feedback we receive from residents – informing the Mayor about analysis and trends.
  • Oversee the contract compliance function of the organisation

Having read that I still have no idea what Richard Crawford actually does. And this is a full-time, 5 days a week job for which he gets the maximum allowance of £33,735 on top of his £10,829 basic.

Councillor Ken Clark is similarly well-rewarded for his ‘work’ as Executive member for Building Communities and Public Affairs. His time is,  allegedly, fully accounted for by this:

Advise the Mayor on all matters relating to Community Neighbourhoods in Newham. 

  • Promoting economic, community and personal resilience.
  • To drive up activity, satisfaction and resilience in community neighbourhoods – empowering residents to lead and shape their community.
  • To be the eyes and ears of the council, sharing information and local intelligence – feeding that information back into the council to better improve what we do.
  • To provide political leadership to Newham’s public affairs profile – ensuring the needs and views of Newham residents are heard by decision makers across and outside of Newham

To borrow a much-loathed bit of consultant-speak, “what does success look like?” How will we know if he has ‘driven up’ activity, satisfaction and resilience in community neighbourhoods? With no baseline to measure against and no targets, there’s no way to tell. And I don’t suppose the mayor cares. The jobs are a joke; a set of phantoms conjured up to justify stuffing cash into the pockets of his closest allies.

The ultimate proof of this is that special responsibility allowances are

calculated according to the days considered by Council or the Mayor to be requisite to fulfil the duties set out in the Job Profile and / or Portfolio of the Office Held

In practice it is always the Mayor that decides how many days a job needs to take. So the likes of Crawford, Clark, Desai, Furness, Baikie and Ian Corbett all have jobs that require five full days a week. It doesn’t matter what the job is, it always takes 5 days. And it therefore always pays top whack.

Perhaps while PwC are looking at the books the Audit Commission could ask them to do a ‘value for money’ study on the mayor’s advisors. The results would be very interesting.

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Guilty!

3 Feb

 Angry Robin

Sir Robin being restrained by councillor Obaid Khan

I was going to blog about the Standards Committee’s verdict on Sir Robin’s conduct at the Newham Show back in July, but I can’t improve on this excellent account in the Evening Standard, other than to point out that Sir Robin was not restrained by a member of the council’s staff but by a Labour councillor, Obaid Khan. 

Nor could I give more insight into what happened than Kevin Blowe, who made the formal complaint.

Not titling his post Sir Robin Wales, My Part in His Downfall was definitely a missed opportunity.

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Scroungers

3 Feb

In a piece in today’s Guardian on the failure of the 2012 Olympics to deliver a legacy of greater participation in sport David Conn observes

The real Olympic legacy winners, of course, are West Ham United, owned by David Sullivan and David Gold, who made their first fortunes in pornography. Next year the Premier League club will take charge of the Olympic stadium, built with £429m of public money, and for which the public is paying a further £160m to convert for West Ham. The club will pay rent, and stands to make a fortune from the 54,000-seat capacity – far more than than its current Upton Park home – and enhanced corporate feasting. Karren Brady, who has worked loyally for Sullivan all her career, negotiated this stadium deal of the century with London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, and has since been made a Conservative peer – Baroness Brady of Knightsbridge.

And a quarter of that £160m conversion cost is being met by the council taxpayers of Newham – local people who are struggling with falling wages and rising prices. Meanwhile, David Cameron promises to drive even more of them into poverty by cutting the benefits cap if his party wins in May.

But of course there’s no cap on handouts to the wealthy. Multimillionaire pornographers and their Tory chief executive can have their business subsidised by the taxpayer: it’s enough to turn your stomach. 

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Affordable housing

21 Jan

ClaptonUltras 2015 Jan 18

Will the council stand up for local people or just let Galliard get away with it? I think we all know the answer to that question.

To rub salt into the wound, the developer is proposing that just 51 of the 838 homes to be built on the Boleyn Ground site will be ‘affordable’ housing. That’s made up of 5 studios, 8 one bedroom flats, 25 two bed units and 13 three bed homes. These will be offered on a shared ownership basis: there will be no affordable homes for rent.

As bad as that seems, things are even worse in Stratford.

CBRE are proposing to redevelop Morgan House – an office block – and part of the shopping centre to provide more than 500 new homes. These will overlook the Olympic Park and provide easy access to both east London’s best connected transport hub and Europe’s largest shopping mall. 

Given the high prices such a prime location will attract, it comes as no surprise that, according to the developer:

There are a number of unique and exceptional site-specific circumstances which result cumulatively in the proposal site being entirely unsuitable for on-site affordable housing provision.

The reasoning is that Newham’s priority is family homes, and a town centre location surrounded by busy roads would not be the right place to house families.

So what about the option of providing affordable homes on another site? That’s not going to happen either.

an initial review of site availability in the area has not identified an appropriate donor site for affordable housing provision. Further, the applicant does not have any suitable sites that could be identified for affordable housing provision.

The only option the developer will consider is bunging the council some cash:

Subject to viability, given the very special circumstances involved with the existing site and emerging proposals, it is considered that a commuted payment towards affordable housing provision would be the most appropriate mechanism for the provision of affordable housing.

Of course once the council has the cash – assuming the viability assessment even requires it to be paid – there’s no obligation to actually spend it on providing affordable housing. It can just vanish into the general pot and pay for whatever the mayor wants.

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Brass neck

12 Dec

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.”

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Equalities

9 Dec

Corbett Crawford

 
What does the mayoral advisor on the left have that the cabinet member on the right doesn’t?
 
The answer is a not ‘a fucking clue’.
 
Thanks to a recent FOI request we know that it’s a special responsibility allowance on top of his basic councillor’s pay.*
 
Richard Crawford advises on ‘Resident Experience’ – whatever that means – and gets a handsome £33,395 a year extra for his trouble.
 
Jo Corbett looks after the Equalities portfolio but “there is no renumeration linked to this post.” She gets nothing.
 
If this were anywhere but Sir Robin Wales’s Newham you’d think that was some kind of joke, but it’s par for the course here.
 
Of the mayor’s nine cabinet members five are men and four are women. Of the men, four get top whack – an extra £33,395 a year. The fifth, the Rev. Quintin Peppiatt, has declined to take an extra allowance this year.** Among the women only Ellie Robinson gets the full allowance. Frances Clarke and Lakmini Shah get £6,679 each; Jo Corbett gets nothing.
 
Outside the cabinet it is no better. Mayoral advisors Andrew Baikie, Clive Furness and Ian Corbett join Councillor Crawford in the top pay bracket. Terry Paul and David Christie each get £13,358. Joy Laguda is paid what Sir Robin clearly thinks a woman’s work is worth – £6,679.
 
It beggars belief that Newham Labour members allow their leader to get away with this year after year, apparently without question.
 
Equalities, my arse.
 
* The current basic allowance for councillors is £10,829
** Cllr Peppiatt hasn’t always been so self-denying. Between 2010 and 2014 he accepted an annual SRA of £18,624 on top of his basic.
 
 
 

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Yet another matter of interest

2 Dec

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.

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Monumental incompetence

2 Dec

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.”

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Without authority

27 Nov

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!

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