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How much does ‘free’ really cost?

20 Aug
The headline act at Under The Stars - every night

The headline act at Under The Stars – every night

The Newham Recorder dutifully reports that a total “around 35,000 people” attended the four nights of live music Under The Stars over the past weekend.

This was the 14th outing for Newham Council’s “musical extravaganza,” which aims “to entertain residents and visitors alike.”

Despite proclaiming that this year was “the best one ever,” the mayor was in strangely defensive mood:

Some people have asked why we continue to spend money on events like this. I say it’s important to keep investing in the things residents tell us they like and make a difference to their lives.

This year 35,000 people have told us they like it. That’s why we will continue to bring the whole of Newham together. And best of all, it’s free.

Well, let’s take a moment to unpick that.

First of all, 35,000 people have told you nothing of the kind. You offered them four nights of entertainment with no tickets or admission fees and, on a warm summer weekend, they took you up on it.

As for bringing ‘the whole of Newham together,’ the total population of the borough is somewhere north of 300,000. Allowing for a number of visitors from Tower Hamlets, Redbridge, Waltham Forest and elsewhere among the crowd, barely 10% of Newham residents attended these events. While that’s a decent turnout, it’s a very long way from being ‘the whole of Newham’.

And finally no, Sir Robin, these events are not free.

There may be no tickets and no admission charge, but the cost of putting them on is met by someone. In fact it’s us, the people of Newham, through our council tax. The claim, which is repeated ad nauseam by the council and parroted by the Recorder, that events are ‘free’ makes it sound like they are provided by the mayor out of his own pocket, or funded by happy thoughts and pixie dust.

What other things that “make a difference” to the lives of Newham people could the money spent on Under The Stars have bought? A new primary school? Weekly rather than fortnightly recycling collections? More home help for vulnerable old people? Who knows.

That is the real cost of the Mayor’s ‘free’ entertainments – the things we don’t get because the money’s being spent on bread and circuses.

Sir Robin is the elected mayor and perfectly entitled to pursue his policy priorities – but he isn’t entitled to pretend they come without real costs to residents or at the expense of alternatives.

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Reasons to be cheerful

19 Aug

woodgrangemarket

I spend too much time on this blog focussing on the negative and sometimes forget to talk about what’s great about living in Newham, and Forest Gate in particular. So here’s a quick list of 10 things that make me very happy to be here:

  • Wanstead Flats
  • Woodgrange Market
  • Independent coffee shops – CoffeE7 and Kaffeine
  • Number 8 Forest Gate
  • The Siam Café
  • Two great local websites – Woodgrange Web and E7 Now and Then
  • Having the Olympics (and Paralympics) on my doorstep
  • Great transport connections from Stratford
  • A community that was resilient long before the mayor appropriated the word

and…

  • The prospect of a great new pub, the Forest Tavern, opening next week

That’s just off the top of my head. If there’s anything I’ve missed let me know in comments.

A social housing crisis in Newham?

12 Aug

According to an FOI reply delivered on 31 July the number of people waiting for a council house in Newham massively exceeds the total number of properties available. There are 17,535 social housing properties in Newham; and 24,544 households currently on the waiting list.

As the council itself admits the average waiting time for a 2-bedroom house is 13 years. Even for a bedsit the shortest waiting time is over 7 years.

Demand for social housing is extremely high in Newham and there are currently thousands of households on our housing register. The majority of people who apply will never be housed. [emphasis added]

Applicants at the back of the queue are likely to be permanently resident in the City of London cemetery long before Newham finds them a home.

So you would think that a major priority for the council would be building as many new homes for social rent as possible. But, as another FOI response (see page 23 of the linked Word document) makes very clear, that isn’t happening:

How many social homes for rent have been built in your local authority area since May 6th 2010? 6

How many social homes for rent to be built in future have, at this point in time, both planning permission and financing in place? None

Not that Newham isn’t building new homes. A council owned 500-home development on Stratford’s Leather Gardens estate, which will consist of a mixture of one and two bedroom flats, has been given the go-ahead. These will be offered to Newham residents as “affordable rented homes.”

If the scheme is successful Newham will create a local authority company tasked with acquiring or building more than 2,000 homes for “affordable rent” over the next decade.

Note that these homes will be for affordable rent, not for social rent. And they won’t be let directly by the council to households on the waiting list, but by an arms-length company operating as a private landlord.

There is a desperate need for social housing in Newham, but the council has decided instead to become “a player in the private rented sector” (to quote Councillor Andrew Baikie).

That is not a priority I would have normally associated with a Labour council.

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Not so smart on a phone

22 Jul

What Newham’s website looks like on my iPhone

According to the Office for National Statistics:

  • Access to the Internet using a mobile phone more than doubled between 2010 and 2012, from 24% to 51%.
  • In 2012, 32% of adults accessed the Internet using a mobile phone every day. [my emphasis added]

There really is no excuse for not having a proper mobile version of your website.

And yes Newham council, I am looking at you.

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Open democracy

19 Jul

Copyright: Image by jsawkins on Flickr. Some rights reserved

On July 15th Newham council voted to amend its constitution to allow the public to film and record proceedings at future meetings. The decision was inspired by Eric Pickles, the secretary of state for local government, basically telling councils that if they didn’t let this happen he’d change the law to force them.

The Newham Recorder invited our mayor and Lutfur Rahman, his Tower Hamlets counterpart, to ‘debate’ the matter. Mike Law has blogged about this and I’d recommend reading his post and the comments on it, as well as the Recorder piece.

What follows is the comment I added to Mike’s blog, which points at what I think is Sir Robin’s staggering hypocrisy on this issue:

Sir Robin, with Eric Pickles’ gun pressed to his head, says

what does it do to build public trust in politics more widely when a clique seeks to shut the public out from decisions made on their behalf?… In the 21st century it is not enough for democracy to simply happen. It has to be seen to happen.

Despite appearances, the age of satire is not yet dead.

As Birdman [one of the commenters on Mike’s blog] correctly observes,

decisions are largely taken in Labour Group meetings, after the Labour Councillors have been told which way to vote, and no genuine debate is ever seen or heard by the public attending meetings… what is there to film?

Monday’s council meeting, at which this “historic decision” was taken, lasted just 14 minutes. And that included a set-piece speech by councillor Ellie Robinson on ‘Newham’s Wonderful Women’.

May’s annual general meeting took a massive 39 minutes; February’s was 31 minutes. The ‘extraordinary’ meeting in January occupied councillors for a mere 10 minutes. I could go on, but you get the drift.

If Sir Robin were truly serious about open and transparent decision-making Labour group meetings would be the ones that took 10 minutes and the real debates would happen in council, where the public could see and hear them.

We all know that won’t happen though.

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Complete control

13 Jul

Woman Shouting with Bullhorn

Last week there was a great post on the Guardian’s Local Government Network titled ‘Councils and social media: a desire for digital control still dominates‘.

Although it was about local government in general, it could almost have been written with Newham in mind:

A small study assessing how councils used social media in early 2012 demonstrated the point. Although 96% of authorities surveyed were using social media to post news stories and information, and 90% were promoting specific events and campaigns, only 41% of authorities monitored other forums and blogs. Where they did, only 28% actively engaged with residents on these platforms, with just 9% of councils saying they used social media for two-way communications. Though things may have improved in the last 18 months, the same fears are still holding councils back online.

Think about the way our council communicates with us as citizens and residents – it’s a centralised command and control, one-way process.

That’s why we have the Newham Mag. It’s all about telling us about all of the wonderful things the council is doing; pushing out information out without any conception that people might want to engage in a conversation about the things we really care about. You can’t answer back to a paper magazine.

The way Newham uses digital channels is consistent with this general approach. Although it does have a social media presence, it’s entirely information-based. The official Twitter feed and the Facebook page are filled with announcements about “free events” and suchlike. Trying to get a response if you post a comment or tweet back to them is more often than not a frustrating experience.

It’s such a missed opportunity.

Social media isn’t so difficult. Follow the basic rules (don’t do anything stupid; engage, don’t broadcast) and you have a powerful digital communication tool at your fingertips completely free of charge.

A measure of how wrong Newham gets it is the very small number of ‘likes’ the Facebook page has – just 474. That’s in a borough with over 300,000 residents. More than half of UK residents will use social networks regularly this year, according to eMarketer. And nine out of ten social network users in the country have a Facebook account. So there are probably close to 150,000 Facebook users in Newham. 474 ‘likes’ represents a feeble 0.3% of those.

The council’s Twitter feed is more popular, with almost 2,700 followers. Given the chance, it could be the focus of some really interesting debate, but that would require a change in the governing mind-set.

Allowing local people access to the conversations that go on within the town hall is a good thing. Councils are democratically elected bodies, and their work should be free and open to public scrutiny. The best way to use digital tools to achieve this level of local involvement and scrutiny is to use social media as it was designed to be used.

Social media is about connecting people and sharing experiences. It’s about enabling conversations. It’s also a daily part of most of our lives – we take it almost for granted that we can engage with people and businesses in near real-time.

When political and civic participation is at such dangerously low levels it is verging on the criminal not to use every available tool to reach out and engage.

It’s not all doom-and-gloom though. There are 14 current councillors with Twitter accounts, which they use to varying extents, and a good number of Labour’s new candidates for next year are active users. Hopefully, an influx of younger digital natives will lead to a more open approach.

Maybe they’ll stop talking at us and start talking with us.

Question time for Sir Robin?

10 Jul

Way back in 2010 I wrote a post on the E-democracy forum about Newham setting a world record for the shortest ever council meeting (just 6 minutes). I noted that the council’s own website said that:

“At these meetings the Council makes major decisions, such as deciding the council tax and budget and policy framework documents. It is the real focus for the whole Council to meet and debate major issues and to ask questions of the Mayor.”

Two years later, in August 2012, I found that the website text had been amended. The new version said:

“At these meetings the Council makes major decisions, such as deciding the council tax and budget and policy framework documents.”

Can you spot the difference? Perhaps they thought no-one would notice, but Sir Robin’s disdain for scrutiny has rarely been so obvious.

There’s now an even newer version which sets out the decisions which by law have to be made at full council. It also says:

“The full council is the opportunity for councillors to question the executive [and] chairs of council committees.”

So someone somewhere has given councillors back their right to publicly question Sir Robin!

I hope that the bright-eyed hopefuls recently selected to contest next year’s elections will, once installed in the council chamber, take that opportunity. Holding the mayor to account for his decisions is, in my view, by far the most important part of their job. And it would make a nice change if they actually did it.

Who knows, they might even get answers!

Next year’s council election results today

8 Jul

This is the full list of Labour party candidates selected this weekend to fight next year’s local elections. Given the electoral history of the borough, the vast majority of these people – and probably all of them – will be elected as Newham councillors on May 22nd 2014:

Beckton: David Christie, Ayesha Chowdhury, Alec Kellaway

Canning Town North: Ann Easter, Kay Scoresby, Clive Furness

Canning Town South: Sheila Thomas, Alan Griffiths, Bryan Collier

Custom House: Pat Holland, Rokhsana Fiaz, Conor McAuley

East Ham Central: Unmesh Desai, Ian Corbett, Julianne Marriott

East Ham North: Paul Sathianesan, Zuber Gulamussen, Firoza Nekiwala

East Ham South: Quintin Peppiatt, Lakmini Shah, Susan Masters

Forest Gate North: Ellie Robinson, Seyi Akiwowo, Rachel Tripp

Forest Gate South: Mas Patel, Winston Vaughan, Dianne Walls

Green Street East: Jose Alexander, Rohima Rahman, Mukesh Patel

Green Street West: Hanif Abdulmuhit, Tahmina Rahman, Idris Ibrahim

Little Ilford: Andrew Baikie, Farah Nazeer, Ken Clark

Manor Park: Amarjit Singh, Jo Corbett, Salim Patel

Plaistow North: Forhad Hussain, Joy Laguda, James Beckles

Plaistow South: Gordon Mackinnon-Miller, Aleen Alarice, Neil Wilson

Royal Docks: Steve Brayshaw, Anthony McAlmont, Pat Murphy

Stratford: Richard Crawford, Terry Paul, Charlene McLean

Wall End: Lester Hudson, Ted Sparrowhawk, Frances Clarke

West Ham: John Gray, John Whitworth, Freda Bourne

Boleyn ward has not yet been able to select its candidates due to a dispute with East Ham CLP. The ward party was unexpectedly suspended last week, despite this being the sole prerogative of the national executive. So expect any of Sir Robin’s favourites who failed to make it in the other 19 wards to be imposed on Boleyn.

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Respect yourself

4 Jul


Once upon a time in a land far, far away… 

In 2006 Hanif Abdulmuhit was elected as a Labour-hating, Galloway-loving Respect councillor in Newham.

In 2008 he was Respect’s candidate for the London Assembly in City & East, standing against Labour’s incumbent, the saintly John Biggs.

At the time he said, “We need a party in East London that puts people before profit. New Labour has turned its back on its own supporters.”

And George Galloway commended him, saying “Hanif Abdulmuhit is an excellent councillor… Londoners deserve better than New Labour timeservers.”

Now, in 2013, Mr Abdulmuhit has put all that behind him. He is a loyal Labour man and on the shortlist for the 2014 council elections.

Of course he won’t be the first ambitious local politician to realise that the path to electoral success in Newham requires a change of allegiance. There are at least four current councillors who previously stood for other parties before converting:

  • John Gray stood and lost heavily 3 times as a Liberal Democrat. Since 2010 he has been secretary of the council’s Labour group
  • Patricia Holland also ran unsuccessfully as a LibDem
  • Alec Kellaway was actually elected 3 times as an SDP/Liberal Alliance/Liberal Democrat before defecting to Labour in 1994. He is now Sir Robin’s Executive Member for Business and Skills.
  • Forhad Hussain, now Plaistow Community Lead Councillor, stood in 2006 for Respect

If he is successful Mr Abdulmuhit already has a blog he can revive, proudly bearing the masthead ‘Councillor Hanif Abdulmuhit’. He may want to delete the rest of it though.

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