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Newham vs Newham

6 Feb
Newham_vs_newham

Yesterday’s debate in parliament about marriage equality included the following exchange between Newham’s two MPs, who are on different sides of the argument:

Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab):

The Church of England was the custodian of marriage in Britain for hundreds of years. For many people, it still is.

The 1662 version of the Church of England service, which has been in use for the past 350 years, sets out three reasons for marriage. The first is that it was “ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord”.

The central problem with the Bill is that it introduces a definition of marriage that includes the second and third reasons but drops that first one. The result is something that is a good deal weaker than the original.

Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab):

My right hon. Friend was at my wedding. I was not young when I got married, and unless I had been blessed like Elizabeth, it was highly unlikely that I was going to be able to procreate after all that time. Is he telling me that my marriage is less valid than anybody else’s?

Stephen Timms:

No, I am certainly not. I was delighted to attend my hon. Friend’s wedding. The reason that I have just cited was applicable 351 years ago as well, but the Church of England service still applies.

Children are at the heart of marriage but they are barely mentioned in the Bill. It aims to open up the benefits of marriage to people who are excluded from it at the moment, but it does so at the price of taking away a significant part of the meaning of marriage. Children are the reason that marriage has always been so important… it is right for society to recognise—as marriage does—the value to all of us of the contribution of those who bring children into the world and bring them up. That is the ideal that the current definition of marriage reflects, and it would be a mistake to lose the value that that definition places on the creation and bringing up of children.

Like Lyn Brown, I am married but childless. And I am pleased that she stood up to Timms on behalf of all of us in that happy condition.

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Statutory Public Notices – Money for Nothing?

20 Dec

Newham council has replied to my FoI request about the cost of publishing statutory public notices.

Over the past 3 years the council has spent close to £119,000 on publishing these notices, more than 95% of it with the Newham Recorder. The balance – a mere £5,500 – went to the in-house Newham Mag. Notices also appear on the council’s website, but that costs nothing.

Sadly Newham couldn’t tell me whether anyone had responded or made enquiries as a result of seeing the published notices, as they do not record that information.

So, as far as we can tell, Newham is handing over an average of £40,000 a year to the Recorder for absolutely no public benefit whatsover. And there’s nothing they can do about it, as the law says they have to.

It is little short of outrageous.

Eye Spy

14 Dec

A list has been published today of the locations of all of the CCTV cameras used by Newham council to spy on residents.

It runs to almost 5 pages long. And the majority of them are not static, but have ‘pan-tilt-zoom’ capability so council snoopers can move cameras around to track individuals.

But even this monster surveillance network is not enough for Big Brother. Our mayor wants to import a whole fleet of mobile CCTV cameras to enable ‘automatic number plate recognition.’

Is there is a scrap of evidence that this massive intrusion into our privacy makes us even a tiny bit safer?

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Easy come, easy go

29 Nov

A report in today’s Guardian says Newham council are “willing to increase their loan from £40 million to £70 million” as part of a funding package to convert the Olympic stadium to dual football and athletics use, thereby all-but-guaranteeing that West Ham United will move in as prime tenants.

Yes, that’s right. £70 million. Seven zero. Million.

When council considered the matter in March they agreed that they would “provide a loan of up to £40m” (my emphasis added). 

Was this “willingness” to agree to a significant increase in the loan – 75% more than the agreed maximum – discussed with any councillors beyond the mayor’s small ‘magic circle’ of sycophants and yes-men?

How do ordinary councillors feel about risking £70 million on an investment with no obvious business case – and few real benefits to ordinary Newham people – when the authority has just lost the £4 million it loaned to London Pleasure Gardens?

How do they propose to justify to their constituents spending £70 million on kitting out a new stadium for a Premier League football club owned by multi-millionaires when vital frontline public services are being cut?

A backdoor subsidy for local newspapers

23 Nov

Last week I attended the GovDelivery Annual conference at the National Audit Office. The theme of the conference was digital government communications.

One of the speakers was Dr. Jonathan Carr-West, Director of Policy, at the Local Government Information Unit (LGiU), who shared some scary and alarming research on statutory notice publications.

He revealed that across the country councils spend up to £67.85m (or an average of £181,000 per authority) every year publishing public notices in local newspapers. This is not something they have any choice about: councils have a statutory duty.

Of course, local newspaper owners know this and exploit it to the full. There is evidence that the individual cost of publishing a notice can be upwards of three times that for a normal advert, reaching over £20 per column centimetre in some publications.

This is a lot of money, especially when councils are trying desperately to find savings. It is also an outdated system that has been left behind by technological advances. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that the audience – that’s local people like you and me –  is moving away from printed newspapers, to a varied digital media landscape.

Councils know this. They know that printed notices in local papers are inefficient and a waste of money. They know no-one reads them and they know that almost no-one ever responds to them.

I have submitted a Freedom of Information request to Newham council, asking how much they spend on these notices and how many responses they have generated. My aim isn’t to embarrass the council: for once they are wasting money and it’s not their fault! As a citizen it offends me that public money is being handed over as a back-door subsidy to newspaper proprietors. I want information I can give my local councillors to persuade them to lobby the mayor, and for him in turn to lobby central government to change the law on public notices.

The coalition government says it believes in localism and that it wants councils to deliver value for money. Well it could prove it by changing the law to free up councils to decide, based on their local online and offline ecosystem, where best to place public notices. They should de-jargonise the content of public notices so ordinary people can understand what the hell they’re about. And they should allow immediate online response – click a button, fill in a form!

Allowing councils to spend a little bit of money with hyperlocal news and community websites would provide a real boost to the sector and lead to significant growth in the number and quality of these sites, while still delivering large savings.

Taking it one step further forwards, the Department for Communities and Local Government should look at developing a central online portal for publication of statutory notices. You could sign-up for automatic email alerts for new notices from your local authority, or subscribe to an RSS feed. The Scottish Government has already partnered with local authorities to produce TellMeScotland, which would be easy to replicate.

You can see Jonathan Carr-West’s presentation online and download a full copy of the LGiU report on public notices.

 

View from Wanstead Park station

19 Nov

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From the westbound platform, looking across towards Sebert Road.

More Rotten Boroughs

17 Oct

The mayor makes yet another appearance in Private Eye’s Rotten Boroughs column this week.

The article essentially repeats the story told on Mike Law’s blog about Sir Robin’s pay rises and contributions to charity.

I’ve lost count of the number of times over the past few years that Newham has featured in the Eye. Surely it’s time for someone – the leader of the Labour Party, perhaps – to take Sir Robin to one side and tell him to sort it out.

Or maybe our 60 Labour councillors might start doing their jobs and hold the mayor to account. Isn’t bringing the council into disrepute against the code of conduct?

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Revised proposals for new parliamentary constituencies

16 Oct

Following a public consultation the Boundary Commission for England has submitted revised proposals for new parliamentary constituencies which, if approved, will come into force for the 2015 general election. A key part of the brief was to reduce the total number of constituencies from 650 to 600 and to equalise (as far as possible) the number of electors in each one.

Under these proposals Newham would be split into 3 constituencies, 2 of which would also include wards from neighbouring boroughs.

The new constituences would be:

I’d spend a bit of time explaining what this means in practice if it wasn’t a complete waste of time. Following the Tories’ decision to torpedo reform of the House of Lords these proposals stand almost no chance of being passed. Labour opposes them fundamentally and the Lib Dems are sufficently pissed off about the death of Lords reform (coming after their monumental shafting in the AV referendum) that they will vote them down too.

The Tories may hope that a deal on state funding of political parties (‘cash for seats’) will bring their colaition partners into line, but Clegg must know that would be political suicide. What’s the point of cash for seats if you have no, er, seats?

 

 

 

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A quick re-brand for Newham’s phony coppers?

27 Sep

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A Newham Council “community safety officer” on patrol

An article in this week’s Newham Recorder (from which the above picture was *ahem* borrowed) about yet another ‘crackdown’ (yawn) on crime and anti-social behaviour in Newham refers to the mayor’s brigade of fake plods as the Community Safety Team.

When we were introduced to these fine people (pun intended) in the Newham Mag they were referred to as Enforcement Officers, or even ‘Law Enforcement Officers’.

Has the mayor done a swift about-turn and decided to make them sound a bit less threatening? I wonder what might have caused that.

£40 million doesn’t buy much these days

24 Sep

So, according to the Standard, the mayor thinks our investment in the Olympic stadium is worthwhile because

local people would get priority tickets to the stadium and access to its facilities for athletics meetings and sports days

That’s not much of a return on £40 million.

Any local politician worth his salt should have been able to get that from a publicly owned stadium located right in his home patch without spending a penny.

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