Maternity blues

23 Mar

More embarrassment has been heaped on the mayor and his fellow councillors over the expulsion of Charlene McLean.

The Evening Standard covered the story under the headline Councillor ‘dumped’ from authority over time off after giving birth prematurely.

The story says local party members are outraged and quotes one ‘angry member’:

“This is a working class mother who had time off during a very difficult pregnancy and was then caring for an unwell, premature baby.

“Despite that, she was injudiciously dumped from the council. Charlene is a dedicated Labour member committed to her residents but not seen as a leadership loyalist. That’s valuable on a council with no opposition.”

The normally supine Newham Recorder also got in on the act, headlining their story New mum dropped as Stratford councillor in maternity leave dispute.

Both stories include the council’s claim that then-councillor McLean was misadvised by an unnamed officer and that neither senior officials nor the executive were aware of this.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Newham Council said: “In this case, an officer provided incorrect information to another member regarding statutory maternity leave and it appears this advice was passed on to Ms McLean.

“Neither the council’s executive or the council’s monitoring officer were aware that incorrect information had been provided to Ms McLean.

“Had the council officer or Ms McLean informed the monitoring officer or the council’s executive, steps would have been taken to agree an extended period of absence for Ms McLean.”

But documents released under the Freedom of Information Act throw this claim into dispute. Mike Law asked last year for details of the amount of individual casework allocated to councillors between June and September. The reply he got in October includes this:

McLean Maternity Leave 1 

He then asked a follow up about case work in October, November and December. That was answered last week:

McLean maternity leave 2

The information governance team knew she was on maternity leave, but we are supposed to believe Sir Robin and none of his executive did.

One of Charlene McLean’s fellow councillors in Stratford & New Town is Richard Crawford. Aside from being a long-standing friend and drinking buddy of Sir Robin’s he is also the full-time, 5-days-a-week mayoral advisor on ‘resident experience’. Odd that he either never noticed Cllr McLean’s absence nor thought to mention it.

Equally odd is that the other councillor who was on maternity leave at the same time had the fact announced on her profile page on the council website:

McLean maternity leave 3

Both of Farah Nazeer’s fellow ward councillors are members of Sir Robin’s inner circle of full-time advisors. They knew she was pregnant and was on maternity leave, but apparently failed to spot Charlene McLean was in the same condition.

The council’s executive are not the only ones who were selectively inattentive. I am told Labour chief whip Steve Brayshaw called two other councillors in – Sheila Thomas and Amajit Singh – to make sure they remained legal whilst ignoring Charlene McLean’s absence.

There is something deeply rotten in the state of Newham Labour. Claims of mayoral and executive ignorance are transparently an attempt to cover that up.

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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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Sir Robin talks immigration, diversity and cuts

19 Mar

The Mayor was interviewed on Nick Ferrari’s LBC show on 17 March 2015 about the impact of immigration on the local community and services.

Inadequate

17 Mar

 Whipps X CQC

The Care Quality Commission has published its report on the quality of care provided at Whipps Cross University Hospital.

As you can see, it is pretty damning.

The report identified a number of very significant weaknesses, in particular poor leadership, low staff morale, insufficient numbers of staff, and an over-reliance on agency and temporary staff. As a result proper protocols and procedures were not followed, patient information was not tracked and monitoring was inconsistent.

Large scale job losses, pay ‘down banding’ and ‘a culture of bullying and harassment’ were all contributory factors. The NHS trust that runs the hospital – Barts – has been put into special measures.

For those of us living in the north of the borough Whipps is far easier to get to than Newham General. So, despite being in Waltham Forest, it’s our local hospital. 

And it’s nowhere near good enough.

UPDATE: According to councillor Dianne Walls on Twitter, Newham’s health and social care scrutiny commission will be taking evidence from both the CQC and Whipps Cross management in April: “We need to know what it means for Newham residents when one of our main hospitals is deemed inadequate, even though it is in Waltham Forest.”

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The civilised thing to do

10 Mar

An excellent piece by Zoe Williams in the Guardian about the Green party conference and why delegates remain upbeat, despite recent difficulties.

This bit in particular caught my eye:

being outside acceptability has allowed the party to slough off the accepted wisdoms that both shackle and amalgamate the other parties. Tax is the obvious example: today the deputy leader, Amelia Womack, promised to axe all tuition fees, and to pay for it from general taxation: yup, that old chestnut. Not a graduate tax, or a fee-based system that was really a tax, but an actual, progressive tax, asking the people with the most to pay for something that would improve the entire country – not because they benefited from it themselves (though, in likelihood, they did), but because it’s the civilised thing to do.

Tax is the price we pay to live in a civilised society. It really is that simple.

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Red sky at night…

9 Mar


via Instagram

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FOI – a timeline

4 Mar

Grey’s Law states that “any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

With that in mind, take a look at this timeline of a recent FOI request to Newham council:

August 2014

Question: Please forward copies of the current portfolios for each Cabinet Member, Mayoral Advisor and Community Lead Member and for any other position generated by the Mayor and which incorporates an allowance that is additional to the basic councillor’s allowance.

September 2014

Response: The full details of the portfolios held by all Members are already publicly available on the individual pages for each Councillor, found on the Newham website.

September 2014

Question: Please forward copies of the portfolios as requested. They ARE NOT available on the authority’s web site.

February 2015

Response: I have now checked whether this information is available on the web and I can confirm that all portfolios have now been published and appear under the names of each portfolio holder.

February 2015

Question: Would you please inform me of the date(s) Newham Council posted Mayoral Advisor Portfolios on the authority’s web site.

March 2015

Answer: 15th January 2015

But perhaps we should be charitable and employ Hanlon’s Razor instead: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

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Overview and Scrutiny

25 Feb

I’ve Storified the live Twitter commentary from last night’s OSC meeting, with some added notes.

The committee’s witness was the Mayor of Newham, Sir Robin Wales.

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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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Scrutiny

23 Feb

Newham Collegiate Sixth Form Centre

Sir Robin explains to Newham 6th form Collegiate students how their education is at risk because someone ignored legal advice

Tomorrow evening the council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee will begin to look at the East Ham Town Hall Campus and Newham 6th Form Collegiate fiascos.

The meeting is, appropriately enough, at East Ham Town Hall. It is open to the public and I’ll be going. [UPDATE: The venue has been changed – it’s now at the Old Town Hall in Stratford]

Councillors and independent members of the OSC have a wealth of material to work through and there are plenty of questions to ask, but if they are looking for a good place to start I’d recommend the PwC  ‘report in the public interest’, which was published on the Audit Commission website last month.

PwC – PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP – were appointed by the Audit Commission to audit the council’s accounts and as such have a duty

… under Section 8 of the Audit Commission Act 1998 and the Audit Commission Code of Audit Practice to bring attention to a number of governance weaknesses identified in respect of the London Borough of Newham’s East Ham Campus project.

The report details a number of failings, including

the fact that the various pieces of legal advice which were sought by the Council in relation to this issue, consistently stated that it was not within the Council’s power to establish the sixth form in its current form. However the legal advice was not followed nor escalated within the Council to the Section 151 Officer or Chief Executive. (emphasis added)

And, alarmingly, that

£10.3m of additional work to one contractor was awarded without following procurement rules and without Members approval.

I submitted an FOI request back in November about the overspend – before the illegality of the 6th form college became known. It was due for a response by 19th December. Newham have not replied and the request in now more than 2 months overdue.

Senior members of the council, the well-paid mayoral advisors and cabinet members who should have been paying attention and weren’t, have consistently claimed this is all the fault of officers; it’s nothing to do with them. I don’t believe that. In Newham no-one farts without the mayor’s permission. That a building project could overspend by £10 million AND a 6th form centre be opened illegally without him and his cronies knowing defies belief.

If Overview and Scrutiny are doing their job properly they’ll be asking who knew what and when they knew it. Officers have lost their jobs over this; it’s high time elected members were held properly to account.

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