Nosey Parkers

8 Oct

Auditors from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency were so concerned last year about Newham’s misuse of its online database that the council’s access was suspended for 12 months.

This was the third time that the council’s access had been blocked since 2010.

The DVLA provides a Web Enabled Enquiry (WEE) link to Local Authorities solely for the purpose of finding out who owns a vehicle suspected of “offences relating to the environment.” These include abandoned cars, untaxed vehicles, driving in a bus lane and causing a nuisance.

Information released under the Freedom of Information Act shows that during audits carried out in January and October 2012, DVLA inspectors found:

  • Newham’s operators were unaware of the correct data retention period.
  • Not all accesses to the WEE link were being properly recorded and cross-referenced to the appropriate case file.
  • There was evidence that “fishing” was taking place to try to establish the correct identity of vehicles reported to the Local Authority. The inspectors noticed that similar registration numbers were repeatedly queried with only one character or digit changed from one enquiry to the next
  • No internal reference numbers were recorded, making file retrieval difficult. As a result, some files could not be located or retrieved during the audit. Theses missing files should have contained a record of the alleged offence and, crucially, the evidence that warranted the collection of personal information.
  • Sufficient evidence of an offence often did not exist or was not seen by the operator prior to accessing vehicle keeper information
  • The correct date of event was not being used in all cases when requesting data. In one case it was wrong by 6 months.
  • Data was being requested outside the prescribed 7-day limit, contrary to Newham’s agreement with the DVLA
  • There was evidence to show that witness statements quoting differing vehicle registration marks were not being returned to the reporting officer for clarification before requesting keeper details.
  • Where an erroneous record had been accessed a hard copy of the record was being retained. This held personal information of the vehicle’s keeper, and was kept on file by Newham despite the person not having committed any offence.

This is incredibly disturbing.

Newham council believes it is entitled to stick its nose wherever it wants. It already spies on residents with the most extensive network of CCTV cameras of any local authority in the UK. Now it thinks it is acceptable to have officers hoover up personal information from other government databases, playing fast and loose with the rules.

People who have committed no offence are having their details searched for by council officers and kept on file. The council’s failure to keep proper records means that we have no idea how extensive this activity was. But we know about the mindset that led to it.

When the Mayor is interviewed he often talks about “his residents.” This is no mere rhetorical flourish. He really believes it: we are his.

The year-long suspension will be lifted later this month. It comes to something that local residents have to rely on the DVLA to keep their information safe from the nosey parkers at Building 1000.

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Jobs for the boys

7 Oct

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the allowances paid to Newham councillors and the extraordinary gender imbalance at the top of Sir Robin’s regime. There was, I noted, only one woman in his cabinet.

Now there’s none. Last week Councillor Kay Scoresby was relieved of her responsibilities.

So not a single cabinet member or executive advisor is a woman. Not one. How does Sir Robin get away with it?

The cabinet page on the council’s website glosses over this grotesque state of affairs by placing our own Ellie Robinson at the top of the membership list, but she is not actually a full cabinet member nor an ‘executive advisor’. She is “Deputy Executive Member for Community Affairs”, as is Plaistow councillor Forhad Hussain. Quite why Richard Crawford, the highly-paid executive member for Community Affairs, needs two deputies to help him out at meetings is altogether a different question.

I know there are members of Newham Labour party – including candidates for next year’s election – who are publicly committed to equal representation. Yet Sir Robin carries on unchallenged. Either these people are not paying attention or are too afraid of the consequences (deselection!) to speak out. In either case it is shameful.

UPDATE (14 October 2013):

Sir Robin could not live for long without his name being at the top of the list, so Ellie Robinson now appears about halfway down, sandwiched between the cabinet members and the executive advisors.

Of the 16 people listed as attending cabinet, she remains the only woman. And the gender imbalance at the top of the council remains a disgrace.

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How to get an iPad mini for just £130

27 Sep


Apple’s iPad mini is one of its best selling products. In the UK these retail at prices starting from £269, going up to £529 for the top of the range. Huge demand and Apple’s wholesale pricing policy mean even the high street chains won’t offer discounts.

But you can get one at a knock-down price if you just follow these five easy steps:

  • Get elected mayor of Newham
  • Go on a trip to China to visit possible investors in a new business park in the Royal Docks
  • Receive an iPad mini as a gift from your hosts, Advanced Business Park (China) Holdings Group Ltd
  • Return home and declare the gift, stating it has a value of just £130
  • Announce you wish to keep the gift for your personal use and that you will reimburse the Council to the equivalent value – that’s the £130 you told them it was worth.

And now the iPad mini is yours. Easy!

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Snouts in the trough – 2013 edition

24 Sep

Last week, without fanfare, Newham council finally published the report on councillors’ expenses and allowances for 2012/13. As the year in question ended at the start of April and the report is dated May 2013, I’m not sure why it took so long to put it into the public domain.

The report shows that last year the 61 elected members of Council – the mayor and 60 ward councillors – trousered a total of £1,204,422 between them.  But although all animals are equal, some animals are more equal than others.

While all 60 ward councillors picked up £10,734 each in basic allowances, 31 of them got to top that up with ‘special responsibility allowances’ that totalled a whopping £479,353. The most equal animal of all, the mayor, received £81,029.

Average household income in Newham is around £27,000 a year. Thirteen members of the council received more than that in allowances last year. Public service can be so rewarding!

The top ten recipients of council tax cash last year were:

  • R A WALES – £81,029
  • L T HUDSON – £ 45,528
  • I K CORBETT – £ 42,811
  • R J CRAWFORD – £ 42,811
  • A R BAIKIE – £ 41,776
  • U DESAI – £ 41,776
  • C MCAULEY – £ 41,776
  • C W FURNESS – £ 41,028
  • A KELLAWAY – £ 37,635
  • E H SPARROWHAWK – £ 33,499

Nationally, the Labour party is rightly committed to getting more women into senior positions in politics. So it is worth noting that this list is entirely male. The only woman in Sir Robin’s senior team – his cabinet and ‘executive advisors’ – is Kay Scoresby and she is joint 12th on the money list. The next highest ranked woman is Forest Gate North’s Ellie Robinson. She chairs the council’s scrutiny commission and collected £23,197 last year – making her the 19th biggest earner.

Among the 20 most senior councillors, with responsibilities that attract the largest allowances, just two are women. When people talk about ‘jobs for the boys’ that is quite literally true in Newham.

It’s not easy being green

13 Sep

muppetscropped

A couple of days ago the Independent published a story headlined Newham: The borough that’s Britain’s greenest – without any effort by its residents. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research had calculated that the carbon footprint of the average Newham resident was the lowest of any municipality in the UK.

The footprint – defined as the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere as a result of the goods and services used – comes to 10.21 tonnes of CO2 a year. It includes emissions generated by the manufacture and transport of products such as iPhones, even if they have been made abroad.

Newham’s footprint is 18 per cent below the national average of 12.5 tonnes and a third less than the 15.51 tonnes emitted in the area with the highest carbon footprint – the City of London.

Cue champagne corks popping at Building 1000 and much tweeting of this fantastic story by councillors and the 2014 cohort of Labour candidates. Even the council’s official Twitter account got in on the act.

Sadly, these muppets had fallen into the classic social media trap – retweeting a link and a catchy headline without actually reading the story behind it.

Had they done so they would have kept quiet. For the reasons behind Newham’s green status are no cause for celebration:

The research… showed a strong correlation between the amount people earned and their carbon footprint, with each additional £600 in weekly income resulting in an extra tonne of annual C02 emissions.

The carbon footprint is also correlated to car ownership, partly because private vehicles produce more emissions per capita than public transport and also because car ownership “is likely to capture broader aspects of lifestyles”, the report noted.

The report also found that, everything else being equal, the more educated a person the greater their carbon footprint will be, although it could not say why this was.

House-size was the other main determinant of people’s carbon footprint, with emissons per head falling as household size increases and relative energy bills declined.

But if The Independent’s trip to Newham is anything to go by, income is by far the biggest determinant of carbon footprint.

So we emit less carbon because we have lower incomes and are less well-educated; we are more likely to live in crowded households; less likely to own a car; and less likely to own electricity-hungry devices like flat-screen TVs and smartphones.

In short, Newham is green because its people are poor.

Next May Sir Robin Wales, who has led the borough for the best part of 20 years, will be asking residents to give him another 4 years in office. We should be asking him why on god’s green Earth he thinks he deserves it, given this dismal record.

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The curious case of the governor of Brighton College

4 Sep

Brighton College

Even by the standards of Sir Robin Wales, this is distinctly odd.

At the Mayoral Proceedings of 29 March 2012 the mayor declared a personal interest in item 6 on the agenda. This concerned the proposed letting to the London Academy of Excellence of Broadway House in Stratford.

LAE is a sixth form “free school academy” aimed at the “academically ambitious” who aspire to get into a Russell Group university. It is a partnership between seven leading independent schools, including the likes of Eton and Roedean.

One of those partners is Brighton College, which the Sunday Times named as England’s Independent School of the Year 2011-12. Sir Robin’s personal interest was, as the minutes of the meeting put it, “by virtue of being a Governor of Brighton College.”

Notwithstanding his declared interest, Sir Robin approved the deal to rent Broadway House to the London Academy of Excellence on terms that included an initial 12 months rent free.

According to the the register of interests on the council’s website, the mayor had declared his connection to Brighton College in November 2011.

To the casual observer, this might look a bit peculiar. Fees at Brighton College are £27,000 a year, which is much the same as the average household income in Newham. What would the Labour mayor of one of London’s poorest areas be doing on the governing body of such a school? How could it possibly benefit the people who elected him and who pay his generous salary? And given that this was in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics Sir Robin was already pretty busy, what with being executive mayor of the main host borough and a board member of LOCOG. How would he fit it in?

Sadly the Brighton College website provided no enlightenment as to the extent of his new duties. It made no reference whatsoever to Sir Robin’s appointment and his name appeared in none their publications. Again, rather strange. Having the mayor of the Olympic borough and the host for their new 6th form venture join the governing body would surely be something they would mention?

The Charity Commission website was no more helpful. Charities are required to publish an annual report, including a list of their trustees. Like most independent schools, Brighton College is a charity and their governors are the trustees. Again, Sir Robin’s name was not mentioned.

Perhaps they just hadn’t got round to it. The last annual report was for the year ending 31 July 2011, so Sir Robin had not yet been appointed when it was written. I put it to the back of my mind.

Then a couple of weeks ago something – I’m not sure what – prompted me to check back. There was still no mention anywhere on the Brighton College website and a Google search for “Sir Robin Wales + Brighton College” yielded only two useful results – the Newham council register of interests and the minutes of the Mayoral Proceedings.

The register of interests had been updated and the list of changes showed that at the end of May 2012 the entry for Brighton College had been removed. That was just six months after it had been added and a bare two months after Sir Robin had declared his personal interest at Mayoral Proceedings. It appeared that his term as governor had been a very short one.

The Charity Commission website had a new annual report for Brighton College covering the year ending 31 July 2012, the period in which Sir Robin had declared his interest as a governor. The report listed all those who had served as trustees during the year, but his name did not appear.

Had the school made a mistake and submitted an inaccurate report? That would be an embarrassment and quite possibly a breach of their legal obligations. I contacted them to confirm that Sir Robin had indeed been a governor and point out that his name had been omitted from their annual report.

On Monday I received a reply from the clerk to the Governing Body:

I can confirm that Sir Robin Wales has never been a governor of Brighton College.

So why on Earth had he ever said he was? Why had Sir Robin registered an interest he did not actually have and why had he declared it publicly at Mayoral Proceedings?

There may be a sensible or rational explanation, but I am at a loss as to what it might be.

It is a very curious business indeed.

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Random facts about Newham

30 Aug

Five interesting things I’ve learned about our borough from reading recent FOI disclosure logs:

  • The council spent £10,392.88 on hiring private detectives in 2010/2011.
  • You are more likely to get a parking ticket on Romford Road than any other road in the borough. 8,273 penalty charge notices were issued for parking offences there in 2012-13, yielding £199,782 in revenue to the council.
  • The council’s total take last year from parking tickets, including car parks, was £9,087,594.
  • Newham Council does not own any residential properties in the Thanet District Council area.
  • There are a total of 3,543 Polish nationals registered to vote in the London Borough of Newham.

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UKIP if you want to

23 Aug
Pretty in pink - Gerard Batten surrounded by his supporters in the European Parliament

Pretty in pink – Gerard Batten surrounded by his supporters in the European Parliament

Is this the end of the political road for Forest Gate’s Gerard Batten?

Wee Gerry has been an MEP since 2004 and is the only UKIP member for London. But the recent re-selection process has seen him relegated to second place on the candidates shortlist for next year’s european elections. UKIP has never had 2 MEPs in London, so second place is as good as nowhere. The final order of the list is up to a vote of the assorted fruitcakes, loonies and euro-obsessives that make up UKIP’s membership, but the recommended order is a big slap in the face for someone who runner-up in party’s leadership election just four years ago.

The London UKIP shortlist in full:

  • Paul Oakley
  • 
Gerard Batten
  • Andrew McNeilis
  • Anthony Brown
  • Elizabeth Jones
  • Lawrence Webb
  • Alastair McFarlane
  • Peter Whittle

However, losing is nothing new for Gerry Batten. He has a long history of electoral failure and is clearly immune from embarrassment. In 2008 he was UKIP’s London mayoral candidate. He finished a dismal 7th, securing just 0.93% of the vote. Even Alan Craig of the Christianist Peoples Alliance did better!

Newham voters with very long memories may also remember him from the 2002 local elections. He stood in Forest Gate North, coming bottom of the poll with a paltry 233 votes.

That, though, was a big improvement on his previous showing. In 1993 Batten contested the Park ward by-election on behalf of the Anti-Federalist League. He collected all of 75 votes.

Defeat in 2014 will just be a return to normality for Gerry.

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Image

Zero hours

21 Aug

Zero hours

Unite has published a graphic showing its ‘Zero Hours Hall of Shame.’

The original was notably lacking one high profile zero hours employer, so I’ve done them a small favour and added the logo, along with the number of employees on zero hours contracts.

You’re welcome, Unite.

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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