A new post by me on my employer’s blog about the Amazon Kindle Fire and its potential impact on the tablet market.
Enjoy!
Newham Council’s Mountain of Debt
3 Oct
People have expressed surprise that the mayor has proposed to borrow £40 million to lend on to West Ham United FC to part-finance their bid for the Olympic stadium. They ask how one of the poorest boroughs in London can afford to take on such debts.
What they obviously don’t realise is that Newham has already has massive debts. According to the draft statement of accounts for 2010/11, the council’s “total external borrowing at 31st March 2011 was £1,186 million.”?????? Against that, “the Council had investments of £303 million.”?????? Which leaves a net position of £883 million of debt.
That level of debt is truly shocking, but what is more alarming is the massive growth in those debts during the mayor’s reign.
As at 31st March 2002 Newham’s total external borrowing was £616 million. With investments of £91m that left a net debt of £525m.
Today’s total debt figure of £1,186 million represents an increase of 93%. Even taking the major increase in investments into account, the net debt position has increased by 69% over the past 9 years.
Although the council claims that the current debt is “well within [our] approved borrowing limit” it is a frighteningly large sum. According to the 2001 census (the most recent data on the council’s website) there are 91,822 households in Newham.
That means the council owes the equivalent of £12,916 per household.
Newham Councillors Paid More Than £1.2 million in Allowances
21 SepLast week the Newham Recorder published a story headlined Newham councillors getting £25k each expenses, claiming that the average councillor received £24,333 to service their wards.
The story also stated that “the basic allowance for councillors newly elected last year was reduced to £9,579.”
It is a sad reflection on local journalism in Newham that neither claim is quite correct.
The £24,333 average applies if you only count the 40 members of the council who served the full 12 months from April 1 2010 to March 31 2011. It completely ignores those who left the council at the May election and those who joined after it. This tends to inflate the average, as those 40 councillors were generally more senior.
The basic allowance, sadly, hasn’t gone down. The reason new councillors only got £9,579 was that they didn’t serve a whole year and therefore only received a pro rata portion of the allowance.
There are plenty of reasons to attack the mayor and his cronies for their free-and-easy attitude to taking home our money, but the Newham Recorder does none of us any favours by getting the numbers wrong.
So if the Recorder got it wrong, what is the truth about councillors’ allowances?
Well, in the year ending 31 March 2011 the 61 members of the council (the mayor and 60 councillors*) collected a total of £1,221,752 in allowances and expenses. This works out at an average of £20,029 per member.
But even this doesn’t really tell the full story, as some councillors get far more than others as a result of “special responsibilities”. The top 10 earners in 2010/11 were:
- RA WALES 80,695
- AR BAIKIE 49,776
- IK CORBETT 42,811
- RJ CRAWFORD 42,811
- U DESAI 41,776
- C McAULEY 41,776
- A KELLAWAY 37,002
- JH LAGUDA 33,499
- EH SPARROWHAWK 32,809
- CW FURNESS 32,231
Councillor Baikie’s allowance includes an additional special payment for serving 2 six-month terms as deputy mayor.
The full report on members’ allowances in 2010/11 can be found here: http://goo.gl/EGDP7
When looking at the above figures it is worth remembering, for context, that average income for a household in Newham is £27,600 a year.
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* That is 60 ‘full-time equivalents’ made up of 39 people who served a full year, 21 who served 1 April to the May election and 21 new councillors who took over their seats and served from the May election to 31 March.
New Parliamentary Constituencies for Newham
13 Sep
When the Coalition came into office last year they agreed as part of their programme of government to reduce the number of MPs in the House of Commons from 650 to 600, which will save the taxpayer about £12 million a year and result in seats that are much closer together in terms of size.
The Boundary Commission, which decides on how parliamentary constituencies are made up, has produced its initial proposals for England. These include an overall reduction in MPs for London, but the changes for Newham and the surrounding boroughs involve a slight increase in representation.
The commission found that Newham was too large for two constituencies, as both the existing constituencies (East Ham and West Ham) have electorates in excess of 86,000, which is over the maximum permitted under the new arrangements. Therefore they have proposed a West Ham and Royal Docks constituency containing nine wards, including three (Beckton, Boleyn, and Royal Docks) from the existing East Ham constituency; a revised East Ham constituency that contains six Newham wards and two wards (Clementswood and Loxford) from Redbridge, which are currently in the Ilford South constituency; and a new Stratford constituency with five wards from the north west of Newham, together with the four southernmost Waltham Forest wards.
The full list of wards for the new proposed constituencies are:
West Ham & Royal Docks constituency:
- Beckton
- Boleyn
- Canning Town North
- Canning Town South
- Custom House
- Plaistow North
- Plaistow South
- Royal Docks
- West Ham
Stratford constituency:
- Forest Gate North
- Forest Gate South
- Green Street East
- Green Street West
- Stratford and New Town
- Cann Hall (WF)
- Cathall (WF)
- Grove Green (WF)
- Leyton (WF)
East Ham constituency:
- East Ham Central
- East Ham North
- East Ham South
- Little Ilford
- Manor Park
- Wall End
- Clementswood (R)
- Loxford (R)
The full Boundary Commission proposals for London are here: http://t.co/aoYHPPF
Unsurprisingly, an analysis by the Guardian shows that all three seats will be safe Labour. Based on voting in the 2010 election Labour’s majorities will be 20,382 in West Ham & Royal Docks, 20,032 in East Ham and 16,926 in Stratford. The only minor surprise is that the Lib Dems will be the main challengers in Stratford (by a small margin, it has to be said).
The Boundary Commission will be holding hearings on its proposals for this part of London at East Ham Town Hall on Thursday 27 – Friday 28 October 2011. More information is available at www.consultation.boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk
You can also write with comments to Boundary Commission for England, 35 Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BQ, or by email to london@bcommengland.x.gsi.gov.uk. The closing date for comments is 5 December 2011.
Declaring War on Council Crackdowns
24 AugLast week Newham Council announced a new ‘crackdown’ on slum landlords; today it announced a ‘war’ on guns and knives.
It seems barely a week goes by without some dramatic new initiative designed to tackle the latest menace, usually in the form of a ‘crackdown’ on whatever it is. This generates a few headlines in the local press before disappearing off the radar, to be replaced by the latest bee in the mayor’s bonnet.
I did a Google search on Newham and Crackdown, and it returned more than 85,000 results!
So, here are a few of the things Newham Council has ‘cracked down on’ in the past few years – and I didn’t get past page 3 of the Google results to compile it:
- Crime and anti-social behaviour in Plaistow
- Squatting
- Tenancy Fraud
- Illegal Cars
- Drugs
- Garden Waste
- Blue Badge Fraud
- Truancy
- Timeshare sales
- Boy racers
- Dangerous dogs
- Landlords flouting safety regulations
- Street gambling
- Illegal property conversions
- Unlicensed street trading
- Illegal skips
- Anti-social behaviour in Stratford
- Crime and Anti Social Behaviour in Romford Road
- Sale of crossbows
The thing is that with the exception of crossbows – an issue that lives solely in Sir Robin’s imagination – these are all important things that need to be dealt with. But by labelling every initiative a ‘crackdown’ you remove all meaning from the word. And you end up taking the same approach to everything – as the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Keep Taking the Tablets
18 AugMy look at Apple’s influence on the tablet market, on the company blog: tinyurl.com/3hz7rg5
Once again, enjoy!
Patently Absurd?
17 AugMy thoughts on Google’s acquisition of Motorola, on the company blog: http://bit.ly/qwUCIJ
Enjoy!
BBM, Social Media and the riots
9 Aug
My colleague Jonathan Akwue posted a great article yesterday about “the unlikely social network fuelling the riots” – not, as the Mail and others had so predictably claimed, Twitter and Facebook but BlackBerry Messaging.
It got wide pick-up across the media and was quoted in the Guardian and the New York Times, among others.
If you haven’t already done so, I suggest you read it: http://bit.ly/q1uNfg
Hacking the Opposition
11 JulLast week the “London Borough of Newhamgrad” blog site was hacked into and 3 months’ worth of recent posts were deleted. A headline was posted declaring “You’ve been hacked”.
For anyone not familiar with the Newhamgrad site, it describes itself as “an insight into the most dictatorial local authority known to Britain.” It is run by an anonymous group (I’m not one of them and have no idea who they are) who have enough connections inside Newham Dockside to come up with the occasional juicy tale, though mostly it’s bitchy political gossip.
Websites get hacked all the time, but this was no drive-by attack by a bored teenager – this was a deliberate and targeted act.
The intolerance of the Wales regime and its supporters for any kind of dissent or challenge is legendary in the borough – former councillor Alan Craig once described it as “Mugabe without the bullets“. The usual response to any criticism of Newham Labour is to label the opponent a Tory or a Trot (oddly, some people have difficulty distinguishing between the two) and expect that it is enough to damn them, but this surely represents a new low. Whoever did this went beyond politically illiterate abuse and committed an offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. Such offences are punishable by up to 12 months in jail.
Why would anyone want to risk that kind of penalty, just to remove some political tittle-tattle from the web?
The posts that were removed might have been a bit embarrassing for those concerned, but nothing fatal to anyone’s political career. And certainly nothing worth going to prison to suppress. They covered:
- Cllr Armarjit Singh’s voting for the West Ham stadium loan without declaring that he had received hospitality from the club
- Cllr Ayesha Chowdhury’s living in social housing despite owning (or having a significant interest in) a property portfolio that the site claims is valued at £2.4 million
- The recent Sunday Times allegations about payments by West Ham to an executive at the Olympic Park Legacy Company
- Lyn Brown MP’s hiring of an unpaid intern when she had previously campaigned for a ‘living wage for all’
- The Newham Campaign Forum – a fund into which all Labour councillors are said to pay a percentage of their allowances
- Cllr Unmesh Desai’s desire to succeed Sir Robin as Mayor * Plans to establish a ‘free’ school in Newham
- Cllr Richard Crawford’s portfolio of responsibilities
- Newham’s failure to investigate a Freedom of Information request that it said it would investigate
- Cllr Paul Schafer being referred to the council’s Monitoring Officer
- A Charity Commission decision not to investigate a local charity over its relationship with Newham Labour Party
On Thursday a notice appeared on the Newhamgrad site stating “This site has been the target of hacking attacks for weeks as well as been subjected to an attempt by spammers to ‘scrape’ IP addresses from our website and set up spiders to trawl it. Newhamgrad will be down until it carries out further investigations. We will be back.”
I hope they will, if only to prove that the regime’s critics will not be silenced so easily. And I hope that next time someone takes exception to something that appears on the site they deal with it via the comments section. Of course, if they think Newhamgrad goes too far they always have recourse to the law – but taking the law into your own hands is never the answer.
More Fun and Games in the Mayor’s Palace of Varieties
4 JulThe Sunday Times carried a detailed story yesterday alleging that West Ham United made payments totalling £20,000 into the bank account of Dionne Knight, a director of the Olympic Park Legacy Company. This arrangement was put in place by Ian Tompkins, who is the director of West Ham who masterminded its Olympic stadium bid and Ms. Knight’s lover. In a previous life Mr. Tompkins was director of Communications at Newham Council, where he worked closely with the Mayor, Sir Robin Wales.
West Ham claims that the payments were for ‘consultancy work’ helping to prepare procurement documents for contracts to convert the stadium after the Olympics and that, as far as they were aware, the OLPC had given permission for Knight to do the work. They also claim the payments were on behalf of the Legacy Stadium Partnership, the joint venture entity with Newham Council that will own the 250-year lease on the stadium; as the partnership didn’t have a bank account set up they paid Knight directly.
According to records at Companies House, Legacy Stadium Partnership LLP was first set up on 12 April 2011, but the Sunday Times says that the first payments were made to Ms Knight in the month before the OLPC made its decision in February. Quite how West Ham could have made payments on behalf of an entity that did not even exist is not explained.
Since the story emerged both Knight and Tompkins have been suspended from their jobs, pending internal investigations. Knight has admitted she hadn’t told OLPC about her work for West Ham.
The Sunday Times, perhaps predictably, has billed this as a “corruption scandal” and local anti-Labour blog London Borough of Newhamgrad uses the same word in its summary. That’s going too far, at least on the evidence to date.
But there are a number of fairly obvious questions that arise from all this about what Ms Knight knew about the status of the bids to take over the stadium and what she might have discussed at home with Mr Tompkins, and what he may then have communicated on to his employers at Upton Park to help them construct a winning tender. The OLPC says ‘chinese walls’ were in place and Ms Knight had no access to key information, or influence on the outcome. But as she was working for West Ham without their knowledge it is unclear how much of a grip OLPC had on the situation. One might also ask why West Ham, on behalf of the joint venture, felt it necessary to hire a consultant to work on stadium conversion procurements before it knew the outcome of the OLPC process and why it thought there would be no conflict of interest in hiring an OLPC executive to do it while the bidding process was ongoing.
Of course Newham residents will have an interest in finding out the answers to these questions, as we are the ones on the hook for the £40 million loan being made to the Legacy Stadium Partnership (to the principle benefit of West Ham United FC), should the whole thing go horribly wrong. And if the 20 grand paid to Ms Knight was on behalf of LSP, as WHU say, half of it is our money – for which the Mayor is accountable.
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