A small gesture of solidarity from West Ham Labour at last week’s Christmas quiz night.
Tag Archives: newham
Shuffling the pack
14 Dec
Sir Robin has written to councillors to announce some changes to his team of ‘mayoral advisors’, including a couple of additions to the already bulging executive payroll.
Cllr Ellie Robinson (Forest Gate North) is taking over responsibility for Commercial Opportunities, leading “work to make the Council more commercial, to ensure we have a strong income stream to mitigate the loss of government funding.” This probably means resurrecting the mayor’s crass MoneyWorks payday loans idea, flagged in the 2014 manifesto but largely forgotten since. The other money-spinning manifesto promise, a kind of BrightHouse competitor to flog white goods to the poor on the never-never, has also vanished from sight. Perhaps Ellie will be tasked with reviving that too.
Having passed over the commercial brief, Cllr Forhad Hussain (Plaistow North) will be able to spend more time with Ken Clark, working on ‘Community Neighbourhoods.’ Lucky man.
Ellie’s previous role as lead for OneSource, the partnership with Havering council to share back office services, will be taken up by deputy mayor, Cllr Lester Hudson (Wall End). According to Sir Robin, this “will enable us to better harness the synergies between strategic and operational finance work.” Beings as the perennially useless “Three Jobs” is already cabinet lead for finance AND he chairs the audit board AND he chairs the investment and accounts committee, this further consolidation of financial responsibility looks like a governance disaster waiting to happen.
Cllr David Christie (Beckton) gets responsibility for the “Newham 2020 transformation programme” and the “reconfiguring of our services.” Which will make him the public face of everything that goes wrong in local public services for the next five years.
Joining the ’special responsibility allowance’ gravy train for the first time are Cllrs Julianne Marriott (East Ham Central) and Tonii Wilson (Beckton).
Cllr Wilson will be taking Ellie Robinson’s seat on the OneSource board. With 14 previous directorships – all at companies which are now dissolved – she brings a wealth of boardroom experience.
Cllr Marriott is a surprise addition to the team. As recently as last June she was one of nine councillors excluded by the mayor from a budget pow-wow at a swanky hotel in Chigwell. But time (and money, no doubt) heals all wounds. Like Forhad Hussain she will be spending a lot of time with Ken Clark in her new role. The mayor assures councillors that her appointment to the Regeneration brief “will give us more capacity to ensure we are delivering regeneration that genuinely transforms people’s lives.” Perhaps by scheduling extra buses to ship them out of town before their homes are bulldozed to make way for yet another ‘luxury development’?
Residents interested in finding out what any of these ‘jobs’ actually entails or what councillors will be doing to prove they are worth their additional allowances will be out of luck. There won’t be anything resembling a job description on the website for months. And even then nothing by way of performance targets. Luckily for our mayoral advisors, if there are no targets they can’t miss them. Trebles all round!
Newham Nativity
14 Dec
The phantom leafleter of Forest Gate struck again on Saturday evening, delivering some seasonal cheer.
Previous examples of the phantom’s work:
Three and out
10 Dec
Cllr Khan was once very close to the mayor
Boleyn councillor Obaid Khan has been suspended by the Labour party.
That makes three local councillors currently on the naughty step.
I haven’t seen the email that was sent to councillors about this, but I understand Cllr Khan’s suspension relates to two separate incidents.
One involves the way he allegedly spoke to a councillor from Barking & Dagenham at an event. The other was a bit of argy-bargy at the Boleyn by-election count where he squared up to Cllr Forhad Hussain. Unfortunately for Khan, this was witnessed by ‘the leadership’, who wasted no time in reporting the matter to higher powers.
One might reasonably ask why either of these ‘incidents’ justifies a councillor’s suspension, when similar events involving the mayor (with the Focus E15 mums), Cllr Ian Corbett (to a receptionist at East Ham town hall) and Cllr Ken Clark (to Cllr Noor at this year’s Newham Show) did not. The Mayor and Cllr Corbett were found guilty by the Standards Committee of breaching the code of conduct, but the Labour party did nothing to reprimand them. Calls to discipline Ken Clark have been ignored.
Quite perplexing.
Except that Obaid Khan was instrumental in thwarting the leadership’s plan to have Cllr Hanif Abdulmuhit’s wife, Aisha Siddiqah, selected as the party’s candidate in the Boleyn by-election. He also kicked up a fuss about the shenanigans that resulted in Femi Alese being elected chair of East Ham Labour party. And, to top it all off, he’s joined the pro-Corbyn ‘Momentum’ group. Sir Robin, you will remember, was one of the 4.5% that backed Liz Kendall for the leadership.
Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold.
Boleyn result
4 Dec
Image via @BritainElects
Congratulations to Veronica Oakeshott, the successful Labour candidate, and commiserations to the rest.
A big Labour win was never in doubt, but it is still surprising to see the party increasing its share of the vote, albeit on a very low turnout – just 21% of electors made it to the polls.
But the bigger surprise is the collapse of the Tory vote – down more than 12 percentage points – and the Liberals coming (a very distant) second. Bear in mind that in the 2014 general election the LibDems lost their deposits in both Newham seats and couldn’t even find a paper candidate to put up in the Stratford by-election.
The Greens also did a little better than their 2014 result would have suggested – they polled around 3% in East Ham. I think they’ll be reasonably pleased.
But for UKIP, this is a truly dismal result – though one that will hearten the rest of us. The hard right has never amounted to much in Newham and this continues that happy record.
More cuts, less scrutiny
23 Nov
The mayor’s vision for scrutiny in Newham
Every cloud has a silver lining and Sir Robin Wales has found a very shiny benefit to the £50 million of cuts he has to implement: the excuse to slash funding for Scrutiny.
The seven scrutiny committees, which cover all aspects of the council’s activities, from health to crime & disorder, are now supported by a single officer.
As a consequence, the number of scrutiny meetings has been severely curtailed. Some committees, including the Health and Social Care Scrutiny Commission, haven’t held a public hearing since June. This is despite the many pressing health issues facing the borough, fundamental changes in the funding and delivery of Adult Social Care and serious concerns over the quality of services delivered by our local hospitals.
Councillors who actually want to do the only real job they were elected for – scrutinising the executive and holding the mayor to pubic account for his decisions – are becoming increasingly frustrated. The lack of support means things that members want to look at have to be ‘prioritised’ as part of an overall ‘work programme’- a mysterious process that is managed by the chair of overview & scrutiny, Tony McAlmont. As Cllr McAlmont owes his position and the significant ‘special responsibility allowance’ that goes along with it to the mayor, his view of ‘priorities’ may not be entirely independent.
Even when work gets ‘prioritised’ it has become nigh on impossible for committee chairs to schedule public meetings. The mayor’s new, legally dubious ‘scrutiny protocol’ (which councillors obediently nodded through in September) requires all requests for witnesses to be made via the mayor’s office, with at least 15 working days notice. The mayor then gets to decide if the requested council officer or Executive member will attend or provide only written answers. Witnesses can suddenly become ‘unavailable’ at very short notice, or substituted with someone of the mayor’s own choosing, rendering the hearing pointless.
One scrutiny commission chair has written to the council’s chief executive and Cllr McAlmont to express their concern:
We are all trying very hard in scrutiny to work within the new regime, forced upon us by government cuts, but I feel that we are being blocked at every turn. When scrutiny of the council’s business is now more important than ever, our capacity to do our work is very constrained through lack of resources.
I must urge you to […] do everything in your power to support scrutiny before we lose all but the statutory minimum of functions.
Nothing will come it. Sir Robin hates scrutiny and holds the entire process in contempt.
At last week’s Cabinet he threw his toys out of the pram when a scrutiny report suggested his pet ‘Every Child A Musician’ programme might have some issues with variable quality in delivery. He blasted the committee for the ‘markedly lower quality’ of their research (compared to well-funded, full-time professional academic researchers he had previously paid for!) and rejected out of hand a recommendation that the aims, objectives and expected outcomes of the programme be reviewed, saying this would be a waste of money.
If Kim Bromley-Derry and Tony McAlmont want to keep their jobs they’ll say nothing – and do even less. For the mayor, defunding scrutiny is a dream come true.
A bluffer’s guide to Boleyn
9 Nov
History
Boleyn ward came into existence in 2002, following a major reorganisation of boundaries in Newham, which reduced the number of wards from 24 to 20. The newly created Boleyn ward was made up from bits of the old Bemersyde, Castle, Central, Greatfield and Plaistow wards.
Greatfield ward, from which the southern part of Boleyn comes, was once a stronghold of the Residents & Ratepayers. They held the ward at every election from 1968 to 1982, when the SDP-Liberal Alliance won. Labour took all three seats in 1986, but lost two of them in 1990 to the Conservatives. The ward went back to Labour in 1994 and stayed that way.
The northern part of Boleyn mostly comes from Castle ward, where Sir Robin Wales first cut his teeth in Newham politics. He was elected there, as plain old ‘Robert A Wales’, in 1982. He replaced ‘Margaret D Brown’, who is better known these days as councillor Dianne Walls OBE.
Although Respect came close to causing an upset in 2006 Labour has won Boleyn ward at every election since it came into existence.
At the 2014 elections there were 9,689 voters on the electoral roll in the ward. Turnout was 44% – slightly above the Newham average – and the three Labour candidates cruised home.
| Candidate | Party | Votes |
|---|---|---|
| Obaid Khan | Labour | 2658 |
| Charity Fiberesima | Labour | 2505 |
| Harvinder Singh Virdee | Labour | 2425 |
| Jamal Uddin | Conservative | 869 |
| Yasir Asif | Conservative | 823 |
| Yaseen Farmer | Conservative | 756 |
| Ben Robinson | Trade Unionist & Socialist Coalition | 342 |
| Barbara Chukwurah | Christian Peoples Alliance | 270 |
| Stephen Williamson | Christian Peoples Alliance | 259 |
Population & Demographics*
Population:
- Total: 15,932
- Male: 53%
- Female: 47%
- Average age (mean): 31
- Median age: 29
Households:
- Total: 4,928
- Avg HH size: 3
- One-person HHs: 24%
- Deprived HHs: 77%
- Single deprivation: 37%
- Multiple deprivation: 40%
- Owner-occupied: 42%
- Private rent: 31%
- Social rent: 26%
- Overcrowded HHs: 33%
Religion:
- Christian: 35%
- Hindu: 10%
- Muslim: 40%
- Other: 3%
- No religion/not stated: 12%
Ethnicity:
- White British: 13%
- Other white: 9%
- Asian/British Asian: 55%
- Black/Black British: 16%
- Mixed/multiple: 4%
- Arab/other: 4%
Place of birth:
- Born in UK: 46%
- Born in EU (ex. UK): 8%
- Born other countries: 47%
Time in the UK:
- In the UK less than 5 years: 35%
- In the UK 5 – 9 years: 20%
- In the UK 10 years or more: 45%
Economic activity (16-74 yr olds)
- Economically active: 49%
- In employment: 32%
- Self-employed: 7%
- Looking for work: 9%
- Economically inactive: 51%
- Retired: 23%
- Looking after home/family: 7%
- Long-term sick/disabled: 14%
- Other: 5%
- Students: 3%
* Based on 2011 Census. Figures may not sum due to rounding.
2015 candidates
Labour’s Veronica Oakeshott is a campaigner for Save the Children UK. She has an MA in political campaigning and was the subject of a brief profile in the Newham Recorder in 2011.
Emmanuel Finndoro-Obasi is chairman (sic) of the East Ham Conservative Association. In the 2014 local elections he stood as one of his party’s candidates in Beckton, finishing sixth.
David Mears was UKIP’s candidate for mayor in 2014, when he came third with just over 6% of the vote. Three months later he stood as the party’s candidate in the Beckton by-election and again he came third, this time with 11%.
Diane Ofori is an independent film and TV producer. Her showreel on YouTube includes an election broadcast for the Christian Party.
Green party candidate Frankie-Rose Taylor describes herself in her Twitter bio as a ’22 year old actor, feminist and sunshine child.’ She is a leading member of the BoleynDev100 campaign, which is calling for 100% social housing on the Boleyn Ground site, which will be redeveloped after West Ham United move out next summer.
Sheree Miller is the Liberal Democrats’ candidate. She lives in Plaistow and works as a Customer Experience Manager at the Barbican Centre.
The issues
Housing. Housing. Housing.
Look at the map. The Boleyn Ground stands at the heart of the ward. The 850 ‘luxury homes’ to be built there will have a huge impact on the character of the area. Even the small number of allegedly ‘affordable’ shared ownership homes will be far beyond the reach of local people. Labour will claim it’s pushing hard to get a better deal from Gailiard Homes, the developers, and will cite the last minute ‘offer’ (details unspecified) that led to the strategic planning committee deferring its decision last month.
But their opponents will hammer the council’s dismal record of failing to stand up to greedy developers. And the fact that the only homes Newham is building itself, via its Red Door Ventures business, are for private rent – at market rates ‘starting at’ £1500 a month for a 2-bed flat.
Parachutes
3 NovMore shenanigans in Sir Robin’s personal fiefdom – East Ham constituency Labour party. And another email to Stephen Timms from unhappy members.
We are writing to you in relation to the recent election of the Chair of East Ham CLP … in our capacities as GC delegates, local branch chairs and Councillors. We are concerned that through a combination of undue influence from our local Mayor Sir Robin Wales, illegitimate nominations and a lack of transparency by some members managing and organising the AGM election i.e. Newham Campaign Organiser Carl Morris and Cllr Forhad Hussain from West Ham CLP, an unfair election process for the position of Chair has taken place.
The story starts back in August, when Boleyn councillor Obaid Khan applied to join the Fabian Society. He received an email back from Giles Wright, the national membership secretary, telling him
The Newham Fabian branch is no longer active but there is a flourishing branch based in Tower Hamlets.
So it was a surprise to find only a month later, at the East Ham AGM, that the defunct Newham branch of the Fabian Society had nominated someone for chair. The lucky man was Femi Alese, chair of Newham’s Local Campaign Forum. Mr Alese was not a member of East Ham’s general committee and this was his only nomination. Unlike the other two candidates, not a single local ward party had put him forward.
But a lack of member support wasn’t going to get in the way of Sir Robin having his place man elected. The outgoing chair, former councillor Paul Brickell, ruled the nomination valid and voting went ahead.
As the email to Stephen Timms continues:
the AGM was … attended by a very large number of (unconfirmed) GC delegates, totalling 60 people who voted in the CLP election. Many of these people were unfamiliar to the active local membership. Many of whom clearly (and some of whom informally told us) that they were there at the behest of Sir Robin who was in attendance and very present with his associates Cllr Unmesh Desai, Cllr Ken Clark, Cllr Richard Crawford, Cllr Lester Hudson at the front door of the meeting. Given the context and his reputation, some could consider this ‘badgering’ voters.
…
Femi Alese … appears to have been ‘parachuted’ into the role by Sir Robin et al. Carl Morris and Cllr Forhad Hussain distributed the voting slips amongst GC and non-GC members. Sir Robin’s associates planned it in such a way that they sat close to the GC members to … see who they were voting for and then tell them who to vote for. This conduct, in the context gives the impression to many members that Sir Robin unduly influenced the meeting and it was not in effect a secret ballot.
Angry members have also written individually to the CLP secretary, Mariam Dawood, asking for minutes of the meeting and a list of those who attended, with details of who they were representing. Unsurprisingly, these requests have so far been rebuffed.
There are calls for an investigation and for the election to be re-run. I doubt these will meet with any greater success.
The cost of one-party councils
20 OctCouncillor John Gray has blogged about his response to the Electoral Reform Society’s report “The Cost of One-Party Councils: Lack of Electoral Accountability and public procurement corruption”. While he takes issue with one or two of the claims made by the ERS, he is a clear supporter of electoral reform for local authorities.
Most interesting is the final paragraph. This, I think, reflects his experiences over the past five years as a backbench member of the most one-party council of them all:
Finally, I think just as important as electoral reform, local government needs structural and legislative reform. Such as making the role of scrutiny committees much more robust and truly independent of the Executive; beefing up Standard Boards; time limits on Council leaders; stopping backbench Councillors being refused information by Chief officers for no substantiated reasons; being open and transparent and stop restricting information to the public or press unless absolutely necessary; making officers’ hospitality register a public document; better guidance from national political organisations on the role of elected members as being champions of their constituents and holding the Executive to account. Finally, we should reintroduce powers to surcharge individual Councillors who act without due care or legal authority with public money.
Good stuff.
Super diversity in Plaistow
14 Oct
Diversity and cohesion in Britain’s most mixed community – John McDermott writing in the Financial Times about Plaistow
“If London is the most diverse city in the world, and Plaistow is the most diverse part of the city, Plaistow might be the most diverse place in the world,” says Forhad Hussain, a local councillor. When Hussain came to the area in 1983 with his Bangladeshi-born parents, this part of the city was mostly white and working-class, home to dockers and their families who had stayed put as Plaistow was rebuilt after the devastation wrought by the Blitz.
A few St George’s crosses can still be spotted in the windows of terraced houses or tower blocks, but the English-born population is on the wane. As late as 2001, 62.2 per cent of Plaistow residents were born in England, according to census data provided by Newham council. A decade later, that share had fallen to 47.3 per cent.
Well worth a read.
forestgatedotnet 