Newham Labour activists (mostly councillors, if you look closely) have been out, pounding the pavements, ahead of May’s London mayoral and assembly elections. And of course they’ve been posting pictures of themselves all over Twitter and Facebook.
But one very prominent local member is conspicuous by his absence.
Where’s Robin?
The somewhat delayed annual meeting of the Newham Co-operative Party took place earlier this week.
This almost completely dormant body is significant because it is able to appoint delegates to the General Committee and Executive Committee of both constituency Labour parties in the borough.
It gives Sir Robin Wales and his cronies a clear route to controlling the constituency parties without the need to pay any attention to the party affiliate that nominated them or local members.
With signs of growing resistance within the previously ultra-loyal East Ham Labour party and West Ham showing an alarming capacity for independent thought – they nominated Jeremy Corbyn for leader, for heaven’s sake! – this is proving to be a safer route for the mayor as he seeks to maintain his grip on power.
Cllr Clive Furness helpfully turned up on the night with a printed slate of candidates – shown above – in case the hard-of-thinking couldn’t remember who they were supposed to be voting for.
There were 44 “co-operators” present and in the contested elections the Walesite candidates all achieved a remarkably similar 27 votes!
However, we are facing a huge financial challenge with massive government cuts. I, along with many members of my executive, have been visiting party members to ask what they think our response should be. These visits will continue…
one thing which has become clear through our member visits is that we have not explained sufficiently well just how radical and successful we are as a Council.So, starting this week I will be writing a regular blog – you can find it www.newhamlabour.co.uk/blog. Do please visit and read it.
Labour party members in Manor Park had to cancel their Christmas social at short notice last week because the mayor couldn’t attend.
The ward party chair sent round an apologetic email, explaining that the social couldn’t go ahead because of Labour party “rules”:
I have to inform you, regretfully, that after an emergency meeting, the Manor Park Social Event for next week (17th), has been cancelled.
This is due to three rules: firstly, one of our guests cannot attend. (If our Mayor cannot attend then we cannot proceed with the social). Secondly, branches are not allowed to officially socialize as part of the Labour Party, only CLP. Finally, no guests outside of Newham are allowed to be invited to a Labour Party social event and there was some doubt about the music and choir at a Labour Party event.
This is very disappointing, as it was discussed and agreed at our branch meeting three weeks ago.
However, I have asked the Chair of East Ham CLP if we can have a social event in 2016 for all of East Ham branches and this can go ahead. So we can look forward to this event.
I am very sorry for any inconvenience this cancellation may have caused.
My sincere apologies.
Anyone searching the Labour party rule book will, of course, come away empty-handed. There are no such rules. It is straightforwardly an attempt to control and stop East Ham members meeting up and working together ahead of the trigger ballot to confirm Sir Robin, yet again, as the mayoral candidate. Divide and rule!
The ward chair was instructed to cancel the event, but maybe she should have seen it coming. She is also East Ham’s social secretary and has previously complained to the CLP secretary, Mariam Dawood, about the impossibility of organising activities without access to the full list of party members.
These shenanigans are an interesting contrast to the West Ham party, which has held many events open to all Labour supporters, mostly without the mayor. Some have included non-Newham guests – and even non-Labour people (disclosure: I’ve been to a couple).
Members in East Ham ought to be asking themselves about the motives of the people running their local party. Whose interests are they looking after?
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!
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.
More 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 mayor has received a complaint about the behaviour of Cllr Ken Clark at this year’s Newham Show.
The email contains considerable detail about the incident, in which Cllr Clark swore violently and at some length at Ahmed Noor in front of other councillors and members of the public. It claims that Cllr Clark’s actions have bought both the council and the Labour party into disrepute. It concludes:
I request you start an independent enquiry and the Standards Committee considering (sic) the nature of the misconduct by Cllr Clark
There is a procedure for handling complaints against elected members. It is described on the council website and it is set out formally in Part 2, article 9 of the council’s constitution:
The Monitoring Officer shall be the Proper Officer to receive complaints of failure to comply with the Code of Conduct…
The Monitoring Officer shall, after consultation with the Independent Person(s), determine whether a complaint merits formal investigation and arrange such investigation.
If there’s an investigation it’s carried out by the Standards Advisory Committee. Not the mayor. In fact the constitution explicitly excludes him from membership of the committee.
So, even setting aside any concerns about a conflict of interest because of his close working relationship with Ken Clark, Sir Robin only had two options when he received the email: he could have told the complainant that he was not the right person to deal with the matter, and that they needed to write to the Monitoring Officer directly; or he could have passed the matter to the Monitoring Officer, telling the complainant that this was what he’d done.
But of course the rules don’t apply to the mayor and he did neither of those things. Instead, this was his reply:
I am writing to clarify a few things following receipt of your email. Just a couple of questions:
- You provide a considerable amount of detail which raises a number of questions. Given the detail I assume you were present and I need a few questions answered. Could you please provide me with contact details, telephone, address etc., so that I can arrange to meet you in person and discuss these questions.
- I note that you appear to have used a Council distribution group for all members of the Council which is only available through the Council’s email system. I presume that you got this from a councillor or perhaps a member of staff? If you could provide me with their details I can have a chat with them about the issues.
- Just to clarify, you make several references to the Newham Labour Party but I do not believe you are yourself a member. Is that correct? Perhaps you are a member in another Borough?
A quick response so we can meet in the very near future would be very helpful.
Regards,
Robin Wales
There’s no acknowledgement of the seriousness of the allegation, no suggestion that this is matter that needs to be put through the proper channels. Just a bullying and sinister tone. How do you suppose that ‘chat’ with whoever provided the email addresses would go?
Replying to Sir Robin the complainant says:
I am very much puzzled as to why you were far more eager to know my background instead of starting the investigation thoroughly against Councillor Ken Clark
Well, they might be puzzled, but I’m not.
Sir Robin holds the code of conduct and the Standards Committee in absolute contempt. When he was investigated by the Standards Committee last year he refused to even acknowledge the investigation, much less provide any evidence. He and his chums are untouchable. They can behave as they like, without fear of the consequences.
And as we see in this case, he’d much rather pursue the complainant than any complaint.
“If you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is – it’s you.”
The mayor has been on week-long trip to China with council chief executive Kim Bromley-Derry, paid for by Chinese developer ABP, and now he’s looking at investing in its Royal Albert Dock project.
The Newham Recorder asked him about the plans:
“We’re always looking at opportunities to invest in projects,” he said.
“…we will always look at opportunities to make money out of projects.
“Each project is judged on its merits of course, but if we can make money and there was an opportunity we’ll do it.”
Sadly this is not the first time the mayor has decided to use public money to play ‘Investment Bankers’ after being sold a dodgy business plan by a man in a shiny suit.
Back in 2012 the London Pleasure Gardens was, according to one of its directors
“going to be one of the coolest places to watch live sports, chill out and catch some amazing events.
“This isn’t just a commercial proposition – we want to be a whole new cultural hub for London and beyond.”
It turned out to be a fiasco that cost Newham council taxpayers close to £5 million for the five weeks it was open.
The company was bankrolled by a £3.3 million loan from the council, plus a further £800,000 because of interest and costs. The council also ended up paying £444,000 to Deloitte for administrators’ fees (graciously discounted from the £1 million they actually racked up) after the business went bust.
Unable to accept the reality of the situation a Newham council spokeswoman insisted:
“The council is continuing to discuss the future use of the site with relevant parties and remains confident that we will see a return on our investment.”
That, of course, never happened.
And awkward questions about what happened to the money, why what was delivered by LPG was so far from what was promised and the evidently hopeless quality of the due diligence carried out by council officers were never even asked by our feeble and supine councillors, much less addressed.
With £40 million of our money on the line with the Olympic stadium ‘loan’ and another £5 million already earmarked for ‘retail opportunities’ in the Queen Elizabeth Park councillors should be wary of indulging the mayor’s next investment fantasy.
Hands up if you think you’re underpaid on £81,000 a year (photo: WorldSkills)
by Iain Aitch
‘The geezer is underpaid’ is not a phrase you expect to hear from the Deputy Mayor of a Labour council when talking about his boss. You expect it even less when his boss, Newham Mayor Sir Robin Wales, draws allowances of £81,029 per-annum and is asking Council Tax-payers where £50m of cuts should be made.
Yet these are the words that came from the mouth of Councillor Lester Hudson at Wednesday evening’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee (OSC) at East Ham Town Hall. Hudson said he was speaking on behalf of the Mayor as he attempted to justify how and why Wales should get a £10,858 pay rise, in the shape of a pension paid for solely by Newham residents.
Once tax breaks were taken into account this would leave the Mayor with a council tax-funded income of £96,231. This is more than four-times the mean Newham salary that other councillors reported to the meeting. Hudson was adamant that Wales, full-timers and those who receive Special Responsibility Allowances (SRA) should receive a hefty 13.4% pension contribution from residents. The contribution from Wales and councillors? Zero.
The meeting was discussing these pensions because the issue had been called in to the OSC by councillors concerned at just how this £600,000 spend over three years would make them look. Councillors Dianne Walls, Seyi Akiwowo and Kay Scoresby asked how this would appear to residents on the doorstep come election time, but Councillors Hudson, McAlmont, Vaughan and Noor argued that MPs get a generous pension, so why shouldn’t they? Vaughan asserted that they were as good as MPs; ironically, Noor decided they were better, even though it appeared that he did not know quite how pensions worked.
Several members struggled with the concept that they were paid allowances for duties rather than actually being employees of Newham Council. Some had to be reminded more than once. They still remained puzzled. Hudson didn’t help by constantly referring to being an employee, even when he was regaling the meeting with tales of his Cambridge degree, his past as an accountant and how he could earn more elsewhere were it not for his selfless dedication to public service.
If there was a The Thick of It moment during the OSC it was when the big white book of meeting rules was pulled out and dusted off. Newham’s council meetings and committees are not places where dissent is a common occurrence and suddenly there was some. Computer says no.
The chair, Councillor Anthony McAlmont, didn’t know quite what to do. The rule book was consulted. But it was clear there was more than a simple problem of pensions or procedure at play. The room was divided along gender lines, with Councillors Rokhsana Fiaz and Susan Masters joining the dissent. Female councillors spoke about the impact of austerity, the impact on residents and the probable illegality of the scheme being proposed. Male councillors spoke about how selfless they were and how much they were worth to the public.
In tense exchanges, issues of childcare, meeting times and parental leave were raised by the women. Councillor Hudson expressed an opinion that those issues had already been discussed at Labour Group. Councillor Akiwowo face-palmed at this point. Fiaz rolled her eyes. Walls pointed out that no such discussion had occurred. Akiwowo came out fighting and impressed mightily. She had already rubbished the idea that huge pensions would attract a younger, more diverse set of councillors. “I’m not 55 and I am pretty diverse,” she said. But the point was lost on the old guard in the chamber. Hudson, unable to vote, left the room stating that he hoped ‘common sense would prevail’ to yet more eye-rolling, astonishment and opprobrium.
At the meeting’s conclusion, all five women voted to recommend that the Mayor reconsider the pension scheme. All three men voted to say all was fine and dandy and when do the payments start?
The final decision as to whether to spend the £600,000 on pensions now rests with the Mayor. At a time when community centres are being closed, childcare facilities cut and repairs put off it would surely be embarrassing, even for this Mayor, to rub Newham residents’ faces in it, wouldn’t it? Let us see.
Whatever the decision, it does now seem that the split within Newham Labour’s ranks is becoming visible. It was seemingly bubbling under even before the ink was dry on the ballot papers at the last council election, but now it is out in the open. We may finally have an opposition sitting in the council chamber, only not where anyone would have expected to find them, least of all Sir Robin.
Iain Aitch is an author and journalist who lives in Newham. He has written for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and Financial Times.
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