Tag Archives: Terry Paul

Paul and Beckles quit

16 May

Cllrs Terry Paul and James Beckles

Before the mayor had the chance to announce her new executive team two members of her previous cabinet announced their decisions to stand down.

First was Cllr Terry Paul

It’s been an honour to serve the residents of Newham since 2018 as the Cabinet Member for Finance and Corporate Services, but with regret, I have declined the offer of a different role in Cabinet.

I’m proud to have restored Newham’s financial sustainability and improved its governance and reputation. I have left Newham’s finances in a better place than when I found them, and Newham is in the best financial position to face the challenges of the future.

Over the last four years there are many achievements I’m proud of, but my personal highlights were:

  1. The Covid-19 response: Newham spent £30m keeping services going and protecting residents. This was meaningful to me as I had to shield during the early stages of the pandemic;
  2. The London Living Wage was given to 700 care workers across Newham to the London Living Wage, making sure that those caring for our most vulnerable residents were rewarded fairly for their work. Thanks to this, we were also able to sign up to UNISON’s Ethical Care Charter.
  3. Restructuring the Council finances to provide more money for services: through more efficient use of council funds, we found ways to improve funding for Young People, Children & Adult services, and libraries.
  4. Taking on the banks: Newham renegotiated better terms on its disastrous LOBO loans of circa £435m, reducing our interest payments to the banks and freeing up money for council services.
  5. Addressed the need for improved temporary accommodation in Newham, developing a Temporary Accommodation Housing Programme over 18 months to provide quality homes for people in urgent need.

I’d like to thank my Cabinet and council colleagues for their commitment to making Newham a better place. No one goes into local politics without a desire to improve their local area, and that is apparent in the work all my fellow councilors do for their communities.

It’s a privilege to have the trust of Stratford’s voters, and I intend to continue working hard and speaking up strongly for them over the next four years.

The digital ink was barely dry before Cllr James Beckles announced that he too was returning to the back benches:

After nearly 3 and a half years in the cabinet, I will be stepping down as the Cabinet Member for Crime and Community Safety. It has been a privilege to serve the people of Newham leading a front-line service that has positively impacted the lives of many of our residents.

I’m proud of a number of things that have been accomplished in my three years including:

  • Launching Newham Council’s Women’s Night Safety Charter with Stratford Business Crime Reduction Partnership.
  • Maintaining a council-funded Met police team, able to respond to council priorities.
  • The Days of Action every six weeks tackling ward-based anti-social behaviour.
  • Newham’ Trading Standards, Licensing, and Regulatory Services team winning a National Hero Award from the Chartered Institute of Trading Standards for their rigorous inspection work during the pandemic.
  • Launching our council’s Modern Day Slavery Strategy.
  • Co-ordinated work with the Met Police to disrupt and arrest drug dealers in Stratford Park.
  • A Violence and Vulnerability Reduction Action Plan commended by the Mayor of London’s Violence Reduction Unit.

All this could not have been achieved without the dedication and hard work of council officers who are the backbone of our organisation and turn our political ideas into reality.

I’m looking forward to the new term and working for the people of Custom House, who have put their trust and votes in me and my ward colleagues.

Reaction from across Labour’s political spectrum was swift and consistent.

Rita Chadha, recently elected in Canning Town North, said on Twitter

 

Known @Terrympaul for more than 20 years, not always agreed, but you would be hard pressed to find a better representative and public servant. A big loss to the cabinet in Newham

 

Former councillor Daniel Blaney, very much from the left of the party, tweeted

 

Unbelievable! Me & Terry are on different sides when it comes to Labour Party NEC elections and argue all the time, but he delivered progressive policies like London Living Wage for careworkers. This is disappointing news.

To misquote Oscar Wilde, “To lose one cabinet member, Ms Fiaz, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.”

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Repairs and Maintenance

15 Jan

This morning Newham Council published the papers for its extraordinary meeting next week on the mismanagement of the repairs and maintenance service.

Anyone who takes the trouble to read the report will be appalled by the scale of financial and project mis-management, which has resulted in a loss of AT LEAST £8.78 million.

The vast majority of this was in the RMS Highways Services, in particular after it started to undertake the work on the Council’s Keep Newham Moving programme in early 2016. Poor practice was also found in other areas, but RMS was – overall – financially viable; the £8.78M overspend was caused by using external contractors to deliver the Keep Newham Moving programme at a higher cost than the price agreed with RMS.

Keep Newham Moving was one of the previous mayor’s flagship initiatives, supposedly a ‘prudent investment’ of the council’s resources to improve the lives of residents. It was a ten year, £100million capital programme to “improve the quality of roads, footways and street lighting in Newham…”

The council decided to put the work through RMS, on the grounds that this would deliver “efficiencies of around 25-30% as compared to the previous contractor.”

Clearly, this was a risk, but it was agreed that a Risk Register (a common tool in project management) would be compiled with the Cabinet Member for Building Communities, Public Affairs, Planning and Regeneration (Cllr Ken Clark) and the Mayoral Adviser for Environment & Leisure (Ian Corbett, who is no longer a councillor). This would be monitored and updated throughout the life of the project.

So £100 million was allocated to RMS despite there being no evidence they could manage the work and no serious assessment of how they could outbid Conways by 30%. It turned out they couldn’t:

[The] significant overspend of £8.78m was a result of RMS under-pricing its Keep Newham Moving Highways activity and then failing to manage contractor costs resulting in increased capital costs to that originally budgeted for. This was a very serious and significant mismanagement of public money. None of the investigations found sufficient evidence of criminal activity to bring proceedings but the Council remains willing to consider any further evidence brought to its attention.

The report describes how RMS managers avoided proper financial controls by splitting invoices so they fell below the procurement threshold and within the level of authority granted under the Scheme of Delegation. The accounts were seriously misrepresented, so that it appeared RMS was making a profit, when in fact it was running a substantial loss.

It is worth noting that although RMS was an in-house service it was being considered for outsourcing under the previous administration’s Small Business Programme or (CSSB, as it was known). This programme looked to outsource Council services into Council-owned companies.

RMS operated with significant autonomy over the management of its accounts, payments to staff and contracting with external businesses ostensibly for it to work on a “commercial” basis as part of Mayor Wales’s CSSB outsourcing programme.

Whether their ability to operate in this fashion was explicitly supported or encouraged by very senior officers and by a Mayor / Cabinet member decision or whether it simply evolved through weak internal controls is unknown. It is also possible that this was an element of the CSSB outsourcing programme encouraging services to begin to operate with a more commercial mind set as they were progressing towards outsourcing.

On 2 February 2017, approval was given by Mayor Wales to outsource RMS following an options appraisal. This was later suspended and RMS didn’t rejoin the programme. Rokhsana Fiaz abolished the CSSB programme following her election in May 2018.

Timeline

  • 2011 RMS was brought in-house. It carried out repairs to Newham’s housing stock. 
  • 2014 (Oct) RMS started taking on highways work from external company Conways on a two year pilot (no evidence of evaluation/review of pilot being carried out)
  • 2016 (Feb) Cabinet commits to (mainly) borrow £100m to ‘Keep Newham Moving’ delivered by RMS which it states is 25/30% cheaper than Conways. Cllr Clark and Corbett are lead members and named as agreeing and monitoring risk register (this is before two year pilot due to end)
  • 2016 to 2018 RMS is unable to deliver work itself and is subcontracting out work resulting in it being charged more than they were receiving per job (and definitely not making 25/30% savings)
  • 2017 RMS misrepresents 2016/17 accounts
  • 2017 (June) Whistleblowers make allegations, resulting in an internal investigation
  • 2017 (July) External auditors (Mazaars) appointed
  • 2017 (Aug and Dec) Mazaars reports does not find any criminal fraud
  • 2018 (Jan) QC advises insufficient evidence to meet criminal fraud
  • 2017/18 RMS overspent by £8.748m in 2017/18 accounts (in highways contracts; housing repairs is profitable)

So, where in all of this was the Audit Board?

In the 2017/18 financial year RMS was only discussed once. As appendix 1 (Chronology) makes clear, requests by councillors for an update were regularly fobbed off. Finally, inNovember 2017

Briefing and documents presented by internal Audit in closed session [of the Audit Board]. Chair LH [Lester Hudson] declined requests for further discussion at meeting. Concerns raised and recorded in minutes by Cllr’s Paul and Fiaz that item could not be debated

Lester Hudson was both Cabinet member for Finance and, simultaneously, chair of audit board. This is generally not regarded as best practice in local government finance.

Audit Board finally got to discuss RMS in March 2018 and the minutes have now been published, with some redactions to protect whistleblowers. They show councillors were absolutely furious about what had gone on. As a footnote to the minutes notes

At this stage in the proceedings, Cllr Paul resorted to expletives and offensive language to underscore the point he was making, informing the clerk he could minute his comments “in any way you like”.

and Cllr Julianne Marriott stated that

… in her view, the Audit Board was complicit in the failings of the Council as there had not been a meeting of the Audit Board since November 2017. If the Audit Board was not meeting on a regular basis, the public could not have any confidence that Members of the Board were holding the Council to account on their behalf, as residents.

It is hard to argue with that assessment.

In May the new mayor commissioned the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) to conduct a financial health check on the council (report). It found

There is a lack of Member involvement in financial reporting and budget control; Audit Board is non-decision making. Overview/Scrutiny has had almost no impact

This is no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention over the past few years.The Olympic stadium ‘investment’, the unbudgeted cost overruns on the East Ham Town Hall campus project, Newham Collegiate 6th Form, the London Pleasure Gardens fiasco, sleight of hand over the funding of ‘free school meals’… the list goes on.

Despite attempts to distract attention elsewhere, all of £8.748m overspend happened during administration under Sir Robin Wales – which included his cabinet member for Finance (and chair of audit) Cllr Lester Hudson and the Statutory Deputy Mayor and lead member for the £100m Keep Newham Moving Cllr Ken Clark. If either of them has any sense of shame or decency they’ll stand up next Tuesday, apologise for their failure and resign.

I’m not holding my breath.

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