Leytonstone cartoonist Woox on LBWF and the Freedom of Information Act
(Reproduced by kind permission of Woox) »
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Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request about the Walthamstow Mall, LBWF is caught out misusing one of the legislation’s exemption clauses, and has to eat crow
The LBWF e-mail pasted below is largely self-explanatory. However, the back story is less certain. Are LBWF officers really ignorant of the Freedom of Information Act’s Section 41? Or was this an attempt to pull the wool – to brandish apparent expertise, and bank on it not being cross-checked? Whatever the case, those involved emerge with little credit. In the recent past, because of Information Commissioner’s Office concern, Mark Hynes, who is LBWF Director of Governance and Law, as well as Data Protection Officer, has stated that all Freedom of Information responses are to be routed through his office and carefully checked before dispatch, in order to prevent these kind o... »
The Health and Safety Executive censures one of LBWF’s contractors after finding a worker cleaning up dangerous dust from the Town Hall basement…with a broom
As might be predicted, knowing the revelations of the past, the more that emerges about LBWF’s recent attempts to deal with dangerous asbestos in the Town Hall, the dodgier the local authority looks. Consider the following. On 13 January 2020, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) informed LBWF that a complaint had been made about construction work in the Town Hall basement, which it summarised thus: ‘Drilling in the basement is causing a lot of brick dust to go out throughout the buildings, so much that it is setting off the fire alarms; and With the presence of asbestos in the basement, there is risk to possible exposure to asbestos particles in the brick dust produced by the drilling’.&nb... »
Michelle Edwards launches a Twitter feed about her experiences in one of LBWF’s new low-rise blocks where, as she describes, ‘It has, and continues to be, hell’
Michelle Edwards is a respected local journalist who in the past campaigned on transparency and accountability, while at the same time writing a regular column for the Waltham Forest Echo about what it was like to live through her estate’s regeneration. More recently, Ms. Edwards has started writing a Twitter feed – https://twitter.com/NewBuildHell – about her move into a new low-rise block and the dispiriting events thereafter. Much coverage of such change tends to be sugary, with developers and councils patting each other on the back. Ms. Edwards peels away the verbiage, and reveals the often harsh truth beyond, and accordingly is well worth reading as a necessary an... »
Crime up, police sanction detections down, yet the LBWF Safer Neighbourhoods Board hasn’t met since November 2021
In the 12 months ending August 2022, crime in Waltham Forest rose 1.9 per cent, while sanction detections (charges, summonses, cautions reprimands, final warning, etc.) fell by the same amount. Turning to the most common crime in the borough, violence against the person, there were 6,710 offences in 2021-22, 2.3 per cent down on the previous year, which seems a plus, though one that is considerably diminished by the fact that sanction detections had also declined, and by a whopping 13.4 per cent. Meanwhile research released in October 2021 revealed that almost two thirds of residents reported themselves worried about crime, with four-fifths declaring that ‘knife crime was a problem in t... »