Google ‘Cllr. Anna Mbachu’, and scrolling down finds the one time Mayor of Waltham Forest featuring in this juxtaposition: Who says algorithms don’t have a sense of humour? PS Just to be clear, Cllr.Mbachu’s indiscretion happened during her Mayoral Year in May 2010, and afterwards she apologised profusely, see »
Hardly a week goes by without someone from the Town Hall popping up to insist that, in everything LBWF does, it is ‘resident focused’. However, as previous posts have suggested, whether such a boast can be sustained remains debateable. In this context, a recent complaint that a LBWF tenant lodged with the Housing Ombudsman Service (HOS) is significant. The tenant had wanted to confirm that her tenancy automatically would be handed down to her son, and believed that the relevant information was contained in a council document called ‘Appendix 10’. But when she had looked for ‘Appendix 10’ on LBWF’s website, it didn’t appear to be there, and so she had contacted the Town Hall for advice. What ... »
In recent days, Cllr. Simon Miller has announced he will not be standing at the forthcoming local elections, and this is provoking some comment, because as Cabinet portfolio holder for Economic Prosperity he has guided many of the development schemes that are transforming parts of Waltham Forest. In a parting message, as reported by Victoria Munro in the February 2022 Waltham Forest Echo, Cllr. Miller explains that he is stepping down because juggling his full-time job with his council responsibilities is ‘“in the long term unsustainable”, and he now wants to ‘“spend more time with the people I love while I still can”’. However, there is a sting in the tail, for while urging local Labou... »
Leading on from previous posts about Cllr. Coghill and her breach of the LBWF Code of Conduct by not declaring in 2017 that she was on the staff of Barry Sheerman MP, Director of Governance and Law Mark Hynes has just provided some new details, small in themselves but nevertheless significant. First, he underlines that Cllr. Coghill’s error ‘was down to her and no one else’ (in other words, ruling out that she had been undone by mis-communication with an officer); and, second, he clarifies that when Cllr. Coghill updated her LBWF register of interests [hereafter LBWF register] in 2017, for some unexplained reason, she started with ‘a blank form’, rather than simply amending her existing entr... »
Since the start of the pandemic, the respective Labour Leaders, first Cllr. Clare Coghill and later her successor, Cllr. Grace Williams, have returned to versions of the long-standing Labour complaint that LBWF is not getting a fair funding deal from the Tory government. Cllr. Coghill early on set the tone, stating in a press release of April 2020 that “‘If lockdown measures continue for 12 weeks the full impact on our finances could be up to £40 million, roughly 10 per cent of our planned budget for this year’, and then telling the Waltham Forest Echo that while ministers had initially encouraged all local authorities to spend as was necessary, and promised to pick up the tab, s... »