Posts

Labour Chief Whip Cllr. Steve Terry: rule book king, but does he really know his apples from his oranges? UPDATED

September 21, 2018 Cllr. Steve Terry, Mark Hynes, register of interests

Cllr. Steve Terry is Waltham Forest Labour Group’s Chief Whip, and works as a regional organiser for Unison. It is reasonable to conclude that, occupying such weighty offices, he must be an expert on the minutiae of procedure, and a stickler for respecting the rule-book. The fact that he is a regular confidant of LBWF Director of Governance and Law, and Monitoring Officer, Mark Hynes about all things Labour also speaks volumes. Nevertheless, examining Cllr. Terry’s register of interests as of this morning prompts some interesting questions. First, though the register of interest form consists of nine subsections, in Cllr. Terry’s case, the ninth, which documents non-pecuniary interests... »

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How local government works: (2) LBWF Director of Governance and Law Mark Hynes and Cllr. Limbajee

September 19, 2018 Cllr. Khevyn Limbajee, Mark Hynes, register of interests

Between 19 June 2014 and 13 March 2018, senior Labour councillor Khevyn Limbajee’s register of interests recorded his sole employment as ‘Press Officer, Labour Party’. However, in March 2018, research showed that (a) according to his Linkedin page, Cllr. Limbajee had stopped working for the Labour Party in 2014; and (b) Companies House listed him as  ‘a person with significant control’ of PR company Tenth Muse Ltd., which had been incorporated on 31 August 2016 and had no other directors. When alerted to these facts, LBWF Director of Governance and Law Mark Hynes investigated and found that ‘although Cllr Limbajee should have ensured that the Register of Interests was accurate and updated I ... »

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LBWF and government funding to encourage social cohesion (1)

August 24, 2018 BNI Community Cohesion Projects, Redevelopment

In recent months, the government has awarded LBWF two large sums of money to help boost social cohesion, and this, and a succeeding post, look in detail at the justification for such funding, and how the money is being spent. The first award was announced late last year, came from the government’s rather oddly named Controlling Migration Fund (CMF) (for which see https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP7673#fullreport) and is worth ‘£1,015,080 for the period to August 2019’. In bidding for CMF, LBWF submitted a ‘summary of key proposals and council outcomes’, and this begins with some observations on the local background: ‘Over the last 10 years Waltham Forest has... »

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STOP PRESS Leytonstone’s E11 BID Co. Ltd. threatened with prosecution

August 22, 2018 E11 BID Co., Fawaad Sheikh

As this blog has demonstrated at length, Leytonstone’s E11 BID Co. Ltd. has become a byword for bad management, and a ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude to the norms of polite society. Slipshod book-keeping, failure to pay taxes, accrual of large debts, late filing of accounts, adverse County Court Judgements, insouciance about explaining how it has spent its money – the E11 BID Co. Ltd.’s litany of oversights and misdemeanours tells its own reprehensible story. And to add insult to injury, when aggrieved traders, who after all still continue to pick up the bill for this charade, have asked for help from the higher echelons of LBWF, they have been met with indi... »

‘Knife crime in Waltham Forest: a nasty little scandal’ UPDATED

August 9, 2018 Cllr. Clare Coghill, Gang Prevention Programme, LBWF spin, Policing/crime

In May 2017, this blog published a post entitled ‘Knife crime in Waltham Forest: a nasty little scandal (1)’, which, somewhat unexpectedly, attracted a big readership. What follows provides an update, focusing both on knife crime specifically, and the broader (though intimately related) issue of gangs and gang violence. First off, and very regrettably, it is worth underlining that the knife crime problem in the borough is actually worse now than it was at the time of the original post. Indeed, in FY 2017-18, the number of offences was 27.34 per cent up on the previous year, a rise that was significantly greater than that in the Metropolitan Police Service area as a whole (21.17), and compare... »

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