Private Eye reports the Town Hall asbestos scandal
See ‘Dust to Dust’, centre column, bottom of page. From Private Eye no. 1394, 12-25 June 2015. »
Posts
Stella Creasy’s views on local government: getting better, but not yet best
I was interested to hear Stella Creasy MP tell Andrew Neil on last week’s Sunday Politics show: ‘Do you think local government matters, Andrew, because I do. Local government is often the first place where people come into politics’. She is quite right, of course, and similar sentiments are exactly why I write this blog. But has she really lived up to her own words? There are plenty of things about Dr. Creasy to like. She is a good communicator, and has a high and generally positive profile in much of Waltham Forest. She deserves considerable credit for her campaign against loan sharks, particularly as this involved her in some totally undeserved and very unpleasant public abuse. And she is ... »
The National Construction College’s Cathall Rd. facility UPDATE: local people still miss out
Courtesy of the LBWF Growth Scrutiny Committee, I now have some up-to-date figures on how many people – and in particular how many local people – have attended The National Construction College’s Cathall Rd. facility. As I pointed out in a previous post on this subject, LBWF initially promised that the College would have a dramatic impact on the locality. In December 2010, Council Leader Cllr Chris Robbins told Waltham Forest News that it was ‘“a fantastic, world-class training facility for local residents and people from across east London”’ and endorsed the view that ‘over the next four years the Construction Training Centre will provide training for more than 4000 local people’ (see WFN, ... »
Documenting Past Failures: (11) some conclusions, part one
The previous ten posts in this series have looked at LBWF’s record of extensive failure over the past decade or so, and it is now apposite to offer some general conclusions. First, it is notable that, by and large, the cases examined share some common characteristics, which may be summarised as follows: (a) rule breaches On paper, LBWF has always possessed clear rules to govern programme inception and governance. Yet the evidence shows that these were often disregarded. Contracts were procured without seeking the requisite number of bidders; contract documents remained unsigned, sometimes undated too; and monitoring and audit requirements, even when specified as mandatory, were not respecte... »
‘Create the impression that you’re constantly in your constituency without wasting too much of your time by being there’
According to Guido Fawkes, Labour’s Austin Mitchell has just come out with this nugget of advice for Parliamentarians: ‘“Constituents are a grudging lot and the people that turn to you for help are so clueless that they probably don’t vote anyway. It’s appearances that count, not work or surgeries.The days when you’d get away with a monthly visit – still less a yearly visit – are gone. You’ve got to live there, or pretend to… so create the impression that you’re constantly in your constituency without wasting too much of your time by being there.”’ (see http://order-order.com/#_@/MMp05VumkPS4JA) Curiously, news reaches me simultaneously that one local MP already seems to have taken his advi... »