Shortly after the Independent Panel report, I attended a Community Council meeting, and heard Cllr. Marie Pye vociferously denying any responsibility for the NRF/BNI fiasco. So I wrote her an open letter explaining why I thought she was wrong. Needless to say, in true Waltham Forest style, she never replied. However, to some extent the last laugh is on her, because if you Google ‘Cllr. Marie... »
As I have described in the previous post in this series, the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report was a revelation. The figures already recounted tell much of the story. But to get a full picture of the chaos that PwC uncovered, it is necessary to look at some of its unpublished findings on individual BNI files, and there is no better place to start than with the batch concerning ‘community c... »
By the spring of 2008, the situation with the Better Neighbourhoods Initiative (BNI) programme was becoming untenable. The Council’s Corporate Audit and Anti-Fraud Team had just reported on the Dr. Foster episode, had nearly completed its work on EduAction’s Youth at Risk project, and was chasing new leads. A consultant’s examination of the BNI which was presented to Cabinet concluded there had b... »
One of the outside organisations that LBWF paid NRF monies to was EduAction, or more properly EduAction Waltham Forest Ltd., a joint venture formed by Amey Plc (‘one of today’s leading public services providers’) and Nord Anglia Education. In the 2000s, EduAction ran the schools in the borough, after a damning Ofsted report at the turn of the century had disposed of the idea that the l... »