From today’s Daily Mail: ‘”Labour council with £2.8m hole in its finances ‘found £300,000 to silence blogger” Published: 02:15, 21 December 2020 | A penniless Labour council with a £2.8million hole in its budget set aside £300,000 to silence a blogger who was highly critical of its work. Sandwell council…had admitted to setting taxpayers’ money aside to pu... »
LBWF’s relationship with North London Ltd. (NLL) illuminates a second way of organising public-private partnerships. NLL is a private company, formed in 2005, whose business is ‘Other service activities not elsewhere classified’. LBWF has close links with NLL, not (as with NPS London Ltd.) because of share ownership, but rather because of, first, mutual involvement in a network of allied instituti... »
In the mid- to late 2000s, Delta Club (hereafter DC) was one of the most high profile organisations in Waltham Forest. Incorporated as a private company in 2003, with sometime Labour Cabinet portfolio holder Cllr. Afzal Akram on its board, DC seemed to have established itself as the ‘go to’ authority on, and provider of, training, especially where ethnic minorities were concerned. A self-penned pr... »
Some significant new evidence has just emerged about North London Ltd. (NLL). In general terms, NLL continues to intrigue. For here is a private company that was paid hundreds of thousand of pounds by public authorities (including LBWF, some directly, and some routed through the Waltham Forest Business Board’s Waltham Forest Business CIC); handed its directors generous remuneration and other... »
In several previous posts, I’ve looked in detail at some of the organisations that purport to represent business in the borough, particularly the Waltham Forest Business Board, and North London Ltd. It is fair to say that few of my observations have been very favourable. For example, I’ve never quite got my head around the fact that in the three years immediately after the directors of... »
A little bit out of sequence, but for those who didn’t see it, this story (see ‘Lost in the Forest’, centre column, bottom) is interesting on LBWF and the E11 BID Co., the subject of previous posts. Its from Private Eye no.1388, 20 March-2 April 2015. »
In the immediate run-up to the start of the Olympic Games in July 2012, LBWF proudly promoted a ‘new international food market’ in Marshall Street, adjacent to Leyton underground station, and, more important, metaphorically ‘just a stone’s throw away from the Olympic stadium’. In a press release, Cabinet Member for Economic Development and Corporate Resources, Cllr. Mark Rusling, enthused: ‘This i... »
A name that crops up in the context of the E11 BID Co. fiasco is North London Ltd. (NLL), a company that was launched in 2004 and apparently went into compulsory liquidation ten years later, put there by its creditors. According to a press release of 2013, NLL was ‘the sub-regional business support agency for North London’ and worked ‘to accelerate business growth and development and attract inwar... »
Councils inevitably dispose of unwanted public assets from time to time, and it is always interesting to discover exactly how they do so, and who benefits. The following is a tale of what happens in Waltham Forest, and as might be predicted, it provokes more questions than it answers. On 14 June 2011, the LBWF Cabinet agreed to lease the Argall Avenue car parks to ‘BID’, a fair assumption being ... »
A couple of years ago, I started hearing some very surprising things about Leytonstone’s Business Improvement District (BID) company, the E11 Bid Co.. The allegation, in short, was that the directors of the company had failed to keep proper books and neglected to pay their taxes; run up substantial debts; and as a consequence jeopardised the company’s ‘going concern’ status... »