Posts

The Goddarts House fire safety fiasco: an update

January 21, 2020 fire hazards, fire safety, Goddarts House

Previous posts have looked at the controversy over flat entrance doors (FEDs) at Goddarts House sheltered housing in Walthamstow, particularly the issue of whether or not they offer sufficient resistance in the event of a fire, and what follows is an update. Regular readers will remember that when LBWF, though its repairs and maintenance contractor, Osborne, replaced the FEDs at Goddarts in late 2017, it was purported to be an upgrade. FEDs are classified as either FD30 or FD60, the numerals denoting how many minutes of fire protection are guaranteed. The new doors at Goddarts, LBWF and Osborne agreed, were FD60s, offering 30 minutes more protection that their predecessors. Subsequently, LBW... »

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The East London Credit Union: some new facts, but confusion, maybe evasion, persists

January 13, 2020 East London Credit Union

 Last month, LBWF divulged some more information about its subsidisation of the now collapsed East London Credit Union (ELCU). The focus is on a large grant that LBWF awarded to ELCU in 2015 in order to help it support vulnerable residents and small businesses. Previous references to this grant were both contradictory and deficient as to important details. In a book published during 2017, a chapter co-authored by then ELCU CEO Michelle Howlin claimed that, two years earlier, LBWF had made ‘a £500,000 investment [in ELCU] to deliver a range of initiatives, including business lending’. Yet in a supposedly definitive listing of all LBWF payments to ELCU from 2014 onwards, forwarded under the Fr... »

Private Eye on fire safety at Goddarts House sheltered housing complex, Walthamstow

December 20, 2019 Cllr.Louise Mitchell, fire hazards, fire safety, Goddarts House

  (From Private Eye, No.1512 21/12/19-09/01/20) »

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Mark Hynes, LBWF Director of Governance and Law, receives a second successive rebuke from the Information Commissioner’s Office: what’s going on?

December 16, 2019 Freedom of Information Act, Mark Hynes

As a previous post has revealed, though LBWF’s Director of Governance and Law, Mark Hynes, doubles as the council’s Data Protection Officer, his understanding of how information on individuals should be handled on occasion is completely at odds with the experts of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Some recent correspondence provides a further illustration of Mr. Hynes’ embarrassing divergence from the legal mainstream. The letter reproduced below from an ICO case officer to Mr. Hynes concerns a complaint that the redoubtable Waltham Forest Echo journalist, Michelle Edwards, has made about how LBWF handled two inquiries of hers submitted under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).... »

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London Borough of Waltham Forest: the local authority that can’t even finalise its annual accounts (1)

December 9, 2019 Cllr. Clare Coghill, LBWF finance, LBWF spin

Every year, like other local authorities, LBWF is bound by law to produce its annual accounts, using an external auditor and a timetable specified by the Accounts and Audit Regulations of 2015. But this year, the procedure has gone wrong, indeed very wrong, and now there is a lively post mortem in progress about who is to blame, and what are the likely consequences. As regards the 2018-19 audit, LBWF knew the specified time frame well beforehand. Unaudited accounts were due by 31 May 2019, and audited accounts by 31 July 2019, so that the latter then could be signed off by the Audit and Governance Committee. However, it has recently emerged that LBWF’s auditor, Ernst and Young LLP (hereafter... »

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