Posts

Town Hall asbestos: LBWF comments, at last

March 23, 2015 Town Hall asbestos

On 27 January 2015, Trevor Calver and I called for LBWF Chief Executive Martin Esom to resign over the Town Hall asbestos affair. Here is the correspondence that followed in date order, beginning at the bottom with our initial e-mail.   20 March 2015 ‘Dear Mr. Fenwick, Thank you for your e-mail. Most of it of course is entirely irrelevant to the points that we raised with Mr. Esom on 27 January 2015, points he has subsequently been so reticent about responding to. As to the parts that are relevant, our response is as follows. First, your contention that there was a ‘discovery’ of as... »

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Documenting Past Failures: (9) the collapse of LBWF’s pet charity, O-Regen

March 18, 2015 Past failures: O-Regen

The registered charity O-Regen was set-up in 1997 as part of the redevelopment of Cathall estate, and charged with running community facilities in the south of the borough together with various programmes to benefit local residents. From the start, O-Regen appeared blessed. It was presented with a £4.5m endowment as well as a portfolio of 16 leasehold properties yielding an income of £120,000 p.a.; its board of trustees included many of the borough’s ‘great and good’ – at one time or another, the likes of Michael Polledri and Guy Davis (‘big players in the business and construction scene in Wa... »

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Documenting Past Failures: (8) the self-defeating silence of Councillor Marie Pye

March 13, 2015 Cllr. Marie Pye

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 Pye’ today, amusingly, my letter comes up as entry four. Anyway, here is the letter in full, as I believe still that it makes a perfectly valid point.   22 January 2010 Dear Councillor Pye... »

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‘Forget the homeless, what about the coffee drinkers?’ LBWF v. The Christian Kitchen (Part 1): Councillor Terry Wheeler makes a stand

March 13, 2015 Christian Kitchen, Cllr. Clyde Loakes, Cllr. Terry Wheeler

A local correspondent writes as follows: ‘Waltham Forest Council is big on celebrating its own perceived achievements and spending our money to do so. You would think that having a local charity like the Christian Kitchen which feeds the homeless 365 days a year would be worth celebrating, but unfortunately, in 2013 our less than enlightened leaders decided otherwise by revoking its licence to operate from Mission Grove Car Park, Walthamstow, for an hour every evening from 7.30 to 8.30pm. In the battle that followed, which ended with the High Court declaring the Council’s decision unlawf... »

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Waltham Forest Pool and Track, again

March 12, 2015 Waltham Forest Pool and Track

Reporting on Tuesday’s planning committee meeting, Amanda Connolly writes: ‘Last night we had a great turnout at the Pool and Track Application. We had 12 articulate, emotional and compelling speakers. The Chamber and seating areas were full. The general feeling from Committee and Councillors was that if we didn’t pass the plans, the whole project was at risk of failing (and as the Council has already let the place be demolished that would be a travesty). Long story short, the plans were passed with some minor conditions that they “continue” (!!) to consult with u... »

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Documenting Past Failures: (7) The Independent Panel and a ‘scathing’ report on LBWF’s ‘deep-rooted culture of non-compliance with procedures to prevent fraud’.

March 9, 2015 Independent Panel

In mid-2009, the crisis around the BNI finally came to a head. The Council had spent c. £116,000 on a series of seven or eight disparate inquiries into the programme, (Waltham Forest Guardian, 17 June 2009)  culminating in the PwC report, but some were obviously flawed, few convinced, and almost all begged further questions. Negative press coverage continued, as when the Waltham Forest Guardian revealed that, contrary to previous assurances, BNI money was being used to subsidise Waltham Forest’s 2012 projects department, with the further revelation – that the documentation here was also ... »

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Documenting Past Failures: (6) Cllr. Loakes, PwC, and the BNI Community Cohesion Projects

March 6, 2015 BNI Community Cohesion Projects, Cllr. Clyde Loakes

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 cohesion’. Let me set the scene. At the beginning of 2007, I was becoming increasingly anxious about the BNI programme (not least because there appeared to be a looming underspend on the financia... »

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Documenting Past Failures: (5) The BNI – ‘We’re awfully sorry, folks. Mistakes were made about how we spent millions of pounds of public money. But it’s all in the past. Let’s move forward and forget it’.

March 6, 2015 The BNI

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 been ‘systematic failures by officers to follow sound procedures’. Police investigations were said to be ongoing. Negative coverage in the local press continued. So LBWF reacted as it had always done, ... »

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North London Ltd. – an enigma wrapped in a mystery?

March 5, 2015 North London Ltd.

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 inward investment into the area’ – reminiscent of the corporate gobbledygook that made Dave Brent so famous. Scattered information elsewhere suggests it sometimes traded as North London Business (con... »

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Ex-Cllr. Afzal Akram, again: why no MBE?

March 3, 2015 Cllr. Afzal Akram, the Labour Party in Waltham Forest

Mention of ex-Councillor Akram in a previous post brings to mind what we have lost since he decamped to West London. The website of his new company, which appears to be a high end mini-cab firm, handily sums up his service to public life in the tabulation reproduced below. Can any local figure claim to have done anything like so much in so short a time? And for some reason Cllr. Akram never even got an MBE. One wonders: why not? Elected as a Councillor & Cabinet Member in the London Borough of Waltham Forest (2006 – 2014) – Annual Budget circa £1 billion Chairman of the North East Lo... »

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