Posts

Has LBWF come clean about Town Hall asbestos to its employees, as the law demands? The evidence suggests not, and that’s a serious matter

May 15, 2023 Town Hall asbestos

As Director of Governance and Law Mark Hynes’ asbestos management investigation limps into its seventh month, so far without any tangible findings, it becomes ever more obvious that one of the major obstacles to him reaching completion is the absence of key evidence that would prove LBWF complied with the law. One revealing illustration of this is some recently unearthed revelations about how LBWF has communicated about asbestos with its employees. All employers have a responsibility to consult their employees over health and safety matters under the Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regulations 1977, and the Health and Safety (Consultation with Employees) Regulations 1996, but th... »

Who’d have guessed it? A senior policeman talks nonsense about hate crime at a LBWF Scrutiny Committee meeting, and councillors remain silent

May 9, 2023 Policing/crime

A previous post (see link below) expressed disquiet about the fact that both LBWF and the local Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) have been pursuing hate crime in the borough as a priority, even though the evidence shows it is a small-scale phenomenon that doesn’t much worry residents. What follows is written in similar vein, and suggests that not only have LBWF and the police failed to properly monitor what they are doing about hate crime, but they also seem to be remarkably ill-informed about aspects of the law. The story is as follows. At a meeting of the LBWF Communities Scrutiny Committee (CSC) on 13 July 2021, the councillors were joined by Inspector Marcus Walton of the MPS in order t... »

A local resident writes in about LBWF ‘traffic calming measures’ that do the opposite! UPDATED

April 27, 2023 LBWF spin, Mini Holland

The post that follows, contributed by a local resident, describes how badly thought-out traffic calming schemes in Waltham Forest are producing damaging consequences. It is a valuable case study in itself, but doubly welcome because it further substantiates two of this blog’s long-standing observations – that LBWF’s traffic calming/ active travel initiatives are often subject to spin, with the upsides inflated and the downsides ignored; and that despite their rhetoric, Waltham Forest councillors and officers are poor at responding to residents’ legitimate grievances, a major reason, of course, why LBWF is rated the sixth most complained about local authority in England. So over to our ... »

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Explainer: the current Waltham Forest Town Hall asbestos scandal in ten bite-sized chunks

April 14, 2023 Town Hall asbestos

1. In 2022, I discovered that a specialist firm, commissioned on behalf of LBWF, had surveyed the Town Hall two years previously, and found that asbestos was present throughout but especially in the basement, with some of this asbestos defined as ‘high risk’, for example in the form of dust. 2. I further discovered that contractors had worked in the basement on three separate occasions between 2015 and 2021; and that LBWF could not produce all the associated paperwork as demanded by the key piece of legislation, the Asbestos Regulations 2012. 3. Accordingly, on 1 September 2022, I requested that LBWF monitoring officer Mark Hynes consider my evidence, and on 27 October 2022, he told me that ... »

Leyton and Wanstead MP John Cryer calls out Labour anti-semitism again…but for his far-left party colleagues he is a liar and a Tory

March 24, 2023 anti-semitism, John Cryer MP, the Labour Party in Waltham Forest

More fun and games in the local Labour Party, so often the home of the gutter. A couple of weeks ago, John Cryer, M.P. for Leyton and Wanstead and Chair of the Parliamentary Party, took to Twitter and made these forthright statements: And the response from his party colleagues? These Tweets are typical of the general tenor: It is often said nowadays that Sir Keir Starmer KBC KC has cleared out the ragbag of Jew obsessives, identarians of various hues, and gaggle of entryists from the Stalinist and Trotskyite fringe who flooded into the Labour ranks on the coattails of Mr. Corbyn. It seems not. »

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