And then there were TEN

John Biggs is to reveal his Cabinet at tonight’s reconvened AGM of Tower Hamlets Council – but BD News 24 is reporting who the Cabinet will be.

Expected Cabinet
John Biggs has already announced that instead of having just one deputy, he will have three. It seems that all three will take specific Cabinet portfolios (presumably alongside boroughwide deputy roles):
Deputy Mayor Sirajul Islam: Housing Management & Performance
Deputy Mayor Rachael Saunders: Education & Childrens Services
Deputy Mayor Shiria Khatun: Community Safety

Veteran councillor David Edgar will take the key position of Resources & Finance, with newcomer Cllr Rachel Blake having to grapple with Strategic Development.

Other posts will be:
Cllr Ayas Miah: Environment, Street & Waste Management, Parking & Transport
Cllr Joshua Peck: Work & Economic Growth
Cllr Amy Whitelock: Health & Adult Services
Cllr Asma Begum: Culture

If the names are confirmed tonight, this will be a Cabinet drawn exclusively from among Labour Councillors – nine of the 21-strong Group will be collecting Special Responsibility Allowances for taking on a Cabinet portfolio.

The criteria on which the Cabinet was selected remain secret. It is thought that the members were actually appointed by the Tower Hamlets Labour Group, which met on Monday to decide who should get the top jobs – in a case of the Labour Councillors giving themselves the paid positions.

John Biggs will be relying heavily on his Cabinet members as he tries to juggle his two full-time posts. As well as having executive responsibility for running the whole of Tower Hamlets, he will retain his position on the Greater London Authority – where he is Chair of the committee which scrutinises London Mayor Boris Johnson’s budget for the whole of London and has to deal with all the issues that come up in his huge City & East constituency.  John Biggs has not yet indicated whether he will draw his full salaries, which add up to over £2,000 a week, for the two positions.

In any event, the Cabinet (if confirmed) is something of a mixed bunch. A majority of members did not grow up in the borough but came here as university graduates. In the main, then, they have not had to spend time homeless and/or on the local housing waiting list or experience, first hand, a need for so many of the services on which the bulk of the population relies and which they will now administer.

That is to say, the Cabinet members will not personally “administer” the services (which is what the paid staff do) but rather they will be responsible for giving them overall political direction. This makes it hard to assess how well the Cabinet will do, as the members have seldom revealed their political visions in the Council Chamber.

However, it is certainly the case that the Cabinet Members will be busy. As well as their Cabinet duties (conducted, presumably, with the support of a part-time mayor), they will remain responsible for looking after their constituents, both in terms of dealing with individuals who need help and with ward-based issues of concern.

We are unlikely to see significant change come fast. John Biggs’s manifesto contained few criticisms of the way that most services were run in Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s Administration. Coming in part-way through the financial year, he has a budget in place, a budget with which Labour had few disagreements. John Biggs’s main pledge was, basically, not to be Lutfur Rahman – a pledge he will have little difficulty in keeping. The other main plank of his manifesto was that he would dismantle the trappings of the mayoral office, so we await announcements in this regard.

However, by the summer next year’s budget-making will start. As John Biggs grapples with the massive funding cuts coming from the new Tory Government, he will be under pressure to draw back from the many commitments Mayor Lutfur Rahman put in place to protect the poorest in the Borough. No one would suggest that John Biggs wants to plunge his constituents into poverty and misery, but Labour has a good track record in “taking difficult decisions” – and John Biggs has given no indication of any different political vision. As the budgets go by, it will be interesting to see how the pressure of taking difficult decisions centrally affects the Cabinet Members who will have grown to love their portfolios.

We’ll come back to you with further analysis of Team John Biggs as soon as possible.

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