Commissioners to stay!

Government turns down Biggs’s request to withdraw Commissioners
Biggs offers to cut East End Life if Commissioners will go

John Biggs has failed in his attempt to get government Commissioners out of Tower Hamlets so that he can run the Council himself. When Eric Pickles sent the Commissioners in, Labour claimed the move was necessary because of Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s failings. Now the Government has made it clear that it is not yet prepared to trust John Biggs to run the Council on his own.

Although the Government is prepared to remove some of the directions, the Commissioners will stay in place for the time being – overseeing future progress. This must come as a hard blow to John Biggs, who had been hoping he could persuade the Commissioners to leave the Borough. However, he tried to put a good spin on the announcement that some restrictions would be relaxed, saying “I welcome this vote of confidence.” He did not make any comment on the ongoing cost to the Borough of having the Commissioners remain.

Writing to John Biggs on 23rd October, the Rt Hon. Greg Clark MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, stated: “I welcome your clear commitment to make East End Life ‘code compliant’ by March 2016.”

At the last Council meeting, John Biggs announced that there would be a “review” of East End Life. He did indeed make some veiled reference to probably closing East End Life after the review – prejudging the review’s outcome. Now it seems he has made a similar commitment to the Secretary of State: will the review go ahead now that its conclusion is known?

The Secretary of State was presumably referring to the Government Code which suggests that Councils’ publications be no more than quarterly. However, East End Life carries much of the public information which other Councils place in commercial local newspapers – at a great cost. John Biggs has not yet commented on how much closing East End Life will cost the Council and the Council Tax payer – or how much the pointless review will cost.

If Biggs has already promised the Government that he will close East End Life, after the review, this concession has not moved the Government which has insisted that “the commissioners will continue their original remit, which is:
“•to oversee an improvement plan covering communications, procurement, property disposals, organisational cultural change
“•to strengthen the authority’s core governance arrangements
“•to take over the authority’s grant making functions
“•to exercise the authority’s functions of appointing an electoral registration officer and a returning officer for local elections.”

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John Biggs went on to make a string of unrelated comments, as follows.

“With a new management team in place we are putting the past behind us.”
This presumably refers to the fact that the Government insisted that the Council appoint permanent senior officers – rather than continue with existing senior officers on interim appointments. The officers were trapped in interim appointments because Labour and Tory Councillors were pressing Mayor Lutfur Rahman to appoint an expensive new Chief Executive, rather than continue with the much cheaper option of a paid head of service. The appointment process, led by the Commissioners, saw external applicants being appointed to vacant posts and presumably the senior officers who were filling them on an interim basis returned to their previous posts. The Council has not revealed how much extra the management team is costing in order that it can “put the past behind us”.

“The day-to-day work of the council is not particularly about politics but about providing excellent services and that’s what we will do. Our community needs it and our staff want to deliver it too.”
Over the four years that Mayor Lutfur Rahman was in office, the mayor concentrated on service delivery while Labour and Tory opposition councillors gave party political responses – such as indicating that they would not assist with the delivery of services. The borough’s two Labour MPs even lobbied Eric Pickles to intervene in Tower Hamlets. Yet over the entire period, Labour made very few negative comments on how Mayor Rahman ran services. Nor did they condemn his many new policies which were designed to protect the poor and vulnerable (some of which they have kept). John Biggs appears to be turning his back on the former Labour approach.

“We need to work hard to support a stronger and more united community.”
Critics have pointed out that if John Biggs is finding the work hard, it would help if he treated the post of mayor as the full-time job which it is, instead of trying to fit it in around his other full-time job at the Greater London Authority.

“Tower Hamlets is and remains the most exciting place in London.”
Presumably John Biggs means that there has been no change in the level of excitement in the borough since Mayor Lutfur Rahman was forced out and he took over. The Borough’s residents will doubtless be grateful.

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