“Newham is Failing”

Before Gaza began to dominate the byelection, Mirza’s Independents actively highlighted the problems faced by Newham Council. Residents experienced increasing costs and lower standards of service.

No amount of unctuous propaganda can change that.

We took a quick trawl of some of the cabinet papers of the last few months to reveal the following.

The homeless figures were originally published by Shelter, show that the number of children Newham has in temporary accommodation is almost one third higher than the next highest London borough.

And then there was the pledge on homelessness from the aspirant mayoral candidate.

That doesn’t seem to have worked out quite so well.

And while Newham scrambles to find £40m to fill the hole in its budget, we discover that Newham Council is NOT collecting Council tax 

Council Tax collection rates ( from Department of Levelling Up Housing and Communities).

The same is true for rents. Our very rough estimate of the amount of uncollected rent is that it amounts to £4.5m annually.

The levels of uncollected rent have tripled in the five years that Fiaz has been in office. 

At the same time, services that residents relied upon have been cut and levels of anti-social behaviour have increased.

Unsurprisingly, this has led to a huge drop in the levels of resident satisfaction, as noted by the candidate Naqvi.

With five days to go before the by-election, what, we wonder, will cause voters to vote Labour?