It seems that ICT staff in Newham are currently taking part in a strike ballot. This is caused by “the council’s plan to outsource the service”, as quoted on UKAuthority website.

The coroner reported, “Omar Abdi Ahmed died on 20th November 2023 in hospital due to hypothermia. Mr Ahmed, an amputee who received domiciliary care three times a day, was found by carers, unresponsive at home on l5th November 2023.

Earlier this week, ( 06/08/24), the Overview and Scrutiny Committee met, together with Mayor Fiaz and Finance Czar, Zulfiqar Ali. These senior backbenchers continued to be concerned that the council’s finances might be a problem. In short, their concerns, which had been echoed on this website and in the press, were that Newham is heading for financial disaster.

Newham Council have agreed, after much internal dissent, a budget. Central to the budget is the plan to sell £16m worth of capital assets.

On the same day as the council meeting that agreed the budget the BBC disclosed that 19 English councils had been given permission to sell their capital assets in order to subsidise their revenue costs (see list below).

Seven voluntary sector groups have written to the mayor and the chief exec to protest the cuts in youth service funding, (see text below). The mayor has planned to take some £300,000 from the youth service budget over the next two years.

There has got to be just the smallest sense of irony in the fact that Fiaz and Labour are slashing the grant to The Theatre Royal at the same time as they are spending more than that in seeking to become the Borough of Culture.

Once upon a time there was a mayor, he whose name could not be mentioned. Back in those days £2.5 million was spent every year on an ‘every child programme’. (This mayor had a balanced budget and could invest in things that were important, err, like children.) 

Taking her lead from the Tories!

In 1997, One of the Blair government flagship policies was to roll out Sure Start Centres across the country to give children the ‘best possible start in life’.

(We’ve taken the liberty of appropriating the NIG graphics, again!)

We know that there will be a minimum of £25m in cuts. Councillors are indicating that the level of cuts could run to £40m.

To reflect the dire situation, it is believed that Newham is considering replacing its ship and crossed hammers coat of arms, with the ten axes.

There was worrying news at the Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting, 20th July 2023, (from approx. 40 minutes in).

The members of the OSC were presented with a report that stated,

It takes some doing to collapse your economy overnight. Some politicians do this over a much longer period.

What we have discovered is that Newham Council is going broke.

When, as a candidate Ms Fiaz promised that she would not run parking controls as a business,

Not a great achievement. Three years in office and Newham is branded one of the filthiest boroughs in the country.

We hear that the knives are being sharpened at the Town Hall. It may be the mayor’s financial incompetence which has brought them to this point, but it will be the staff at Newham Council who pay the price.

In a move to promote the mayor’s latest vanity project and salvage money from any corner, the arts complex in Stratford, which serves the whole borough is about to be dealt a blow from which it is unlikely to recover.

For those of you unfamiliar with the reference, Harold MacMillan was a Tory prime minister in the 1960s. As Earl Stockton he was critical of the sale of public assets by a subsequent Tory government under Margaret Thatcher. He referred to it as “selling off the family silver”.

You all know the story about the frog. If you throw a frog into boiling water it will hop straight out. If you put it in cold water and bring it to the boil, you’ll get perfectly poached frog legs.

In order to mask her incompetence, Mayor Fiaz is treating the people of Newham like frogs.

You’d think that with the pressure on the finances Newham Council would be making every effort to increase its income, especially when it has a low-risk portfolio of 35 empty commercial properties.