Budget Working Commission Unimpressed by Mayor’s Performance
We know that readers are unlikely to peruse the somewhat dry pages of the Budget Working Commission, however, as this is the first real attempt to hold the mayor to account, we have read through it and bring you the edited highlights.
There are 10 recommendations
This seems a bit bureaucratic, but it is a useful means to hold the Mayor and her spending plans to account. Simply put, it would require the mayor and her new Tsar for Finance, Cllr Ali, state when they are going to use money from reserves to finance their plans, why and whether this was planned as a part of the budget or because they have to draw on new money for overspends.
They have noted the mayor’s failure to control her spending. The second recommendation requires that she immediately puts £5m back into the reserves. As they note elsewhere, a failure to do this will involve the council running out of cash. In effect what they will do is sell off or mortgage assets. To reduce your assets as you increase your revenue spending is a recipe for future problems, but as Mayor Fiaz is unlikely to be in office, that will be somebody else’s problem.
Don’t spend any new money! If the mayor plans to spend money on new projects, don’t. Instead put the money into replenishing the reserves.
Noting that the council is likely to overspend on temporary accommodation by some £5.6m this year and is planning to spend an additional £9.9m next year, the commission recommends that the mayor urgently comes up with a proper plan to reduce spending in this area, starting with reducing a dependence on hotel and B&B accommodation. They might go further and suggest that the mayor’s need-based housing allocation policy is failing and that she needs to look at the issue afresh.
One way of reducing demand is to increase the residency requirement for applicants. The commission recommends that this be increased to five years from the present three years.
This is a bland statement but contains an implicit criticism of the mayor and her advisors. The commission suggests that any spending decisions are made with the advice of people who know what they are talking about.
Noting that the council currently spends around £3m per month on agency workers, they suggest that using the most expensive form of staff is probably not a great idea. They want to be kept informed of spending on agency staff. You never know, the Hawthorne Effect might cause the mayor to get a grip of her spending on agency staff.
This just asks that the mayor comes up with a realistic plan. They use language that is repeated throughout the report, “feasible, targets, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound”. All good stuff, but it does rather suggest that the mayor has been a bit lax in her management style to date.
They are critical of spending money on children’s services provided by an NHS provider. It does suggest that they haven’t appreciated the complexity of funding between public sector bodies and run the risk of retrenching into organisational silos.
They note that the council is unlikely to deliver the planned £1.9m surplus in education spending. They also comment that they were unable to comment on £1.1 of capital spending and £200k of revenue spending because the papers arrived too late. They therefore require “a comprehensive and fully costed programme scope and project/delivery plan – including specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound outcome measures”, (those words again!), specifically for the Newham Sparks programme.