Carry On Up the Council

Wednesday 29th March 2023 saw some strange goings on at East Ham Town Hall.

Three Scrutiny Chairs, (Councillors Masters, Booker and D. Lee Phakoe) plus Cllr Chadha ‘called in’ the decision of the mayor and cabinet, to approve the additional spending of £24m on the redevelopment of James Riley Point.

The meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Commission started at 6pm. The councillors wanted to address issues of the viability of the scheme, governance of the development programme and the compulsory purchase (CPO) process.

Mayor Fiaz also attended, although she had to leave at 7.15pm.

The councillors stayed…until 10.45pm.

This might be the first time that we have seen back bench councillors act in a manner that genuinely holds the mayor and executive to account and in the article that accompanies this one we look in more detail at their deliberations.

However, their attention to this matter was not universally well received.

The meeting began and Mayor Fiaz made several contributions. Alas, our informants were not able to elaborate on her contributions because “peoples’ brains were shutting down whenever she spoke”. It seems that Fiaz’s fabled verbosity is now working against her.

The willingness of councillors to interrogate this subject should be welcomed by the residents of Newham. It appears that it was not so warmly received by senior officers.

As the meeting approached 9pm, the legal officer informed the chair that either the members would have to suspend standing orders or close the meeting at 9pm. Of itself this was nothing unusual. He added that the meeting could only be extended by some 30 minutes and only if the members present agreed.

It seems that the members still had some work to do and they didn’t want to be shunted out of the Town Hall after 30 minutes. There ensued a bit of a spat. To his (their?) credit, Cllr Higgins refused to be told what to do.

The legal officer asserted that the meeting could only be extended by 30 minutes and Higgins challenged this. The legal officer and Cllr Higgins then left the room with a copy of the constitution, closely followed by Cllr Lee Phakoe.

They returned shortly after with the discovery that the constitution did not set any limit on the time, so the commission got back to work.

Shortly after, the acting Chief Exec (Colin Ansell) and Corporate Director of Resources, (Conrad Hall) popped in to the meeting. Hall asked how long they were going to be, because the caretaker wanted to go home.

The members informed Mr Hall that they would take as long as they needed. And they continued.

Sometime later, the pair (joint salaries circa £400k) popped back again. The meeting was dragging on and officers and caretakers needed to go home. It apparently didn’t occur to them that the Chief Exec could lock up, but perhaps that was beneath him. We do know that previous Chief Exec’s have indeed had keys to the building for just such a purpose.

Mr Hall, we are informed asked Cllr Lee Phakoe to go and explain to the caretaker why the meeting was taking so long, to which Cllr Lee Phakoe apparently told him, “That’s your job”.

We enquired as to the sums paid to the four leaseholders in the block of flats. Alas, the figures were on the ‘green pages’ which meant that they were confidential. Four leaseholders had clung on to extract the largest pay-out possible in the CPO process. Councillors, understandably were unwilling to be specific but when we asked if they were “large”, we were not contradicted. “Very large” still no contradiction. “Excruciatingly and eye-wateringly large?”, still no contradiction.

Let’s hope that we all get to live in a regeneration area.