Further matters of interest

5 Jan

Cllr Sophia Naqvi posing with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn

What does Jeremy think about buy-to-let landlords?

Cllr Sophia Naqvi’s register of interests has been published and it reveals that she, like the leader of her political group, is a multi-property owning landlord.

In addition to the home they live in, Cllr Naqvi and her partner own a further five properties in Newham – two in her own name, two in her spouse’s and one jointly owned. No doubt a tax-efficient arrangement of assets.

The latest recruit to the Landlords Alliance is former councillor Idris Ibrahim, who will be one of the three candidates for Green Street West. As the final register of interests from his single previous term shows, he is very much a junior member – just the one extra house. 

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WTF just happened, part 2

14 Dec

Newham Independents camapigners in yellow h-viz jackets

Newham Independent campaigners wearing the uniform of right-wing populism, the gilets jaune

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks you’l know that Sophia Naqvi, Mehmood Mirza’s candidate, won the Plaistow North by-election by a handy margin, handing Labour a second consecutive defeat.

Mirza and Naqvi have been joined in a new group on the council by Zuber Gulamassen (Plashet) who defected from Labour. The Newham Independents are now the largest opposition group on the council. Which hands Cllr Mirza an extra £7,900 a year ‘special responsibility allowance’ as leader. 

What did the local blogs and commentators have to say?

From the Left of the local political spectrum Newham 65 reported

Labour has been comprehensively beaten in Plaistow North by the misnamed ‘Newham Independents’, who generally represent a populist anti-Labour/pro-car platform. On this occasion the campaign undoubtedly focussed on the national Labour Party’s position refusing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. The failure of local MP Lyn Brown to join Stephen Timms in supporting parliamentary efforts to call for a ceasefire didn’t help the atmosphere.

Newham’s ‘Old Labour’ Right could barely contain their glee

The defeat in Boleyn was a disaster. The defeat in Plaistow North is a humiliation.

Predictably they blamed that humiliation on the mayor, but added

For the first time in decades, Labour is facing an opposition that wants to win. It is an opposition that builds its support on an ethno-religious communitarian base. Labour currently has no response … But they will have to decide whether they will confront this new party on principle or will appease them in the hope of retaining some of the votes, say in parliamentary elections. Meanwhile they face a campaign that aims to attack local Labour and its record at every opportunity.

Writing for the On London blog, Lewis Baston observed

There is an electoral malaise in this ancestral Labour heartland at the moment. Mirza polled only eight per cent in the mayoral election in 2022 as an Independent candidate but would clearly be doing better now as leader of what amounts to a local opposition party. After all, Lutfur Rahman and Aspire returned to power in neighbouring Tower Hamlets last year with a familiar blend of Leftist and Islamic rhetoric, populism and somewhat conservative campaigning on issues like Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.

However, the hurdle at which past challenges to Labour’s hegemony in Newham have fallen is the ability to campaign across the whole borough. That is a bigger task than picking off a ward or two where issues and personalities come together. Mirza’s political operation is not yet ready for that. Even so, its growth is a headache for Labour in a borough where the party has become accustomed to winning everything.

Mirza and his followers have already started to address that last point, inviting applications to be his candidates in a swathe of wards across the centre of the borough from Green St West to Little Ilford. Those selected are encouraged to be ‘community champions’ for their wards. It should be a wake up call to Labour and an antidote to complacency among its sitting councillors.

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Keeping the receipts

13 Dec

Cllr Lewis Godfrey addresses Newham COuncil

A small but important moment early in Monday’s council meeting. Cllr Lewis Godfrey (Lab, Green Street West) requested an amendment to the minutes of the previous meeting.

Cllr Godfrey:

Chair, I’d like to make a quick point of order. There’s something in the minutes which I think needs correcting. In item 10 on the urgent motion in the penultimate paragraph, it reads “following Councillor Mirza’s right to reply, the chair called for a vote on the amendment which was passed, becoming the substantive motion.” Can I please suggest we amend that to read “Following Councillor Mirza’s right to reply, the chair called for a vote on the amendment, which was passed unanimously.” Everybody in the chamber voted for the amendment, and I think it’s important that the minutes reflect that.

Chair (Cllr Winston Vaughan): Okay. Do you agree? Council? Any abstentions? Thank you. 

The motion in question is the emergency motion on the conflict in Gaza, moved by Cllr Mirza, and the amendment is the one moved by Labour which replaced the entity of the original text.

Apparently, Cllr Mirza has been telling people he didn’t vote for the Labour amendment. But he did. He eventually abstained when the final motion was put to the vote.

Tweet by Cllr Lewis Godfrey

Cllr Mirza enjoys ‘keeping the receipts’ so no doubt he’ll be absolutely fine about having this particular receipt stored for future reference.

Secret by-election

23 Oct

Former councillor Daniel Lee-Phakoe

Former councillor Daniel Lee-Phakoe

There’s going to be a by-election in Plaistow North. Not that you’d know it from the council website.

Cllr Daniel Lee-Phakoe resigned a week ago, on 16 October, for personal reasons. This created a ‘casual vacancy’ in his ward and assuming more than one candidate is nominated it will be filled following an election.

In order for people to stand they have to know an election is happening. So the returning officer (in this case the council Chief Executive) publishes a notice. These days that means an announcement on the council website.

But if you look on the homepage, there’s no notice. No mention of an upcoming election. Nor in Latest News. Or even on the council’s Twitter page.

Okay, so maybe it’s under Your Council. So click the hamburger menu, top right and scroll down to the bottom. Nothing obvious there, but a menu of other sub-sections and a link to results from May 6th (that’s May 6th 2022, more than a year ago). There’s also results from recent by-elections in Boleyn and Wall End and an archive of previous results. But nothing for upcoming elections.

Let’s try Voting in Newham.

If you look at that on a laptop or tablet there’s nothing obvious, but if you scroll down you might spot a link for Statutory Election Notices.

And there you have it – notice of a casual vacancy, dated 17 October, and Notice of Election Plaistow North, dated 19 October.

It takes five clicks to find the notice of election, and that’s assuming you knew to start looking.

There’s also a Timetable of Proceedings for the by-election, but that’s on a different page.

Long story short, the by-election is being held on Thursday 23 November and if you want to stand you need to get your papers in by 4 pm this Friday (27 October 2023).

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Scrutiny, who cares?

20 Oct

As I wrote earlier in the week, the conduct of the overview and scrutiny function at Newham council has been severely criticised in a report from the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny.

But what is overview and scrutiny, and why is it important?

The role that overview and scrutiny can play in holding an authority’s decision-makers to account makes it fundamentally important to the successful functioning of local democracy. Effective scrutiny helps secure the efficient delivery of public services and drives improvements within the authority itself. Conversely, poor scrutiny can be indicative of wider governance, leadership and service failure.

That’s from the ministerial foreword to 2019’s “Statutory Guidance on Overview and Scrutiny in Local and Combined Authorities” written by then-minister for local government Rishi Sunak MP. I wonder whatever happened to him?

Overview and scrutiny committees have been part of the local government landscape since 2000 and are mandatory for local authorities with executive governance arrangements, which means councils with a leader and cabinet or  a directly-elected mayor. Councils run on the committee system don’t require O&S, but can opt for it if they want.

The idea is that councillors who are not part of the executive can hold the executive to account for the decisions and actions that affect their communities.

When overview and scrutiny works well it should provide constructive ‘critical friend’ challenge; amplify the voices and concerns of the public; be led by independent people who take responsibility for their role; and drive improvement in public services.

Given that directly-elected mayors hold so much power and unlike leaders in the other governance models can’t be removed, effective scrutiny by councillors provides vital checks and balances. As the guidance puts it

A strong organisational culture that supports scrutiny work is particularly important in authorities with a directly-elected mayor to ensure there are the checks and balances to maintain a robust democratic system. Mayoral systems offer the opportunity for greater public accountability and stronger governance, but there have also been incidents that highlight the importance of creating and maintaining a culture that puts scrutiny at the heart of its operations.

Authorities with a directly-elected mayor should ensure that scrutiny committees are well-resourced, are able to recruit high-calibre members.

The failure of overview and scrutiny in Newham is nothing new. It was appalling under the previous mayor, who regarded the whole thing with contempt. That things have not improved since 2018 is more than disappointing. But, as the statutory guidance says, the

prevailing organisational culture, behaviours and attitudes of an authority will largely determine whether its scrutiny function succeeds or fails.

Anyone who has paid any attention to local politics in Newham, which until last year meant the internal politics of the local Labour party, will recognise the truth of that. 

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Scrutiny scrutinised

18 Oct

Cllr Anthony McAlmont, chair of Overview and Scrutiny

Cllr Anthony McAlmont has chaired overview and scrutiny since 2014

Buried in the papers for Monday’s full council meeting was a report entitled ‘Scrutiny Improvement Review’. It is the output of work carried out by something called the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny.

I must admit I wasn’t aware of this review and completely missed an earlier interim report, produced back in 2022. Given that the CfGS were

unable to speak to the Chair of O&S, the Mayor or mayoral support officers and Cabinet members or CLT

during the first phase of work I doubt it contained anything of value. But happily, they were invited back to complete their review and the final report is damning.

Here is the summary of findings:

Some recent improvements in minor aspects of scrutiny’s operation cannot detract from the fact that the function is not performing as it should. The core of the challenge lies in poor relationships – principally, poor relationships between Members, but also poor member-officer relationships. Without sustained effort to improve relationships it will not be possible to achieve any tangible improvements.

Trying to improve relationships will be difficult while ongoing behavioural problems continue. There is real personal animosity between certain councillors, and between certain councillors and the Mayor.

It is right that the Mayor should be subject to robust scrutiny, but for this scrutiny to work at all well requires a degree of good faith on all sides. It does not serve anyone, least of all Newham’s residents, for scrutiny to be used as a way to act out personal disagreements and factional Party disputes. There is an unusual, and unhelpful, focus on the need to hold the Mayor to account exclusively, rather than the Mayor, her Cabinet, and senior officers individually and collectively.

It is unsurprising that senior officers do not want to enter the political space, but they are going to have to, as these problems left unaddressed will come to have real-world impacts on the ability of the authority to do business, if this is not already happening. As things stand this general absence of officers from a role of active management within the political space is exacerbated by the unusually high number of interim staff in senior positions.

Member-member relationship challenges influence and inform member-officer relationships as well. They have prompted two undesirable trends:

▪ An extremely variability in the quality of certain relationships. In respect of certain committees, individuals, and topics under scrutiny, member- member and member-officer relationships are quite positive. In other spaces, the opposite is the case. This variability occludes systemic weakness and means that it has been difficult for the organisation to find consensus about the nature of the problem.

▪ A tendency towards defensiveness – from most if not all key stakeholders – about their role in scrutiny, its work, the quality of corporate governance generally and the state of the Council’s political and organisational culture. We have found that in areas where weakness is admitted it, and its impacts, can be minimised – or the fault for that weakness is placed at the door of another individual or group.

It is everyone’s responsibility to work together to admit that these problems exist, that everyone bears some responsibility for their presence, and to try, despite disagreements, to put improvements in place. This will be challenging. While improvement is possible it will require meaningful reflection and self-criticism from everyone in the system.

The report is only 12 pages long and is worth reading in full.

Long-term readers of this blog will know that ineffective scrutiny is nothing new. Indeed, under the previous mayor it was designed not to work. Things have clearly not improved and it is fair to ask why not. There is more than enough blame to go around, but one person in particular should now be considering their position. 

Cllr Anthony McAlmont has been chair of Overview and Scrutiny since 2014. He has held the role under both Robin Wales and Rokhsana Fiaz. If, as the report says, “there is not a clearly articulated role for scrutiny to perform” what has he been doing for the past 10 years?

The resignation – or, if he won’t do that, his ousting by Labour Group colleagues – won’t fix scrutiny. That’s a long term programme, the first steps towards which are recommended in the report. But it would show that at long last someone is being held accountable for their failings. 

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Moaning Mirza

25 Sep

Cllr Mehmood Mirza was none to happy about my previous post. He took to Twitter to tell me to 

get a life man, do you have anything better to do?

And yet here he is in May last year, encouraging his followers to check the registers of interest to see how many ‘additional homes’ councillors owned:

Mehmood Mirza on Twitter

Which was a bit rich, given he had just stood for council – unsuccessfully on that occasion – while owning multiple ‘additional homes’ himself.

Anyway, he’s a councillor now and subject to the exact same levels of scrutiny he wanted for others.

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Matters of interest

20 Sep

Cllr Mehmood Mirza

The recently elected councillor for Boleyn ward, Mehmood Mirza, has published his register of interests.

And it is, to say the least, interesting given his personal brand as a Corbynite man of the people.

In the section on land, he declares that he owns eight properties, either directly or through his company Phoenix M Properties Limited. Addresses for seven are provided: 

  • 79B Selsdon Road E13 9BZ 
  • 28 Eversleigh Road E6 1HQ 
  • 29 Patrick Road E13 9QA 
  • 11 St Martin’s Avenue E6 3DU 
  • 47 Central Park Road E6 3DZ 
  • 24 Orwell Road London E13 9DH 
  • 76 Strone Road London E7 8EU

The location of the eighth is withheld as

The Monitoring Officer has agreed the disclosure of the Member’s home address is a sensitive interest under s.32 of the Localism Act 2011.

While declaring eight properties in the borough might meet the legal requirement, Cllr Mirza is being modest about the extent of his rental empire. Three of the houses are sub-divided into flats on which he either currently or has in the past had selective (which is to say landlord) licenses. These are 76 Strone Road, 24 Orwell Road and 28 Eversleigh Road. 

Cllr Mirza was granted a selective licence for the ground floor flat at 76 Stone Road on 3 August 2023, after he was elected; Phoenix M Properties was granted a licence for the first floor flat on 22 June. The contact address for both applications was First Floor Flat, 24 Orwell Road. In 2010 Mirza was granted a “Certificate of Lawfulness for an Existing Use as 2 x 1 bedroom flats” at Orwell Road.

At 28 Eversleigh Road, Mirza has held a selective license since December 2020 for Flat 2 at that address. And documents publicly available on the Companies House website show that Phoenix M Properties has two mortgages on the house – one for 28 and another for 28A.

This extensive portfolio of rental units puts Mirza top of the league of Newham councillor-landlords. No mean achievement given the number of competitors.

Elsewhere in Mirza’s declaration, Labour officials will raise an eyebrow at section 2. This is where councillors declare who has made donations to, among other things, their election expenses. Mirza lists Unite the Union and the GMB. As both unions are affiliated to Labour it is unlikely that either would contribute to a candidate running against the party. I suspect that Mirza has simply filled the form out incorrectly. His union memberships should appear in section 8 – other interests. Though quite why a company director and landlord should be a member of two trade unions is a bit of a mystery.

Companies House records show that Cllr Mirza is the sole director and company secretary of Phoenix M Properties Limited. He is the sole ‘person with significant control’, owning more than 75% of the shares and voting rights in the business. His occupation is given as ‘Property Management’. However the section on his register of interests where he is asked to “state any employment, office, trade, profession or vocation carried on for profit or gain” he doesn’t mention being either a company director or property manager; he says he is a legal advisor.

Now that the extent of his property holdings is public it will be entertaining to see how his supporters square this with the idea he is a left-wing hero.

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They work for you (kind of)

28 Jul

Hat tip to former councillor Andrew Baikie for his recent Freedom of Information request, asking how much constituent casework each councillor has been logging on the council’s i-Casework system.

He asked:

Please can you provide:

Data (numbers thereof) for Member (Councillor ) Enquiries logged by Newham Council between May 9th 2022 and May 8th 2023, broken down by :

1. Each Ward

2. Within 1) then broken down by individual Ward Member.

Although it took the information governance team an age to respond, they eventually did.

The data comes with a mild health warning: although i-Casework is the primary system for managing member enquiries (i.e. casework)…

…Councillors have a number of ways of raising issues on behalf of their constituents, or helping their constituents to raise issues themselves through the most appropriate channels, such as the Council website and online forms. Similarly councillors may refer issues directly to services for their direct action and assistance. Where councillors have assisted their constituents in these ways they would not be recorded centrally on the casework system. As such, the data shared below should be treated as only a partial representation of all of the casework that councillors undertake as we are aware that a significant amount of casework does get administered and managed ‘off’ of the i-casework system through emails and other channels of contact.

So, to the data. Broken down by ward

Ward Total enquiries
Beckton 419
Boleyn 54
Canning Town North 74
Canning Town South 55
Custom House 143
East Ham 110
East Ham South 147
Forest Gate North 111
Forest Gate South 47
Green Street East 103
Green Street West 213
Little Ilford 93
Manor Park 238
Maryland 68
Plaistow North 108
Plaistow South 82
Plaistow West & Canning Town East 120
Plashet 128
Royal Albert 48
Royal Victoria 33
Stratford 84
Stratford Olympic Park 116
Wall End 119
West Ham 102

And by councillor. The original response sorts the results by ward, but I have put them in rank order

Councillors Enquiries Ward
Asser, James 376 Beckton
Godfrey, Lewis 166 Green St West
Patel, Salim 134 Manor Park
Tripp, Rachel 110 Forest Gate N
Dawood, Mariam 101 Manor Park
Gulamussen, Zuber 98 Plashet
Masters, Susan 82 East Ham South
Higgins, Nate 80 Stratford OP
Hudson, Lester 80 Wall End
Morris, John 79 Plaistow W & CTE
Patel, Miraj 70 Green St East
Laguda MBE, Joy 67 Plaistow North
Booker, Elizabeth 60 Little Ilford
Whitworth, John 58 West Ham
Beckles, James 57 Custom House
Kamali, Sabia 57 Stratford
Shah, Lakmini 49 East Ham S
Corben, Carolyn 49 Maryland
Haque, Imam 48 East Ham
Chadha, Rita 47 Canning Town N
Ruiz, Sarah Jane 46 Custom House
Easter, Canon Ann 46 Royal Albert
Gray, John 42 West Ham
Odoi, Thelma 40 Custom House
Rush, Simon 40 Plaistow W & CTE
Keeling, Danny 36 Stratford OP
Wilson, Neil 35 Plaistow South
Ferdous, Shantu 34 East Ham
Wilson, Tonii 33 Beckton
Adaja, Caroline 33 Royal Victoria
Khan, Mumtaz 32 Green St West
Charters, Luke 32 Wall End
Makwana, Pushpa Dipaklal 30 Plashet
Ali, Zulfiqar 29 Plaistow North
Dasgupta, Dr Rohit Kumar 28 Canning Town S
Falola, Femi 28 East Ham
Lofthouse, Jane 28 Plaistow South
Welsch, Cecelia 21 Boleyn
Singh Virdee, Harvinder 20 Boleyn
Rahman, Muzibur 20 Green St East
Penton, Ken 19 Maryland
Lee-Phakoe, Carleene 19 Plaistow South
Chowdhury, Areeq 18 Canning Town N
Bashar, Syed 18 Little Ilford
Paul, Terence 18 Stratford
Griffiths, Alan 17 Canning Town S
Islam, Anamul 17 Forest Gate S
Sarley-Pontin, Madeleine 17 Forest Gate S
Alam, Musawwar 16 East Ham South
Virdee, Amar 15 Green St West
Begum, Nur 15 Little Ilford
Gani, Mohammed 13 Boleyn
Vaughan, Winston 13 Forest Gate S
Zilickaja, Larisa 13 Green St East
Lee-Phakoe, Daniel 12 Plaistow North
Rahman, Rohima 10 Beckton
Guaña, Belgica 10 Canning Town S
Mohammed, Shaban 9 Canning Town N
Garfield, Joshua 9 Stratford
McAlmont, Jemima 7 Wall End
Bailey, Jennifer 3 Manor Park
McAlmont, Anthony 2 Royal Albert
McLean, Charlene 2 West Ham
DasGupta, Sasha 1 Forest Gate N
Hossain, Dina 1 Plaistow W & CTE
Brayshaw, Stephen – Royal Victoria

Even given the health warning that not all casework flows through the system there is a remarkable variance between the casework being logged across the council.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

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WTF just happened?

17 Jul

This was not the news I was expecting to wake up to on Friday morning:

Boleyn (Newham) council by-election result:

IND: 42.5% (+42.5)

LAB: 32.1% (-27.0)

GRN: 21.1% (+3.5)

CON: 2.5% (-15.6)

REF: 0.8% (+0.8)

LDEM: 0.8% (+0.8)

Votes cast: 2,710

Independent GAIN from Labour.

The Independent in question is Mehmood Mirza, a figure well-known (and not necessarily in a good way) to local Labour people.

For those fortunate enough not to have encountered him before, the excellent Newham 65 blog addressed the question Who is Mehmood Mirza? 

Mehmood Mirza has surprised many by winning Thursday’s by-election in Boleyn ward. But who is he, and what does he stand for?

He has described his occupation variously as a legal adviser, a campaigner and a human rights activist, but he is also a significant private landlord. He currently owns ten properties in the borough, which will make him – since the departure of Ayesha Chowdhury from the council last year – the most propertied Newham councillor-landlord.

The piece is worth reading in full for a flavour of what we can expect to see in council meetings over the next three years. His first outing as Cllr Mirza will be on Wednesday. 

Lewis Baston, writing for the On London blog tried to take a broader view of why Labour had lost a seemingly safe seat.

Mirza’s win came as a surprise to most observers, although he had obviously run an effective campaign on the quiet. While Labour dominates in Newham, other candidates poll a third of the votes cast even at a peak Labour elections such as 2018. There – particularly with the focus of a local by-election – there is still the critical mass required for a challenge in the right ward at the right moment.

I don’t think anyone in Boleyn would have described the Mirza campaign as being run on the quiet. But the point about a potentially critical mass of non-Labour voters that can coalesce around the right message is well made. As Baston notes

Boleyn was one of the three best Newham wards for Respect in 2006, when it mounted the most successful recent challenge to Labour’s ascendancy. Mirza’s vote in 2023 mobilised some of this left of Labour and independent strand of opinion, and he was assisted by left wing campaigners. Some of Mirza’s policies were not particularly socialist – he said he was in favour of free car parking and a lower council tax, so he might have attracted some Conservative-inclined voters too.

Some? The Tory vote collapsed completely! Mirza basically stole their local policies – opposing LTNs and parking charges – and combined them with a hefty dollop of anti-establishment populism. As in May 2022, Mirza’s actual policy platform – as opposed to his left-wing posturing – was indistinguishable from the Conservatives.

Open Newham, the voice of the dispossessed ancien regime, wasted no time in pointing the finger

This is an indictment on Mayor Fiaz. In five years, she has taken Labour from a seemingly impenetrable position to one in which Labour appears vulnerable; she has alienated her colleagues on the council; and faces serious accusations of bullying of staff and colleagues.

The two constituency parties remain suspended by the Labour Party. There is a real doubt that Fiaz would have been reselected if the members had been allowed to choose in 2022.

The election of Mehmood Mirza will not mean that the voting arithmetic on the council has significantly altered. It will mean that there is a consistent and hostile, independent opposition voice who will seek to hold the mayor to account. If Fiaz experienced some discomfort at council meetings before, we can only anticipate that this will increase in the future.

Over on Twitter the Jeremy Corbyn fan club was in equally jubilant mood, declaring

Seat taken by a staunch Corbyn supporter standing as an independent – up yours Akehurst and co

And

Newham folk don’t like being stitched up by Central Office & [having] candidates foisted on them.

Which ignores two inconvenient facts. Firstly, that in neighbouring Wall End ward Labour’s vote share went up by 12 percentage points with a candidate selected in the exact same way. 

And secondly, that staunch Corbyn supporter is a buy to let landlord with multiple properties who swans round the place in a huge Mercedes & campaigns on lowering taxes, abolishing parking charges and removing LTNs.

Maybe get your head out of your arse, understand that most voters neither know nor care about Labour’s internal processes and recalibrate your political compass.

None of which is to ignore the fact that this result is an absolute disaster for the Labour party in Newham. Losing two seats to the Greens is one thing; losing a third to a populist campaign like Mirza’s is altogether more threatening. Just look across the borough boundary to Tower Hamlets. 

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