Inspection Report: Council to get “envoy”

IT’S OUT. The Best Value Inspectors sent into Tower Hamlets Council by the last Government have produced their report and it will be out on Tuesday, 12th November. We know this, because it says so in The Guardian.

The Guardian knows when the report is out and what the main conclusion is, because its “sources” have told it. Lucky old Guardian. Some papers have all the luck. We don’t have such august sources.

The Report was commissioned by the old Tory Government and handed in to the new Labour Government – which, presumably, had to agree with its recommendations. The Guardian says that report will be “highly critical” of the financial and personnel management of the Council. As a result it is appointing an envoy to keep a close watch on the decisions made by the “Mayor and his team”: an arrangement which the report refers to as a “support package”.

This is as much as The Guardian has to say about this latest report. It pads out this information with lots of references to 2014 and lists of what they don’t like about Mayor Lutfur Rahman then.

And from all this we learn that value is in the eye of the beholder.

So The Guardian expects the report to be “highly critical” of the financial management of the Council? Excuse me? Mayor Rahman has balanced the Council’s budget. The outgoing Labour Administration could not get the Council’s external auditors to sign off its accounts for seven years. No Government sent in an envoy to help that Administration come to terms with its financial incompetence. Mayor Rahman had to sort it out (which he has – Labour’s accounts have all now been audited and signed off).

So The Guardian expects the report to be “highly critical” of the personnel management of the Council? Excuse me? A number of senior officers have left Tower Hamlets Council and moved on to work elsewhere over the last two years. These senior officers are presumably the ones that carried on spending taxpayers’ money knowing that the auditors could not sign off the accounts of the money they were spending. Or, if they did know their spending had not been verified by the external auditor, did they care? What action did they take to get back to the systems of accountability (no pun intended) that every other Council in the country has to follow?

Lucky Tower Hamlets Council to be getting a support package. Since 2020, six Councils in England have declared bankruptcy: Birmingham, Nottingham, Croydon, Thurruck, Woking and Slough and at least four others have warned that they fear going bankrupt. None of them got an envoy. Some of them even got a Government cash bail-out. (Birmingham was in such a pickle they paid John Biggs over £1,000 a day to advise them. So Mayor John Biggs can’t get the external auditors to sign off his own Administration’s accounts, and he gets £1,000 a day to advise on somebody else’s. Mayor Lutfur Rahman sorts out John Biggs’s accounts – and gets an envoy to check up on him. You couldn’t make it up.)

Value, we repeat, is in the eye of the beholder. We all know the list. Rahman has restored the free school meals in primary schools that Biggs axed, and Rahman has restored the post-16 Education Maintenance Awards and University bursaries that Biggs did away with. He’s brought Leisure Services back in-house and we now have free swimming for women and girls and men over 55. And so on. These services are immensely valuable to the residents of Tower Hamlets: it was in the hope of getting a Mayor who was focussed on delivering for the people that led many to vote for Lutfur Rahman in 2022. But there’s not a word in The Guardian about how this allegedly under-performing Council has delivered such trail-blazing, people-centred services without going bankrupt.

Mayor Lutfur Rahman must be fed up with this constant “we know best” attack, but he will bounce back – if for no other reason, because he is completely driven by an obsession to try to make life better for the residents of Tower Hamlets. Labour will probably mount a giant whinge-fest, because they are still obsessed with their view that it is their birthright to govern the borough and the electors must stop getting it wrong at each election. Sometimes it seems that nothing ever changes.

●Read more about it:
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