Biggs: gone fishing?

One of the reasons why the number of people employed in the UK has gone up is that as it’s so hard to get a decent full-time job, people are having to do two or three part-time jobs to make ends meet. The Government then counts jobs, rather than people – and suddenly it looks as if there’s a whole lot more people in work than there used to be.

It’s an idea John Biggs seems to have latched on to – but very, very quietly. In none of his publicity does he proclaim: “trust me, the part-time mayor”. Nowhere does he say “back to the future with Biggs, returning to the three day week”; or even “Biggs: part-time and proud”. Informally, Labour Party bigwigs have always said that they prefer Biggs to be a part-time mayor rather than risk a by-election for his very safe GLA seat, but Biggs has stayed quiet on his plans. Until now.

Biggs’s page on the GLA website records that he is to continue in his role as Chair of the GLA’s Budget and Performance Committee for 2014/15 – that is, “next year”. There are two possible explanations of why he has quietly agreed to stay on in this post.

First, he is so confident that he can juggle both roles that he doesn’t mind taking on the extra responsibility. Far from skimping on his GLA work to concentrate on Tower Hamlets, Biggs could be intending to straddle both Town Halls, which would have to see him putting in only a part-time role in Tower Hamlets. Given that he would be restricted to having only elected councillors in his Cabinet, this would mean in practice that he would hand over vast chunks of delegated authority to Labour Councillors – councillors whom no one had elected to be executive officers. Ironically, Labour has been hypercritical of Lutfur Rahman delegating responsibililty to competent councillors who serve in Cabinet.

The other possible explanation for why Biggs is making plans for his 2014/15 tenure at City Hall is that he has concluded that he cannot win a boroughwide vote in Tower Hamlets. This possibility would chime in with Labour’s revised London election strategy: Sadiq Khan MP, appearing recently on the Sunday Politics show, left Tower Hamlets off Labour’s list of priority seats. It would also make sense of Labour’s last few press releases, which have concentrated more on petty point scoring than planning for the borough’s political future.

However, the final sting in the story is that there appears to be no provision for either elected post – Mayor of Tower Hamlets or GLA Member – to be done on a part-time basis.  If you have the post, you have the post – and, of course, a salary paid from public money. Biggs’s GLA salary is £53,973 for next year; the Tower Hamlets Mayor receives approximately £65,000.

We await John Biggs explaining how he would do both jobs at once – and his confirmation that he would only draw half his salary from each public body. Unless, of course, the answer is that he really has given up…