Labour and Conservative councillors have continued to play silly games over the appointment of a new Chief Executive. The scheduled meeting of the Council on Wednesday, 11th July was preceded by a special meeting to thrash out a way forward. Councillors were under pressure not to leave the Council without a Head of Service any longer, and they appointed Stephen Halsey to the post on an acting basis. They then agreed, by a majority vote, to return to square one and start the process of appointing a Chief Executive all over again.
This business was supposed to take half an hour, from 7pm until the start of the scheduled meeting at 7.30pm, but it took until nearly 10pm to conclude. The scheduled Council meeting started at 10pm, by which time most members of the public who were bringing petitions or asking questions had gone home. Council standing orders provide for scheduled Council meetings to run for three hours, but councillors were reluctant to sit in the Chamber for another three hours and cantered through the agenda like a herd of young gazelle, taking what had to be taken and deferring whatever could be left to another day.
Let’s recap on what the Labour-Tory alliance has done.
•They endorsed the appointment of Aman Dalvi as Acting Chief Executive, only to refuse to extend that appointment in May.
•They agreed an appointments process with the Independent councillors, which began by asking a head hunting agency to find candidates for the post. Of all the candidates the agency found, only one was willing to take the post – and the Alliance refused to appoint him (though they had endorsed him as Acting Chief Exec).
•They did not implement the process properly. Having interviewed two candidates, they proceeded to vote on which candidate to recommend to the Council. No one at the appointments panel asked for a vote on whether the candidates were appointable: they just voted on which one to recommend. When their preferred candidate withdrew (after the interview), the remaining candidate was the one Labour did not prefer to recommend: at this point, they complained that the process had not been followed because there had not been a vote on whether the one remaining candidate was appointable. There had not been such a vote because their members on the appointments panel had not asked for it. In that their representatives on the appointments panel had voted on preference only, it is impossible to see how there can be any suggestion that the remaining candidate was not appointable at all.
•They have now re-opened the process. Will the head hunting agency be able to find any candidates they couldn’t find before? Or is it more likely that potential candidates will see the shenanigans of the Labour Group over this appointment and conclude that Tower Hamlets Council is a basket case – and run a mile?
•What is the cost to Council Tax payers of having to repeat the process and the cost of having officers attend special meetings on the matter – and the cost of culling the scheduled Council meeting? How can Labour justify this, at a time when frontline services are under threat from government cuts?
•Given that they usually come down on any waste of money like a tonne of planks, why is the Conservative Group letting itself be associated with this playground behaviour?
Labour stopped Mr Dalvi, the one remaining candidate in the process, from being appointed despite the fact that their representatives had not asked for a vote on whether candidates were appointable but had been content to proceed to a vote on which of the two then remaining candidates should be recommended. Mr Dalvi is doubtless considering his legal options, and it is likely that his legal advisers, if he has some, are very optimistic. The Council may also face the threat of having its own decision, driven through by Labour and the Conservatives, judicially reviewed. If that review goes ahead, and if Labour is found to have taken an unsound decision, they will have a great deal to answer for.
It seems hard to believe that the Labour Group is going to these extreme ends just to stop Aman Dalvi from being appointed Chief Executive. The fear is that they are pulling out all the stops because they have a preferred candidate waiting in the wings to drop into the new process that they have created. If this turns out to be the case, any candidate who is prepared to condone this kind of process is unlikely to be the best man or woman for the job. Watch this space.
(For the background to this story, see: http://www.eastlondonnews.com/labour-and-tories-in-new-chief-exec-scandal.)