Celebrating 50 years of service to Newham Council by RMS "Chippy" Chris Parker

Yesterday I attended a ceremony at Newham Council Dockside Building, where the Mayor and the Chief Executive thanked Chris Parker for his 50 years of service to the Council and the residents of Newham. 

Chris joined the Council as a 16 year old apprentice in 1970, qualified as an carpenter and has served ever since in our inhouse repair and maintenance service. 

Chris is a real genuine nice guy and it was great to hear all the first hand tributes from his work mates, trade union colleagues and his managers!

Joint Covid-19 visit to Newham Council Repairs & Maintenance depot (& future plans)

This morning at 8am I went on a joint walkabout with Cllr Shaban Mohammed, management and local Unite trade union reps of our Council Housing repairs (RMS) depot in Bridge Road E15. We were there to inspect the new social distancing arrangements in the depot, to listen to staff about any concerns and also for Shabs and I, on behalf of the Mayor and all Councillors, to thank staff for their truly fantastic response to the pandemic in Newham.

There has been many scary times during the last 9/10 weeks and the fact that so many of our front line housing staff left their families and turned up to provide essential emergency services is humbling and also proves the worth of having directly employed in-house public workers providing public services.

We have operated from Bridge Road a 24/7 emergency/health & safety repairs service, while also still turning empty void council properties into lettable homes for homeless families & carrying out vital technical visits and inspections.

While I have seen at our Council Dockside headquarters (which has been a distribution centre), RMS workers collecting and delivering tons of food, every day to our #HelpNewham hubs for shielding and vulnerable households.

Cllr Mohammad and I both want to visit and thank personally all our other housing service staff for their superb work (when safe to do so).

It was also good to see the new UPCV windows manufactured at the depot stacked up and waiting to be installed as soon as we can safely do so. We are all actively working out what we can do to counter a possible/probable next wave of Covid-19. 

Newham Council Extraordinary Meeting on Repairs & Maintenance Service (RMS)

This is my speech to the crowded meeting on Tuesday where I moved a report with recommendations on why we had a £9 million overspend on RMS, what we did about it and what we are doing to make sure this never happens again.

"Thank you all for attending this extraordinary meeting.

The Chair has kindly agreed to hold this meeting in the spirit of openness and transparency to give councillors the opportunity to discuss the Council’s investigation into the allegations about the Council’s Repairs and Maintenance Service and also the completely unacceptable financial losses we have suffered.

There have been a number of inaccurate reports into this issue and the Internal Control Commission that the Mayor has announced will be investigating how this happened.

BUT even more importantly it will be looking at whole Council systems so that we can ensure this never, ever happens again. This is not isolated incident. We have suffered similar losses in the East Ham campus overspend (& being ultra vires), London Pleasure Gardens losses,  the Children services overspend and of course, the Olympic stadium debacle.

We want to create an effective system of internal controls, establish clear checks and balances and make Newham Council a beacon of best practice.

I will give a short outline of what has occurred. Then my cabinet Colleague, Cllr Ali, who is currently the lead member for Highways will give a more detailed information about what happened,

The RMS service was established in 2011. It is wholly owned by the Council and subject to Council financial procedures.

It has 4 key functions:

1. Repairs & Maintenance (R&M) for our Newham Housing stock

2. R&M Highways (minor)

3. Gas safety servicing

4. New build housing (minor)

In 2016, the Cabinet approved the "Keep Newham Moving Programme", a £100M investment over 10 years in highways. It agreed that RMS would undertake this work.

RMS had been identified as being subject to the Newham Council Small Business Programme which meant it was due to be externalised and therefore was told that they had to stop being Council bureaucrats, take risks, be entrepreneur and win new business.

At the time it was recognised that giving them these contracts was potentially risky since RMS had not undertaken such major highway works beforehand and certain measures were supposed to be put in place to control this risk.

By golly did they take risks, the senior management at RMS put a bid to the Council to carry out these works at a price far below what was actually needed to deliver it.

After this blunder RMS had to sub-contract these works to private contractors at a price far above the money they should have received from the Council. This resulted in a loss of £8.78M.

A number of serious allegations were made about financial mismanagement, including a whistleblower in June 2017.

This resulted in an investigation not only by qualified investigators, our internal audit but also two external auditing companies.

Specific advice was sought from these external advisers and also from a criminal barrister about whether there was sufficient evidence of criminality.

The advice was that there was insufficient evidence.

Despite the lack of evidence to support a criminal prosecution, there was evidence to progress disciplinary proceedings against staff and this resulted in a number of staff being dismissed or given final written warnings. A number of other staff have also since left RMS.

Even now if anyone has any actual evidence of criminality please let us know.

Finally, for now Chair, I would like to reassure Council  – as someone who has spent most of his professional career in enforcement and is used to attending court, working with police, instructing solicitors and helping put criminals into prison – that if there is any substantive evidence of criminality - we will prosecute.

(I will post my "right to reply" on the debate later)

Newham RMS report to Extraordinary Council meeting 22 January 2019

"*Stop Press* Papers for next week's Extraordinary Full Council at 7.30pm Stratford Town Hall - open to all Newham London residents and public. All welcome. You'll find out what really happened in the council's Highways Repairs & Maintenance which led to a £8.6 million overspend before May 2018. Plus what we plan to do next. #transparency Hat tip Mayor Fiaz. 

Being Scrutinised at Scrunty

Recently as Cabinet member for Housing Services I was called to answer questions by the Newham Overview and Scrutiny Committee.

This is a statutory committee of Newham Councillors whose role is to hold the Councils Executive members to account and make recommendations. 

As a backbencher Councillor for the previous 8 years, I had been a member of various scrunities (some longer than others) but this was the first time I had appeared as a member of the Executive. 

The Chair asked me to first give an outline of my housing brief for the benefit of the Committee. 

I explained that the present housing structure in Newham had been drawn up by the previous administration who had intended that all Councils services should be "outsourced". The new Mayor, Rokhsana Fiaz, has put a stop to all "outsourcing" and ordered a rethink and corporate redesign.  So things will change.

My housing brief is currently in 3 parts:- 

1. Traditional Council social housing management of our stock: repairs, rents, voids, allocations, residents engagement, Anti social behaviour (ASB), fire safety, right to buy, tenancy and leasehold enforcement. The Mayor has reserved the regeneration, planning and strategic delivery portfolio.

2. Homelessness and temporary accommodation (although not rough sleepers. The published minutes need correcting slightly on this), assessment, advice, support and prevention.

3. Private sector rental licensing and enforcement, including houses of multiple occupation (HMOs), advice and support. We really want to work with and support landlords but we won’t hesitate to drive bad and criminal landlords out of Newham and into the Courts. 

There are still a few grey areas (pardon the pun) about the scope of my brief due to the fragmented nature of the current structure.

Some Key issues

Number one is fire safety in our blocks including the removal and replacement of unsafe cladding. This is costing us a huge amount of money (waking watches) and it would appear that the Government will not reimburse anything like our total costs.

Review our entire allocation policy including the suitability of the offer for homeless temporary accommodation in light of the new Mayoral priorities and also changing Government policy. We have nearly 27,00 households on our waiting list and nearly 5,000 households in temporary accommodation. I suspect due to "sofa surfers", homes with grown up children who cannot afford to find a place of their own as well as all those private sector tenants, who have to spend most of their income on rent that the real figure of those in housing need is far higher.

Reform RMS repairs: (our in house repairs maintenance service). We have a number of good staff but the repair service is currently not good enough. RMS also has a limited new build module housing capacity which could be used more to build new homes on unused areas in estates.

Reduce Homelessness: Prevention is key. We spend far less than other boroughs which may be the reason why we have such high levels of homelessness. We need to educate residents about the scale and the real reasons for the housing crisis. We need more "joined up" thinking between housing and social services on these homeless issues which might result in financial savings to the Council and a better service for the people in Newham

Anti-social behaviour (ASB): While enforcement is not the only tool it is important. Too many residents live in fear of a tiny number of violent and abusive residents.

Fragmented caretaking service: This has been hived off the control of housing management. This has made it difficult to do anything about these services, particularly those services in estates, as I have no authority to manage these services.

Tackling housing poverty by supporting residents getting advice about benefits and support into decently paid work. We need to make sure "that work pays". This will reduce evictions and homelessness.

The need for Culture change and Resident Representation: There had to be a culture change on the part of both Members and officers in the way in which they interacted with residents, if residents were to be "at the heart of everything we do". There are practically no tenant and/or resident representation in Newham and while an annual citizens assembly on housing would be a good thing, it would not be a substitute for a proper democratic and accountable TRA. While we did not want to return to the “bad old days” when in some cases a small number of tenants had dominated the Tenants’ and Residents’ Associations (TRA’s) for their own ends. We need to carry out a review of tenants’ and residents’ representative structures as soon as possible.

Private Sector Housing Licensing - Enforcement: There will be an increase in the number of housing inspections undertaken to ensure that landlords were complying with the terms and conditions of their licences. Inspections and enforcement action are key to ensuring compliance and making landlords aware that non-compliance would not be tolerated. I am not at all opposed to properly managed private rented sector accommodation and I would expect any Councillor who rents property to be an exemplary landlord.

Planned Maintenance: We need to have planned maintenance and refurbishment programmes for Council properties. They are much cheaper than carrying out emergency repairs and better for residents. The “Decent Homes” programme ended eight or nine years ago. Therefore, there was a need for a properly planned programme. A housing stock survey is about to take place which will guide this.

Housing Associations: My own casework had shown me that the management performance of a number of housing associations within the borough had been abysmal. Therefore, if housing associations wished to work in partnership with the local authority, and I welcomed partnership working, it was necessary for poorly performing housing associations to improve.
In the Q&A with Councillors afterwards

In response to a question about the high cost and poor quality of some temporary accommodation I explained long-term lease agreements with decent landlords may provide an alternative form of accommodation and would do away with the requirement to pay a expensive “nightly” rate for private sector temporary accommodation.  Landlords want long term security of income. There are now a greater number of Council inspections of such accommodation. We are also thinking of buying and leasing properties.

Regarding the adverse effects that bad landlords had on their tenants, neighbours and good landlords, I hoped to see an increase in the number of prosecutions of bad landlords and an increased number of costs orders in the Council’s favour. Also, in the case of illegal evictions, I would want to see if necessary, custodial sentences for landlords to change their behaviours.

(picture college of some of the housing visits and inspections I have undertaken in last week).