Judicial Review Could Have Huge Impact On Newham Cuts

On Friday, service-users of Roma Support Group, who are based on Barking Road, won their judicial review of the decision by the city-wide body London Councils to cut £10 million of funding from voluntary sector organisations in London.

In the High Court, Mr Justice Calvert-Smith held that London Councils’ consultation process was flawed and that they had failed to meet their statutory equality duties. He quashed all the funding cut decisions for the 200 plus projects and he said that London Councils must re-run the process, this time with full equality impact assessments.

In a statement [Word doc], the claimants' brief Louise Whitfield of Pierce Glynn Solicitors said:

"This case establishes that even in the current economic climate, it remains of paramount importance that public sector funding cut decisions are properly assessed for their gender, disability and race equality impacts.

If they are not, public sector funding cut decisions will be unlawful.

London Councils simply did not consider the full effect of their £10 million cuts on the hundreds of voluntary sector groups and tens of thousands of members of the public who would be affected. They will now be required to do so."

If Ms Whitfield is correct (and she is a specialist in claims raising equality issues, so I bow to her knowledge on this area of law) then Roma Support's legal challenge has a potentially huge impact on prospective public sector cuts in Newham. If the council has failed to carry out proper equalities impact assessments in deciding the services it intends to cut, then it may be acting unlawfully.

In the decisions taken so far, is the council really able to demonstrate that it has carefully considered the gender, disability and race equality impacts of cuts it proposes to make? Or are the decisions, as many suspect, arbitrary and uneven?

Regime Change - Minus The Aerial Bombardment

It's been amazing to see secular, democratic Egyptians rise up against President Hosni Mubarak - scenting the possibility of regime change, without targeted strikes by US missiles, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians or the imposition of a Western imperial viceroy and his occupying army.

It could still end in defeat, we've no way of knowing. But it's incredibly inspiring - it shows that self-confident state power, governing with no democratic mandate, can be pushed to the point of collapse by ordinary citizens taking to the streets and confronting lines of baton-wielding police.

UPDATE

Check out these amazing pictures of the protests in Egypt (be warned that some a pretty graphic).

And it's because this image from Cairo has received such worldwide attention that I love the design for this poster, which has been circulating online:

This Blog Is Rated '18'

"Under certain circumstances, ", said Mark Twain, "profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer".

Now I'm not much for liturgy, but I do try and keep the blasphemy, sacrilege and general cussing on this site to a minimum. That's why I'm highly amused to discover that one part of this blog - not the whole site, but just the Politics section - has been blocked to local schools and others in Newham council for alleged 'profanity':
I can only assume that it's my distaste for the saintly Stephen Fry that's the cause of this web-based fit of the vapours. Unless, of course, constantly referring to Newham's glorious Mayor as 'The Great Helmsman' is just too vulgar and irreverent...

Thank you to the reader who passed this information on to me, along with the image above.

Newham Council Ignores Mandatory Requirements On Spending Data

At the beginning of December, I wrote about a promise made by Newham council - that in response to the new local authority requirement to publish every item of its spending over £500 by the end of January, it would "comply with the regulations regarding publication of payments set out by Government".

The guidance issued by the Department of Communities and Local Government in September last year says that councils should publish spending on a monthly basis, in CSV format, with the detail of "all individual invoices, grant payments, payments to other public bodies, expense payments or other such transactions", broken down into meaningful expense areas and including supplier names.

The deadline of 31 January is now looming and Newham council has finally managed to place some information online. And guess what? They've completely ignored the mandatory requirement that information is published in CSV file format and instead issued a 115-page PDF file, making it incredibly difficult to analyse. Neither has the council provided a 'licence to reuse', meaning that technically others will need prior written permission to reproduce the data.

It is possible to plough through and find the details, for example, of the council's expensive consultants (look out for the expenditure type 'external advice' and the name 'Kingsgate Interim'), but the local authority has made it as difficult and inaccessible as possible.

Why am I not surprised?

UPDATE

I asked 'Information Governance' at Newham council to explain why their previous commitment had been broken and they promised to get back to me - by 25 February!!!

Delingpole - The Interpreter of Interpretations

Some highlight's from last night's excellent BBC Horizon programme in which Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse looked at why science appears to be under attack. The following exchange is with the Telepgraph's conservative, dogmatic climate change denier James Delingpole, who "doesn't do science", doesn't read the relevant scientific papers but is instead "an interpreter of interpretations". He's now really angry at being made to look like a complete twat.

Eighteen Hundred Strong Petition Opposes Wanstead Flats Plan

As part of the public consultation on the Metropolitan police's planning application for its Olympic policing centre on Wanstead Flats, the Save Wanstead Flats campaign has submitted a petition to Redbridge council opposing the plans - one that has been signed by 1824 local people from the communities around the proposed site.

It is still possible to submit comments in more detail against the planning application via Redbridge council's website - see here for further details.

Coming Soon: Protesting Against Cuts in Newham

Save Newham Services has details of a number of protests coming up in the borough:

MONDAY 31st JANUARY
Picket in Stratford
6.00.pm Old Town Hall
Protest and leafleting outside the Great Helmsman's final “we’re all in this together” public meeting (which starts 6.30).

SATURDAY 12th FEBRUARY
Valentine’s Day Massacre of Jobs and Services.
12.00- 1.30pm Stratford Shopping Centre
SERTUC Day Of Action with street theatre and leafleting.

MONDAY 28th FEBRUARY
March and Lobby of full council meeting
This is the meeting that will set Newham's cuts budget. Local trade unions have called a demonstration that assembles at Plashet Park at 5.00pm and will march to East Ham Town Hall. (march and assembly point to be confirmed after negotiations with the police).

SATURDAY 5th MARCH
Street stalls and leafleting for TUC demonstration on 26 March
Stratford / East Ham / Green Street

Tessa Sanderson Threatens Legal Action on Stadium Vote

Now that the finances have been underwritten by Newham council, it seems extremely unlikely that West Ham will fail this Friday to secure their bid to take over the Olympic stadium in Stratford. Lord Coe's opposition to the Spurs plan today is likely to hold considerable sway with the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC).

But it's still unclear whether one OPLC board member, Tessa Sanderson, will participate in Friday's expected vote. Last Wednesday, Sky Sport reported that she had been excluded because of a "personal consultancy contract" with Newham council. A statement from the OPLC said that "this had not been disclosed to the company" and that "Board members are obliged to give declarations of interests, including pecuniary interests, in any matter where there is a potential conflict of interest."

However, yesterday Sanderson threatened legal action unless she is allowed to participate in the decision on the Olympic stadium. She denies a conflict of interest, which appears to relate to her involvement with the Newham Sports Academy, saying:

"My involvement with Newham has been well-documented in the national and local media over the last four years and clearly is in the public domain, indeed you only have to look at my own entry on the OPLC website to see my ongoing involvement".

And indeed it does, although this doesn't mean that the formal contractual arrangements with the local authority, who core-fund the Acadamy, were fully declared. Nor is Sanderson's instance that she can "remain objective and open-minded to the two proposals" really relevant - in a decision as big as this and with so much money involved, the appearance of propriety is just as important as the suitability and experience of Board members to take part in it.

Most people, myself included, had no idea of Sanderson's consultancy and now that the council is about to become either a significant funder or possibly even a joint lessee (see here) of the stadium, her participation in any vote on its future would clearly appear partisan.

UPDATE - 24 January

The OPLC has asked for more time to consider the West Ham and Spurs bids and "there may now not be a final ruling until the end of March". Partly a consequence of the threatened legal action?

Friday Updates

Newham Council's loan to West Ham United

Following up on my thoughts on whether this decision might potentially be ultra vires and the coverage on the BBC yesterday: last night the council voted to approve a loan of £40 million to West Ham to support its bid for the Olympic stadium in Stratford.

The Guardian reports that the vote was unanimous, which would be a surprise if true: one Newham councillor I spoke to this week was adamant that he would abstain. I e-mailed the head of 'Democratic Services' at the council today, asking for a breakdown of the vote, but inevitably, there was no response.

The question of whether West Ham eventually takes over the stadium is of less interest than the use of public money - at a time of swingeing cuts - to underwrite the financially stricken club when commercial lenders have evidently refused to do so. I know many Hammers fans would prefer to see the redevelopment of the East Stand instead of a move - although it's not as though Spurs supporters are entirely overjoyed about a move to Stratford either:

North London is indeed "theirs" - and they're welcome to it.

According to the BBC, "a council spokesman refused to say whether it would be liable for the debt if West Ham defaulted, citing commercial confidentiality". I'd imagine it might be of interest to local people to know whether, in five years time, we'll have few local services left after the cuts have hit hard, but instead the controlling stake of a Premier League / Championship football club?

Wanstead Flats - amending the Epping Forest Act

Now that the Home Office has announced that it still intends to create a Legislative Reform order to amend the Epping Forest Act - even though it admits that it has no need to do so - discussions have started about the possibility of a judicial review of this decision. More news soon.

Newham's e-Petition facility

So far, Newham council has failed to confirm that formal permission has been granted by the Divisional Director of Finance and the Executive Member for Finance, Property and Assets for the petition submitted by my employer, apparently the first one requested, to go live.

This is despite promising to do so "no later than 21 January". Not a terribly impressive start to the new electronic era of "listening to and acting on the views of the public".

The imprisonment of Edward Woollard

Having writing about the disproportionate sentence handed down to student protester Edward Woollward, I see that an online petition on this issue has been set up - see here.

Policing The Age Of Austerity

I was asked by the magazine Red Pepper to break out the crystal ball and make a few predictions about the policing of anti-cuts protests in the coming year. This article also appears online here.

Why do we persist in telling ourselves that in Europe, it’s the French and the Greeks who protest whilst the British are too apathetic to take their dissent out onto the streets? Marches and demonstrations have always been an important part of Britain’s political culture and there was little sign of any stereotypical indifference when students braved sub-zero temperatures and snow to march against rises in tuition fees at the end of last year.

There is widespread public support, too, for the principle that a healthy democracy depends upon on the basic right to protest. However, it’s a sad reflection of our lack of collective memory that, not long after criticism of the policing of the G20 summit protests and the death of Ian Tomlinson in 2009, so many people were apparently still shocked by the tactics by the police used against student protesters, especially the use of ‘kettling’ or enforced containment.

Curbs on the right to protest have existed for as long as there have been governments to create them and over the last twenty years, the powers of the police to control and limit demonstrations, often by force, have grown increasingly broad and repressive. What the student protests therefore tell us, if anything, is that despite the pledges made by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary Denis O' Connor in a review into public order policing in 2009 after the G20 protests, very little has fundamentally changed.

In the coming months, this means that anti-cuts campaigners can expect a heavy police presence and a readiness by the police to use their powers extensively at any protest that isn’t firmly contained within a prescribed route – which in London usually means a low impact, ‘self kettled’ stroll through the streets from Embankment to Hyde Park. It’s the kind of restriction that we’d obviously want to avoid, but a risk of sustained police heavyhandedness is that, as Johann Hari suggested in the Independent in December, potential demonstrators may increasingly be frightened off from taking part in anti-cuts protests.

Cuts in police numbers might instead tempt senior officers to ban protests altogether. This was mooted by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson after the tuition fees protests. One police officer, a Sergeant Dan Stoddart writing in the magazine Police Review, has gone as far as suggesting a limit on the size of protests, saying that “having tens of thousands on the streets seems to have become an expensive luxury” and questioning whether ‘modern pressure groups’ need to protest at all when “instantaneous global communications and media… puts any message into the palm of your hand”. If nothing else, this deeply illiberal argument should hopefully provide a sobering warning to those who place such great emphasis on the value of online campaigning.

Then there are the lessons we can learn from the spate of undercover police officers who have recent been unmasked after infiltrating green activist groups. In his interview with the Daily Mail, former undercover officer Mark Kennedy acknowledges that the peaceful climate campaigners he spied upon “had no intention of violence.” However, they were still targeted in the kind of operation normally reserved for drug dealers and criminal gangs, presumably because their campaigns focus on disrupting major economic and business interests such as power stations and airports.

If activism grows against corporate tax-dodgers like Vodafone and Top Shop, which is difficult to police because it invariably involves nothing more than trespass (which is a civil, rather than a criminal offence), might groups like UKUncut start to face the same kind of surveillance and infiltration? It’s far cheaper than intensive public order policing and as I suggested in a short piece for Manchester Mule last year, the government may be persuaded of the benefits of "targeting potential troublemakers” through greater use of intelligence, as a cost-effective way of using reduced police resources.

Finally, those expecting a change in attitudes as, for the first time, cuts hit the police too will almost certainly face disappointment. It’s important to remember that in general, the police do not institutionally share public perceptions of the importance of dissent. Protests are seen as a nuisance, a distraction from the maintenance of order and, as an episode of the Channel 4 series ‘Coppers’ showed in November 2010, demonstrators are often viewed with contempt. The naïve idea that the police can somehow be ‘shamed’ into better treatment of protesters by actively opposing cuts in their numbers – what one campaigner recently called ‘proving our moral superiority; – represents a failure to understand the deep-rooted prejudices against dissent that exist within the culture of the police.