If you’ve ever been to the sumptuous Newham Dockside office complex by the Royal Docks, or passed by the architecturally brilliant Hackney Service Centre in Hillman Street, or marvelled at Lutfur Rahman’s spending on desks and filing cabinets, then you might be interested in this piece I wrote for today’s Sunday Express.
Here it is in full:
WHEN Sir Steve Redgrave, or whoever else is chosen for the historic task, lights Britain’s Olympic flame on July 27 next year, a quartet of fat cat mayors will be beaming smiles from their VIP seats close to the Queen.
Alongside London’s Boris Johnson, if he is re-elected next May, will be the three directly-elected mayors of the Games’ host boroughs.
Together they form a mixed bag of forerunners for a model of government that will soon spread across Britain.
As well as their powerful positions and democratic mandates, their critics believe they have another thing in common: gold medals for vanity projects and wasting local taxpayers’ cash.
On a popular pathway next to the Olympic stadium in east London stands a new sign giving tourists directions for the district of Bow. Go south, walkers are told, and stroll for one and three-quarter miles. It’s all very helpful, except for one tiny matter: the sign is already in the heart of Bow. That the calamity-prone council which approved the sign was Tower Hamlets is surprising to few.
In local government circles over the last couple of years it has become a byword for waste and arrogant incompetence. Yet its controversial leader, Mayor Lutfur Rahman, an independent who was expelled from Labour, is to be rewarded with a VIP pass marked “access all areas” for the duration of the Games. He will be driven to the venue in a top of the range E-class Mercedes, which he currently bills impoverished local taxpayers at a rate of £72 a day to rent.
The newest of the quartet, he won one of Britain’s most poisonous campaigns of recent years last October with the help of a London-based Bengali TV station headed by a convicted fraudster, and with the backing of a millionaire “curry king” who lives in a four-storey housing association home. Mr Rahman’s mayoralty has been described as a slow motion car crash ever since. Within days of victory, he decreed his council-issued Blackberry was no longer grand enough and ordered staff to buy an Apple iPhone4 for £599.
In the seven months since, while railing against Whitehall cuts and apologising for making hundreds redundant, he spent £115,000 redecorating his new suite of offices at the town hall, citing as justification the need to host foreign dignitaries, and also assembled a team of “mayoral advisers”.
Last Friday, the council’s chief executive Kevan Collins quit after just two years in the job to take up a safer role as head of a new education quango. However, while Mr Rahman, who earns £65,000 a year, may be the latest addition to the London mayors’ club, he is by no means its public waste gold medallist.
Many believe that accolade should go to Sir Robin Wales, the mayor of the Olympics’ main host borough, Newham, where all 60 councillors are Labour and which, like Tower Hamlets, is one of Britain’s most deprived areas.
His opponents there accuse him of running the borough like a fiefdom. Last year, while council staff suffered a pay freeze, he had a four per cent hike to take his salary to £81,000 a year. He also appointed 40 Labour councillors to paid roles in his administration.
While the Olympics and the soon-to-open Westfield shopping centre in Stratford will be his crowning glory, they will fail to hide what some suspect will be his lasting folly.
Opened last year, the architecturally stunning Newham Dockside, an office block beside London’s Royal Docks, cost £111.2million of council money to build. Still not fully occupied, it is the new home for the council’s back office staff and call centre. Some £9,300 was spent on five designer lights and £18.7million more went on furniture and fittings.
Sir Robin and Mr Rahman will be joined in the Olympic Royal Box by Jules Pipe, the directly-elected Labour mayor of neighbouring Hackney since 2002. He earns £76,000 a year and many observers say he is the best of the bunch having transformed his deprived borough through an affable style of leadership.
However, even he dived into the murky waters where there is a blur between fostering civic pride and wise public spending by commissioning architects Hopkins to design the impressive Hackney Service Centre which opened last year at a cost of £48million. Like Sir Robin, Mayor Pipe argues the “energy- efficient” site will save money in the long run.
Last night, a warning was made to cities such as Coventry, which are moving to a Tower Hamlets-type model. Peter Golds, leader of Tower Hamlets’ Tory opposition group, said: “There are no checks and balances. Even the President of the United States has to appear before Congress. At the last council meeting our mayor didn’t open his mouth once: there are no rules requiring him to.”
A Hackney council spokeswoman said the cost of the £48m service centre was “significantly” offset by the disposal of council sites in the borough. She added: “Bringing customer services together will allow us to recover any additional cost in a short period of time.”
Newham Council said by 2015 savings from the move to Newham Dockside will amount to £94million gross. A spokeswoman added the buildings were refurbished to a “good standard” so they can be rented out to businesses.
Mayor Rahman refused to comment on the purchase of his iPhone, while a council spokesman defended the revamp of his office, saying it will be used by support staff and for meetings, including with senior officials from key organisations. The council says it will look at cutting the cost of leasing the mayor’s car.
Trial by Jeory 
So before the recession, Hackney and Newham decided that they could save millions of pounds and improve delivery of their services by consolidating their arrays of offices into central sites. Yet you cast this as mayors wasting council taxpayers’ money.
Have you got figures that disprove how much the councils say they’re saving, or cost comparitors with other office projects? Or just some rather an idea that the lampshades look a bit pricey.
Not sure what your beef is with hiring Hopkins. Do you imagine that a worse architect would have produced a cheaper building rather than worked to the clients budget as Hopkins would have done? Good design makes buildings cheaper in the long run and people are happier and more productive in well designed spaces.
I agree that the lack of checks and balances in the mayoral system is problematic, and much prefer the leader-and-cabinet system, but Hackney and Newham investing to reduce their office costs doesn’t really demonstrate that the mayoral system creates waste.
I think you answer your own question in your comment. Do you think Newham and Hackney would have embarked on such schemes post-recession? Surely that’s the test, no?
Agree, Hopkins are brilliant architects: the building is stunning and so is their Velodrome.
What do you think would be the reaction if say the Department for Communities and Local Government, or any other Whitehall department, announced they were commissioning Hopkins to spend tens of millions of pounds on a new office “because in the long run it will save money and be more energy efficient”?
So what’s the difference between (a) investing in new, energy efficient and more effective for the customer (at least in Hackney’s case) offices which enables cost-effective streamlining of services on a central site (plus redeployment or sale or lease of unwanted buildings) before the recession and (b) deciding to invest pre-recession in, let’s say, new school buildings which are more energy efficient, more appropriate for modern teaching, better facilities for the students etc etc? School buildings wouldn’t be built after a recession either. Does that mean that we shouldn’t have new school buildings either?
Nobody, public or private, is going to invest in new buildings after a recession has hit – private sector because there’s no money in it (see a range of empty sites across the country) and public sector because the incredibly limited budget has to be targetted at service provision.
The Hackney Service Centre is partly exactly that – offering services in a better way to residents. It is not the vanity project that you want it to be. I bet you wouldn’t be complaining if Westminster had done it (and by the way I imagine that Westminster, Hammersmith and Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea will have to be involved in some pretty massive redesigns in order to deliver the much-vaunted shared services that Eric Pickles praises so highly to the skies).
If I were a Westminster taxpayer I would.
As for your analogy, I would always place higher priority in building new or improving existing schools. Did Hackney?
Also, do you think a Whitehall department would dare do what Hackney did?
Err…Hackney has rebuilt several schools – to award-winning standards. Bridge Academy comes to mind immediately but there are others – OpenHouse London may have a list.
To the best of my knowledge the Govt departments do not actually own the buildings they occupy – they lease them. So I’m not sure that they would necessarily have the ability to decide to arbitrarily build a new site for any of them.
However you could take a look at Eland House, occupied by the Department for Communities and Local Govt. Previously CLG (or Department of the Environment as they were originally known) were in the old 1970s towers on Marsham Street which have subsequently been destroyed and replaced with the new Home Office building. By my reckoning, your view would be that the towers should still be up and even if Communities and Local Government weren’t there the Home Office should be in the old towers even though they were hideous to the landscape and a seriously unpleasant working environment.
Incidentally that also leads me on to point out that the old Home Office buildings on Queen Anne’s Gate (the Grey Lubljanka?) are currently either empty and awaiting a new tenant or possibly being knocked down and rebuilt – it’s been a few weeks since I was in the area.
The office block that was the Ministry of Justice (next door to Westminster City Hall and on the corner of Victoria Street and Buckingham Gate is also currently a building site. The MoJ has moved to offices in Petty France which were (until a couple of years ago) previously occupied by the Passport Office. The Passport Office currently occupy new and improved office accommodation just at the back of Victoria Station – a classic example of moving to a new and improved building to offer better service provision.
I really must get out and find my life again…
PS One more thing about Eland House (from the Department that brought you Energy Performance Certificates and required them to be displayed publicly for all public buildings above a certain size): the EPC rating for Eland House is one of the worst going. It is an ‘E’ rating although this is an improvement on its original ‘F’ rating. So it can’t even be said that the building is delivering energy efficiency savings for the taxpayer.
http://www.communities.gov.uk/corporate/about/howwework/sustainabledevelopment/estateimpact/energyuseestate/