Hornsey Town Hall update/meeting

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by John McMullan on November 2, 2017 at 9:55

Deselect them Chris. You know it's your only option.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on November 2, 2017 at 14:34

Keen to devolve Crouch End select/deselect powers to me, John? Careful what you wish for :)

Only one Crouch Ender is on the Labour shortlist. The other 9, including our three existing Cllrs, are from other wards, mainly East of the borough, including three with explicitly anti-HDV 'statements'.

Not a single mention of HTH in any candidate statement. HTH is the main and probably only civic issue to have dominated public discourse (displaced only recently and hopefully temporarily by moped crime) for over a decade.  

What is it about us that we are so unconcerned about whatever happens that we refuse to engage with the political process?  If CE was a town in outer Paris, would the concern express itself differently?

Having spent time with them all, I think our three existing Cllrs are sophisticated people of integrity, committed to Labour values - how did they end up on the right of Borough politics?  Are they, in fact, reflecting the West's excessive wealth (life expectancy is still 7 years more at this end of the 41 bus route) if, in fact, being better off makes you less 'Labour'?

It's possible that the anti-HDV faction will win the day and our existing Cllrs be replaced by those far more likely to have wanted a Council-owned and locally operated future for HTH.

We'll know more after the 'shortlisting' meeting on Wed Nov 29th, followed by the actual Cllr selection on Sunday, Dec 3rd. All too late to stop the disastrous HTH sell-off, though it might encourage the Planning Cttee to impose conditions on the developer they otherwise wouldn't have (provided the Planners put forward those conditions in the first place - unlikely!).

Whomsoever represents us, from whatever political body of thought, structural faults in the system of local government inevitably seem to distance us and them - reminds me of the well-known trope:

Politicians go looking for trouble, find it, misunderstand the situation and thus roll out the wrong policies. 

One strong factor surely must be the hierarchy.  Cllrs depend on the Leadership for the chance to play an active part in what happens here - the reason they say they stand.  If they are selected to serve as Cabinet Members, they get an allowance that enables them to only have one part-time job apart from their Council work. The prestige of a Cabinet post must raise the amount they can earn in the private sector.  Being Chair of a Cttee does the same pro rata. Jobs as 'SPADs' in Westminster can pave the way for a career as an MP. Already-successful Cllrs have demonstrated competence and loyalty and thus make attractive candidates.

Jeremy Corbyn was unusual in that he made it to Westminster without rising through Haringey's ranks during his ten-year stint as a Harringay Cllr ('73-'83) but most are not as original.

One of our Cllrs was Leader of the Lib-Dems and, like others here before her, defected to Labour because of her sincere desire to get stuff done - she is not able to do that outside the tent, given Labour's 50-year voting dominance and the Lib-Dems miserable disarray.

Cllrs are whipped and can be effectively expelled if they don't do what the Leadership tells them. So your entire political future, your chance to 'make a difference' in your ward and beyond, is entirely in the Leader's gift. It can be withdrawn the moment you disobey the whip. 

Here the Leader is assisted by two long-term Cabinet members, those for Finance and Regeneration, arguably the most important issues we face.  This trio seems to run Haringey.

I suppose that, if you believe that local people are responsible for their own local politics, we get what we deserve.

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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on November 2, 2017 at 15:09

"We'll know more after the 'shortlisting' meeting on Wed Nov 29th, followed by the actual Cllr selection on Sunday, Dec 3rd. All too late to stop the disastrous HTH sell-off, though it might encourage the Planning Cttee to impose conditions on the developer they otherwise wouldn't have"

There's a word for the problem you have there and the fact that it only exists for elections and not gimme selections like this is basic corruption as far as the wider public would be concerned.

Purdah! Purdah Purdah!

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on November 2, 2017 at 16:13

Thanks, John - not sure exactly how serious you're being...

Are you saying Labour is fundamentally corrupted by their choice of selection mechanism? 

Does anyone use a better system that they could adopt?

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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on November 2, 2017 at 16:33

Not by their selection mechanisms. By the fact that they're so "electable". Once selected they have a 90 something percent chance of being elected... so doing anything like this now while they're all effectively up for selection is EVEN WORSE than doing something before the election, i.e. during a purdah.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on November 2, 2017 at 17:32

Sorry m8 I must be having a senior moment but I can't figure out what you mean.

Three potential Cllrs are selected out of the 10 candidates who have put themselves forward. 

You're saying that, as the potential Cllrs are likely to be elected in May 2018, the selection process is, in fact, the May 2018 election process? So the three potential Cllrs are a shoe-in?

Forgive me if I've got this wrong, but you're saying that this is worse than if the election was swung by the Council deliberately doing stuff to get the potential Cllrs elected (which they're not allowed to do during purdah).

Is that what you mean? 

I take the view that internal party-political selection mechanisms are likely to be 'fixed' by the Leadership if they can get away with it (partly based on your reports about St Anne's).

At least the abuses that made a purdah period necessary are no longer as explicitly possible because a purdah period has been imposed, so that's a step forward, isn't it?

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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on November 2, 2017 at 17:46

It is, and so let's have a purdah for the selection too then eh? I don't think the purdah is just for cash giveaways etc before the election, it's to stop things being rushed through before a potential change of governance. This would be more likely to happen when the incumbents fear being kicked out.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on November 3, 2017 at 10:24

I notice a problem with Cllrs generally - they're not required to know anything about the topics their expert civil servants ask for their decision on and most appear to know very little yet still put a brave face on.

This seems especially bad to me when it comes to the Cabinet members responsible for Finance, who are supposed to 'lead' on things like the $2bn HDV deal or disposing of HTH.

I often read in the press what appears to be a widespread view that Council's do not act in a 'businesslike' way. Developers, for example, seem to be able to run rings round them by presenting viability assessments.  A recent case became even more notorious when it was revealed that the Council did not have the software needed to even open the viability assessment, let alone the Cllrs expertise to interpret it. They never read it presumably because this key financial document was beyond them.

I suspect that Cabinet Members in Finance are unable to read a simple balance sheet.  So if Cllrs contradict the advice they're given, or, perhaps more importantly, are unable to initiate enterprising plans, then are they the right people for the job?  A good few years back the Govt handed back to the technocrats decision-making on setting interest rates.  Maybe we ought to curtail the power of Cllrs to make financial decisions?

The few remaining experts among the Council's civil servants did what Councils do - they hired consultants (BNP Paribas) to read the developer's viability assessment (which itself was prepared by a different set of consultants). Both these firms are experts in how to get around the law to the advantage of whichever side is paying them.

I suspect the decision to appoint Paribas was taken by the Cabinet Member for Finance (we'll never know), acting on 'recommendations' which we are not allowed to see. The Council could have used another service to evaluate why the poor developer could not support any affordable housing at all - the Government Valuation Service has a lot of experience but no, they didn't.  

Why don't they lay out all the facts so we can see how marvellous they all are and impress the hell out of us?

Their disposal of HTH is terribly poor value for money.  Since 2000, they've wasted millions on bad decisions, all of which seem to have been taken by Cllrs without any comeback whatsoever. Their failed 'Creative Trust' made false promises that they could raise millions, inserting years of darkness where there should have been light.

They really should be transparent on this but it seems it would be far too damaging so they won't.

They moaned for years that they bore the £250k/yr annual cost for keeping HTH dark. It now turns out that HTH more than paid its way by being rented out as a film location. It also seems that they turned down the revenue opportunity of adding an extra phone mast to the very tall tower there - this in a town that has poor coverage. They could have filled it with small local business but left it empty for over a decade before they did.  They could have let us use it (big car park at the back) but refused.

There is no detailed financial justification for Council schemes presumably because Cllrs don't trust residents with the details. They make promises, for example, that income (from, say Finsbury Park events) will be 'ringfenced' but refuse to say how the money was spent. 

Years back, they promised to ringfence £600k (from selling off the Citizens Advice Bureau building) for HTH maintenance and repair. The HTH Assembly Hall leaked - money wasn't spent, the cost of the refurb escalated - walls, ceilings, panelling etc got ruined. This helps to make it so there is 'no alternative' because it would cost 'millions' to refurbish, failing to mention that their neglect made it cost millions in the first place. 

To me, these are bad decisions - even if I'm wrong and it wasn't Cabinet Members for Finance that took the big financial ones (possibly against advice) it is certainly their responsibility. Here we go again with another problem - they won't accept responsibility and resign - when did they ever?

They then blighted HTH for four years (2010-14) with the crazy notion that they could give the £150m campus to a £5m-turnover private school.

When that blew up in their faces they then rapidly decided to spend nearly £2m on a confidential EU procurement exercise to find someone to take HTH off their hands. They spent zero on investigating how the community could run HTH themselves. They gave away a £150m campus so as to save them having to pay its refurb and running costs. That is terrible value for money when it pays its way and refurb grants are available. They gave the Ally Pally Theatre and BBC studios £6.8m last year and obtained £17m in refurb grants for it - I reckon HTH could be refurbished for £2m from them, added to the £4m grant already available.

There are 130 small business people working there at the moment - if they're all paying £100 per month per desk, that's over £150k/yr and the place is still being used as a film location (e.g. by Disney for 10 days last month). I know, I keep a list ('film' tab).

By having more than one 'prestige' tenant they could make a small profit that would, over time, finance a larger refurb loan and pay them back more than they put in.

Residents are not allowed to see into the details of what income was received and where it went - that's a job for Cllrs on our behalf and we don't trust them according to surveys.

So maybe it's time to return to first principles and adopt sortition again (like Jury Service, everyone gets a turn to make the decisions). Would we be worse off?

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on November 4, 2017 at 16:44

Senior Councillor resigns, Hornsey Town Hall affected?
Here is a highly critical resignation letter from long-term Haringey Cllr Stuart McNamara (Labour, Bruce Grove) to our Council Leader (Cllr Claire Kober), seemingly 'leaked' by Cllr Carter, (Lib Dem, Highgate) here.

Cllr McNamara has been a Cllr since 2010, often at the very heart of the Council as Cabinet Member, Chair and member of various Cttees and Scrutiny Panels.
His letter informs our Council Leader that he will not stand in the forthcoming May 2018 local elections because her leadership has made the Council's position untenable. Things 'stagger from bad to worse'. What she has done (to the Borough and her own Labour Party) 'has to stop'.

He gives his insider overview of what he sees as her autocratic leadership, citing poor decisions, money wasted, opportunities missed and general hubris displayed, all at the expense of the poorest in our Borough.

Our Council Leader is attempting the biggest transfer of Council Land and Property ever proposed in the UK. She is embarking on a joint venture with a £2bn overseas developer (the 'HDV' deal with Lendlease), assisted by the HTH decision-maker, Cllr Alan Strickland (Cabinet Member for Housing and Regeneration).

Cllr McNamara is appalled at HDV itself and the way it has been brought about, alleging a cover-up.

Cllr McNamara gives prominence to HTH as one of the many bad deals his Leader has presided over (a 'giveaway').

If the letter provokes any changes they might very well affect the future of HTH. If you're in the mood for long reads here is the full text:
--- Cllr McNamara 'note' to Council Leader Cllr Claire Kober ---
3rd November 2017
Dear Claire,
As you know, I have recently spent some time travelling and with my family. I returned this week and, although I have been kept informed of developments during my absence, nothing could have prepared me for recent events at the council, especially as we are a mere six months away from the local elections in May 2018. Whether the fact that your intransigence over the HDV has now led to the council being dragged through the courts, your stubborn determination to close Park View Road, your giveaway that is the Hornsey Town Hall deal or countless other bad ideas such as the Highgate Library plan, things just stagger from bad to worse.
Haringey Council’s current position is increasingly untenable, as a result of the way you have personally chosen to lead the organisation, especially over the past couple of years. This has, in turn, had a significant impact on my view of the health of the council and on my future intentions. I am and always have been a loyal Labour Party member and it is for that reason that I feel what you have done to the borough and party, and continue to do, has to stop.
Somebody has to call you out on your wrecking ball tactics and horrific wasting of public money on nonsense vanity projects whilst council services are starved of cash or sold off to the lowest bidder, making horrendous Tory government cuts even worse. This government and its behaviour towards the most vulnerable in our society is an absolute scandal; I am not suggesting they are not the core cause of the council’s financial predicament, rather that your ideological determination to pursue out-dated and maverick policies, whilst losing sight completely of the Labour values we are supposed to stand for, has made a very bad situation immeasurably worse.
When you became leader, nine years ago, we all welcomed new blood and a fresh injection of young talent into the local party. You had joined us in Haringey with a number of friends from Labour Students and the National Union of Students. You all quickly assumed central roles and responsibilities. The council’s reputation and recent history had warranted change and you came to us at a time of crisis at Haringey Council when a fresh direction was urgently needed. Like many people, I initially supported your leadership. You had, and still have, a right to be objectively and fairly judged on the merits of your leadership. Sadly, and on that basis, your leadership has been largely focused on the ideological pursuit of a poorly thought-through version of a commissioning and out-sourcing council.
Many of the policies you have pursued and subsequently rolled out, often in the teeth of significant opposition from a wide range of others within the Haringey Labour Party, have been badly researched and untested, have squandered significant amounts of taxpayers’ money and ultimately caused great harm to council services. You have operated in your role as Leader of the Council as though Haringey were your own personal fiefdom, consistently ignoring the views of others and prioritising bad policies time and time again and, in the process, you have caused incalculable damage to the Labour Party in Haringey. You have shown yourself to have little or no regard or respect for party members, a sizeable number of Labour councillors, both Constituency Labour Parties and both Members of Parliament. Considering that you are Chair of London Councils and regularly speak on behalf of the Local Government Association on issues pertaining to London, I am at a complete loss as to where you actually get your mandate from when you clearly have used your position in Haringey for your own personal political advancement, at the expense of even moderately constructive relations with others here in Haringey. You have projected a falsely positive view of Haringey to other local authorities and people of influence elsewhere in local and central government that is increasingly divorced from the reality on the ground. You have also placed a far higher importance on having good relations with private developers than with others in the Labour Party in Haringey and with residents, the very people we were elected to support and represent.
We are now facing your third term of office and we do this under a Conservative government which is fragile but which has managed to inflict incalculable damage on local residents through its austerity programme and through swingeing cuts to local government. I have voted against some despicable cuts proposed under your leadership yet I have been loyal to those collective Labour Group decisions, which have gone through anyway, without much serious analysis and with many Group members sadly being largely incurious about alternatives. You have only maintained a narrow majority in the Labour Group throughout your time in office and you have done this through a combination of patronage and punishment. Many of my colleagues have, unfortunately, been willing to let you run the council without their input.
Although you have loyal courtiers and enforcers that you actually have some sort of relationship with, the vast majority of us, elected local Labour representatives, are strangers to you, uninvolved with decision-making and powerless to influence the council’s direction. Our interventions are regarded with suspicion and hostility and you have attempted to publicly humiliate some of us with suspensions, formal warnings and demotions, so as to keep us in our places.
In the last budget round, we voted to cut meals on wheels, close day care centres for the elderly, close a recycling centre, begin charging for some waste services and shut down children’s centres across the borough. You put to us a proposal to increase council tax for residents with disabilities and to sell off our parking services team. This was voted down, but so was our counter-proposal to increase council tax. We have been left with the nonsensical legacy of your cast iron commitment to keep a promise you made in a manifesto many years ago. What makes this remarkable is that this is the only manifesto commitment you have ever truly kept and when the government is reducing, to zero, the funding it gives us, your position look stubborn and asinine rather than principled. You are strangling the services we deliver.
You have overseen a culture where a core group of senior officers and a few members of Cabinet set the policy direction of the council whilst backbench councillors are ignored. This was the case after the August 2011 riots when dozens of ward councillors like me were side-lined and you sought to empower self-appointed and unelected ‘community leaders’, including the group you recommended that nearly scuppered the IPCC investigation into the death of Mark Duggan. You have consistently made statements declaring that almost everything we have, and do, to be a failure and then outsourcing or selling it off, sometimes under very dubious circumstances. The exception to this of course being schools, where you have taken credit for improvement and at the same time actively encouraged schools to leave council ownership and seek academy status. You are generous with council resources, waiving rents and large payments from powerful organisations when it suits you and you condone councillors dining out and enjoying corporate hospitality when the meals on wheels service has been cut. All too often, Labour councillors and residents find out about these things after the event, through member enquiries or FOI requests.
What you are currently planning to do through the council’s proposed partnership with Lend Lease which was, in effect, sprung on all of us when it was too late to plead for reason and restraint, is splitting the Labour Party and putting you at odds with almost everyone else, including a number of your Cabinet. The HDV was not in any manifesto and yet you have pursued it through a covert and incremental approach, duping fellow councillors who sat on the Future of Housing Review about the sheer size and scale of the plans. Both MPs and both the Tottenham Labour Party and the Hornsey & Wood Green Labour Party actively oppose it. It is also opposed by a sizeable and growing number of local residents, local groups and businesses and has dragged the council into the High Court and the press for all the wrong reasons and at great expense to the Haringey taxpayer. You have totally ignored the scrutiny process, which was far more thoughtful, thorough, and in-depth than anything you, or officers, could deliver and you have sought to insult the intelligence of your fellow councillors and the public by peddling the pretence that the council has undertaken meaningful consultation and has met its Public Sector Equality Duty. It is disappointing, yet sadly very familiar, this same pattern of you seeking to force through unpopular, expensive, and incompetent and poorly thought-out policies. You seem to have no inherent ability to either listen to others or know when something is simply a very bad idea. Your Thatcheresque ‘I have no reverse gear’ isn’t a sign of strength of leadership or character but an abysmal flaw whereby you see compromise as weakness.
The One Borough One Future Fund (£668,745 in Tranche 1 paid out in 2012 out of the £1.5 million fund set aside to give grant funding to various organisations without any evidence of their track record in delivery), the iMPOWER contract (£2,000,000 paid up to May 2017 with little concrete evidence of how this was good value for money and whilst the youth service budget was slashed), the N17 Design Studio (estimated in June 2015 as costing the council £351,037 for refurbishment and running costs, now likely to be much higher than this, for an architect firm that left after the free money stopped and yet was awarded contracts on Apex House and another site in Tottenham Hale), 51 Degrees North (£406,618 for a failed experimental lettings firm that only secured a handful of tenants and then collapsed) and a seemingly endless list of other bad and failed ideas have seen your administration squander millions upon millions of pounds of finite council money on trendy and exciting sounding fads, almost all of which failed to deliver on their original aims and objectives and with no-one held to account and the council patting itself on the back at each turn on its dynamism and willingness to experiment with new ideas.
These ideas weren’t dynamic; they were incompetent attempts to reshape the very nature of what the Council is for, without the necessary expertise or common sense to see that, irrespective of how good or exciting these ideas might have been, they were experiments nonetheless and badly researched ones, whilst vital public services had almost identical sums of money slashed from their budgets to fund these irresponsible gambles. Haringey Council is a local authority, not a bank or a hedge fund and the loans to Chicken Town (£90,000 grant, £210,000 loan and a further £40,000 loan) and other local hipster ventures are further evidence of poor decision-making, especially when the amount of money you have personally allowed to be spent on all of these things could have kept our adult social care homes open and fully funded our youth service and a range of other council services. For every one of these bad and costly decisions there have been desperately needed public services you have been willing to shut down at the flip of a switch that could have been kept open if you had been willing to listen to what your colleagues and the residents of this borough have been trying in vain to say to you.
You promised that when Customer Services moved from Apex House and Station Road to Marcus Garvey Library and Wood Green Library that services would be improved. It is now clear that these were bad moves and cost huge sums of money for the borough to end up with an inferior library service at both sites and a diminution in Customer Services’ front counter capacity. You were told this was likely to be the case but you simply wouldn’t listen. The same is true for Osborne Grove; a site that we as councillors were assured would be a centre of excellence, yet following a recent damning report by the Care Quality Commission was rated as inadequate. Your response was to suggest it is sold with no one held to account and no immediate commitment to maintaining and improving services there. The same is also true for the Youth Zone proposal, which plumbed new depths when it came to bad ideas written on the back of an envelope. No proper thought was given to the inoperability of a single site, the Friends of Chestnuts Park were neither consulted nor involved and the project would have breached guidance in relation to construction on metropolitan open land. In none of these scenarios have you ever demonstrated responsibility or contrition when they have gone belly up as a result of rushed, poorly researched and contentious proposals. If anything, the more contentious the proposals have been, the more enthusiastic you appear to have shown yourself to be.
When proposals like these inevitably went south, as most of them have, you have simply carried on as normal without a glimmer of remorse and with no one taking responsibility amid an ugly fog of hubris that seems to have taken hold at council headquarters in Wood Green. The more people disagree with you, the more you believe you are right. This is not a way to lead people and in the process you have become increasingly isolated. At this years Labour conference, the leader’s speech appeared to condemn Haringey, without naming us, over our reliance on developers to set local political policy. Your response to the party leader was childish defiance on the issue of ballots for people whose homes are threatened with destruction and who face exile. You are contemptuous of the party you have used to obtain power and personal importance and all you have left to rely on is your record, which is dismal.
We all recently learned of the existence of a Shadow HDV Board, which has apparently been meeting in private, and before any Cabinet decision to proceed with the HDV took place. This sums up what you stand for and the utter contempt you appear to have for almost everyone around you and the very people that put you where you are. I am disgusted how councillors and the public were deceived on this and this, along with the fact that you attempted to interfere in the selection interview process by submitting spurious allegations about fellow candidates that you happen to dislike, is for me the final straw. Haringey Council is fact becoming a Loony Right imitation of Militant on your watch.
I have therefore concluded that I cannot be a fellow candidate with you in the forthcoming local elections and have written to the Haringey LCF to inform them that I am withdrawing my name from the list of prospective candidates. I will be stepping down from the council at the end of my term of office in May.
The Labour Party in Haringey is a force for good, as exemplified by our two brilliant Members of Parliament, the many good ward councillors we have and our thousands of members drawn from every corner of the borough and every walk of life. I am optimistic that common sense can prevail and the Labour Party in Haringey will be able to unify around the sensible, popular and desperately needed policies outlined in the 2017 Labour Party Manifesto and resoundingly win the local elections in May 2018. For that to happen you need to fundamentally change the way you do things and listen to sensible voices around you, including by immediately halting the HDV. If you genuinely cannot bring yourself to actually listen, involve others and change the way you do things then for the sake of Haringey and of the Labour Party you probably need to just resign before you cause any more harm to this great borough.
Regards,
Stuart
Stuart McNamara
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on November 5, 2017 at 14:43

Hi Billy - I can't reply to your level 8 post so here it is at level 1:

You wrote: "How do you know Chris, that various councillors have no clue about the portfolio they are responsible for?
You make an awful lot of assumptions and strawman arguments in your rather epic post."

I didn't mean to imply that Cllrs have no clue, I just note that having met both of the Cllrs who are Cabinet Members for Finance, I doubt very much that they can read a balance sheet.

That's OK in a representative democracy (the classic political justification goes) and there a many, many others who can't - you only need to if you're involved in business and few are. In most of the stuff Cllrs deal with they seem to concentrate on outcomes rather than means and those require a 'triple bottom line' that is not shown in the numbers business use.

My point is that, as Councils are not seen as doing well in business scenarios, perhaps it's because Cabinet Members for Finance are not very good at business? Our recently departed Chief Exec came from Barnet, which has had the hell privatised out of it so I guess he did the same here. 

It seems to me that the chief skill needed in Finance is to be able to assess what is value for money. Also, to make judgements as to how much, for instance, we should keep in reserve (Labour Trade Unions saying Haringey has far too much) and how much to allocate for priorities such as HTH.

It's clear to me that an awful lot of our money has been wasted over HTH and it's helped them justify the emergency action of getting rid of it at any price. For example, the interim use that has revivified it could have been started a decade ago, why wasn't it?

The £4m refurb grant (that Planning Services told me they'd apply for) could have been obtained and spent years ago, saving us a fortune as not only was it not, but the failed 'Creative Trust' neglected to use the funds the Council promised to 'ringfence' (from selling off the Citizens Advice Bureau adjacent in Hatherly Gardens) for its upkeep and thus is rotted ruinously.

As to the strawmen, you're implying that a balanced argument would be more persuasive.  If only! Everyone with an opinion on local government matters bases it on their innate prejudices because we simply don't have access to the facts and resources the Council hold. So, by 'guessing' eventually, we discover things we otherwise wouldn't - it's an invitation to take the straw man down, Billy - fancy having a go? 

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on November 5, 2017 at 19:19

There you go again with your straw men!

My whole argument rests on my claim that the Council is not getting good enough value for money when it does deals, Billy - I'd like to know why so I can help improve things.

I completely agree that you don't need to have expertise in your portfolio to be good at it but I ask again, why do they do such bad financial deals particularly?

Could it be that those with more than a basic financial understanding would do better?

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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on November 6, 2017 at 10:13

If you're not saying if the deals are good or bad then is this the right thread for you?

I think the HTH deal is a bad one and I'd like to know if it's the finance Cllr who made it -  after all, it must be more than allocating funds for priorities - they congratulate one another on their endeavours.

If HTH is a bad deal and it's not the finance Cllrs who made it, I'd still like to know how it came about. To evaluate, the first thing I want to know is how does the money stack up?  A proper accounting is the least they owe us but it seems impossible to obtain - shurely shome mishtake?

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