Setting the record straight archive

Wednesday October 5, 2011

Fee-paying headteacher attacks Tower Hamlets school

Tower Hamlets Council is hitting back after a claim made by the head of a fee-paying London school has reached national headlines.

Speaking at the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, David Levin, head of the £12,000 a year City of London School, claimed that London is ‘sleep-walking towards apartheid’ as children in inner-city schools are ‘taught in ghettos’.

He cited Stepney Green Maths and Computing and Science College as an example simply because 97% of the school’s pupils are from a Bangladeshi background.

With pupils securing their best ever GCSEs in Tower Hamlets this summer, and 62 per cent achieving five A* to C passes including maths and English, the council is clear about its take on Levin’s claims:

“Using a word like ‘apartheid’ to describe the situation in schools is not only misleading but highly irresponsible. Comparing education in London to an oppressive system that was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people was extremely ill-judged.

“It would be alarmist to suggest that there is 'apartheid' in East London just because children and young people are receiving their education among other pupils of the same ethnicity.
 
“We do not judge our pupils' success on the basis of whether they attend schools with pupils who happen to be of the same ethnicity, but on the quality of education they receive and their progression in educational attainment with internationalism promoted as a core principle in the learning environment.
 
“The East London community is very proud of the fact that it has many people from a diverse range of backgrounds living, working and learning together; a community that celebrates and champions its diversity as not only an inspiration but a source of strength and cohesion."

Mayor Lutfur Rahman has also publicly backed Stepney Green School, by adding:

“I was extremely concerned by Mr Levin's words. I know he has a well-regarded reputation within the education sector and I believe he shares my desire for an excellent education for all our young people. However, I feel his words were both inflammatory and focused on the wrong target. 

“Firstly, this is not a community that has chosen to segregate itself. It is a community that has limited choices, in terms of where they live and where they can attend school.

“I am most concerned about the government cuts further limiting the choices of communities. This is particularly the case with the cuts to housing benefits, which has a danger of dividing London and our borough further along the lines of income.

“This is why I am committed to building more social housing across the borough and maintaining investment in the Building Schools for the Future programme.

“Mr Levin's concern would be better directed at those who do have the luxury of choice in terms of where they live and where to send their children to school.

“Whilst choices for many of our residents are limited, our pupils are making the most of their education as highlighted by our excellent results – provisional results show that this year our pupils achieved their best ever GCSE grades, with 62 per cent achieving at least five A* to C passes including English and maths. Furthermore, we as an authority take community cohesion very seriously and are working with schools to give our pupils the chance to explore a wide range of experiences.

“I welcome Mr Levin to continue his work in Tower Hamlets and invite him to give opportunities for all our pupils to mix with pupils at his school.”

Paramjit Bhutta, headteacher at Stepney Green School, has given his reaction to the comments. He said: “I am proud to be the headteacher of Stepney Green School. The school is ‘Outstanding’ in Ofsted judgements and has been transformed into a highly effective educational institution. The school is value-led and the children’s work on community cohesion and supporting charities is second to none.

“We ensure that the students have extensive links to other communities by developing work, with other schools and partners, nationally and internationally.

“The school has strong links with Mr Levin, headteacher of the City of London School, through our gifted and talented programme. The students are achieving well above the national level, driven by outstanding students, parents, staff and governors.

“I am pleased to say that our students value, respect and work with communities from all around the world. The staff are themselves from all around the world; the students develop wonderful relationships with these staff and turn to them for advice and care.

“Mr Levin has been a supporter of Stepney Green School for a number of years and our relationship becomes stronger each year. The words ‘ghetto’ and ‘apartheid’ are not words that come to mind when describing schools like Stepney Green. Instead, I would use inspiring, aspirational, compassionate.

“The students look forward to their rightful place in the global community and they develop a sense of duty and responsibility towards their own community, but also communities around the world who need a helping hand.”

Friday February 4, 2011

Tower Hamlets Council statement on appearance fees paid to celebrities

Recent media coverage has highlighted the amount of money the council previously spent on hiring celebrities to present at staff awards and other events. In previous times before the huge cuts made by central government to our funding, this was something we and many other local authorities had arranged as a non-financial reward for our hard working and high performing workforce. However, we would like to set the record straight and make it clear that it is a practice we have long since stopped, and our focus is now very much on protecting the many support services that our residents need and rely on. Our full statement is provided below:

"The Council like many many public sector organisations did from time to time recruit the services of guest speakers and celebrities at events, where it was judged that their involvement would help in the promotion of a key service or motivating staff.

Many public organisations use this technique as a non financial reward for staff and as such is not unusual. We have long been a high performing council and have previously hired a well known speaker to address our staff awards ceremony.

However given the financial constraints facing all public sector organisations we have long since discontinued this practice for our staff awards."

Friday 16 July 2010

Excellence in the East End

Your council is committed to providing the best possible services to you, the local resident.

We’re a high performing council – we have some of the best services for children and older people in the country. Our young people achieved their best ever GCSE results last year and we are now in the top 10 performing UK authorities for reduction of waste taken to landfill.

Our Annual Residents Survey results show that local people are more satisfied than ever with local public service providers and feel more informed and involved in the services we provide.

In order to maintain these high level services we aim to recruit and retain the best possible staff for the job.

Some of our staff are paid over £50,000, as we outline in our recent Council papers (pdf). This is similar to many other public sector organisations and is not unusual for an organisation of the size of the council, which employs nearly 10,000 staff.

Good management is going to be even more important as we face some challenging financial decisions in the light of national cuts and fewer grants coming through from the Government.  

We’ve already announced that we’re starting to deliver these savings this year by removing vacant positions and reducing the use of agency staff.

There are going to be challenging times ahead, but we’re committed to protecting the excellent services that mean so much to our residents.

Tuesday 2 March 2010

Channel 4 's Dispatches programme

Channel 4 's Dispatches programme, ' Britain's Islamic Republic', presented a picture of Tower Hamlets which many who live and work in the borough fail to recognise. Supposition and innuendo replaced the facts about a place with a proud tradition of anti-racism and where social cohesion is evident. Mr Gilligan presented little of substance and nothing that demonstrated that Tower Hamlets Council has acted improperly.

Some of the comments made during last night's programme are familiar to us and have already been investigated. We will examine any evidence of illegal or inappropriate activity by council officers or councillors, should any evidence be provided to us. We accept that there will always be some members of the community who are unhappy about losing grant funding and urge people to come forward with any proof they may have that grants have been provided unfairly, either to the Council or the appropriate complaints/government body.

We will continue to assess and appraise rigorously all of the groups we fund, to ensure that their aims and objectives are in line with our own - to deliver excellent, cost-effective services based upon the needs of our communities. 

In the early 1990s, Tower Hamlets faced the challenge of the far-right making in-roads into the borough. The response from the Council was to reflect on what these divisions, usually seen as racial, meant for the borough and particularly how to create a place that could appreciate its diversity, tackle the inequality which often results and shapes a cohesive community. Anchored in this anti-racist work, the Council has developed its equalities practice so that, thirteen years later, in 2006, we became the first Council to reach Level 5 of the Equality Standard for Local Government. This journey is the real story of Tower Hamlets.

The simplistic, selective and unsubstantiated narrative produced by Mr Gilligan fails to recognise the efforts of the community and the Council to engage all of our residents in local democracy. It did not acknowledge that, far from serving only some sections of the community, our priorities are the elderly, the young, those living in over-crowded conditions, carers - all those who need help and support, irrespective of their personal views.

Our You Decide! programme, now in its second year, allocated £4.76 million to local people across the borough who chose how the money should be spent. Grants in the borough are subject to rigorous external audit and scrutiny and we have yet to see any evidence of the 'wrongdoing' in this area implied by Mr Gilligan.

Far from shifting our grant-giving to fund only 'non-secular '  groups, we fund over a hundred local  groups covering all aspects of social welfare.  These groups provide valued and diverse services, and are run by people from all sections of the community, who believe that Tower Hamlets is a place where people of different faiths, political views, and cultures can and do live and work together. We have not given the East London Mosque £10 million of funding, and we and refute any unfounded allegations against council officers unreservedly.

Tower Hamlets Council is not oblivious to the make-up of its communities and the tensions which can arise in response to the kind of allegations made in monday night's programme.  Nor are we complacent about the kinds of activities we acknowledge would concern our residents were they proven to be accurate.  We have made huge efforts to pull Tower Hamlets away from a position where those who might seek to divide our community are able to find support. We hope that Mr Gilligan's efforts do not assist those who would take us back there. 

View the Council's Mainstream Grants and Corporate Match Funding programmes (pdf, 29 kb)

View the Council's Working Neighbourhoods Fund programmes (pdf, 17 kb)

Friday October 2 2009

Joint Director of Human Resources

You may have seen coverage in the media this week relating to the position of the Joint Director of Human Resources at Tower Hamlets Council and NHS Tower Hamlets.

The coverage regarding the severance package that the Joint Director will receive is wholly inaccurate. 

Deb Clarke is not receiving £300,000 or any comparable amount, neither will she receive a pension 'top-up'.  This was made clear to the media involved, but was not reflected in the finished article. 

The Council's Monitoring Officer will be formally interviewing those involved in the decision to make this post redundant to identify the source of this inaccurate and damaging information.

Thursday 17 September  2009

East End Life

Despite recent reports to the contrary, the cost of East End Life has not gone up and remains at 2.3p per copy.

The £396,000 overspend reported relates in fact to the entire Communications budget at Tower Hamlets - and is a mid-year projection of where we would be at year end if no action were taken.

In fact, we constantly keep budgets under review and have already brought the projected overspend down to £277,000 and fully expect it to be within budget by year end. It's tight budget management like this that allows Tower Hamlets to have the seventh lowest council tax in the country.

Local and regional newspapers are most definitely struggling but to continually claim that it is council free sheets - which do a totally different job to independent newspapers - that are killing them off is a red herring and prevents a proper exploration of the issues.

Councillor Joshua Peck
Deputy Leader
Tower Hamlets Council

Tuesday 18 August 2009

The East London Advertiser "Fury over council cash to bail out East End youth centre" article, 14 August 2009

The Council does not spend local taxpayers' money lightly, and the decision to save the Davenant Centre from closure was carefully and strategically made.

The Davenant Centre is an extremely important facility for the local community, the Council has a responsibility therefore to do everything within its power to save it from going under.

The £350,000 loan- and it is only a loan - will do just this and ensure that this vital community asset is retained for local people - while also safeguarding public and private funds previously invested in the centre. Our financial involvement also means we will be able to assert much tighter control over management of the centre in future.

The loan will be closely monitored through an agreed business plan, and the Council had already requested as a condition of the funding that court appointed Administrators undertake a high level enquiry into expenditure of the public funding to clarify whether there is any evidence of impropriety. Should there be evidence that requires further investigation then the Administrator will decide whether to appoint forensic auditors or how the matter should be handled. 

The Council does not have the authority to set up the public enquiry that has been suggested into the running of the centre and in the light of the detail set out in this correction note such an enquiry would in any event appear to be hasty and inappropriate.

29 June 2009

The Place Survey - a response from the Leader of the Council

You might have seen reports in last week's local media about the findings of the Government’s recent Place Survey. This article suggested that it revealed “hidden tensions” in Tower Hamlets as well as saying that the Council was planning to keep the figures “under wraps.”

he Council has no such intention, nor are we planning to ignore its useful lessons.

However, it is important to remember that out of a population of 200,000 people in Tower Hamlets only around 1500 were given the questionnaire and of these, just ¼ actually responded to it.

That said, the Council I lead is in no way complacent about the issues of community cohesion and anti-social behaviour that the Place Survey raises. But I believe that there is a lot more to community cohesion than obvious cultural differences between our communities. Inequality, deprivation, overcrowding and low-aspirations blight both white and ethnic minority communities in Tower Hamlets. This in turn drives the anti-social behaviour that is a source of mistrust and animosity between neighbours – no matter what their backgrounds.

That is why, under my leadership, the Council is investing £20 million in tackling overcrowding, £30 million in jobs and training and putting 20 new police officers on the streets – backed up by £500,000 of CCTV cameras. We have also been pushing hard to make sure that new developments in the borough bring in houses that our residents can actually afford to buy and rent – leading to more socially and ethnically mixed communities. And we’re doing all of this while protecting the East End’s rich heritage –  saving the Bancroft History Library, investing in Victoria Park or a memorial to those who died in the wartime Tube Disaster at Bethnal Green – so that generations of East Enders can celebrate what they have in common.

I genuinely believe that the Borough’s diverse communities get along much better now than they did twenty years or even a decade ago, but there are still trends that worry me and my Cabinet colleagues. For example the voluntary segregation we see in some of our schools and the new “gated” developments that cut residents off from the life of the borough. Tackling these problems needs time, commitment and collective effort.

Have we cracked it?  No, of course we haven’t.  But against a backdrop of the Iraq War, the 7/7 bombings, the glistening towers of Canary Wharf, the recession and the long queue for social housing, I think we are gradually making progress.  And whenever I see white and Bengali mums chatting after dropping their kids off at school in the morning, I feel more certain that is the case. 

Councillor Lutfur Rahman
Leader of the Council

3 October 2008

In today’s (Friday 3 October) Evening Standard an article appears which is both inaccurate and misleading.  The Evening Standard has been contacted by the council and has been asked to issue a correction and apology.  They have not yet agreed to do this, so in the meantime it’s important to set the record straight.

The story which was printed in the newspaper and published on the Evening Standard’s website is about the council’s Assistant Chief Executive, Lutfur Ali. But, the Evening Standard printed a picture of Tower Hamlets Council Leader, Cllr Lutfur Rahman. When the mistake was pointed out by the council, the Evening Standard removed the picture from its website and from its later editions. 

We want to make it absolutely clear that Lutfur Ali is not facing any investigation concerning his recent appointment as Assistant Chief Executive.   

Furthermore, no details of Lutfur Ali’s recruitment process have ever been released or confirmed by the council.  The Evening Standard has printed uncorroborated assertions which they should, in accordance with Press Complaints Commission guidance, verify by other sources and seek confirmation from the council which they failed to do.

The Standards Committee meeting on Thursday 2 October was not about any allegations against Lutfur Ali.

The committee only deals with complaints against councillors not officers. It’s a legal requirement that all complaints against councillors must be referred to the Standards Committee and the process for dealing with this is set out on other pages on this website. Please see Article 9 of the council’s constitution on the Standards Committee (Word doc, 208K).

The council has written to the Evening Standard to point out the inaccuracies in their story and seeking that they immediately publish a correction and apology.

Monday 4 February 2008

Response to a discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Any Answers programme on Saturday 2 February 2008

On Saturday 2 February 2008, a discussion took place on BBC Radio 4’s Any Answers programme that included comments from a Tower Hamlets Adult Social Care service user and a complaint about the standard of care received.

Whilst the council cannot go into detail about individual cases, people should be reassured that we have thoroughly investigated the circumstances of the person involved. We are satisfied that an appropriate level of care is provided.

Tower Hamlets Council is acknowledged as providing some of the best social care services in the country. Towards the end of last year we were externally rated as a three star service (the highest possible rating) for the fourth year in a row.

We have halved the rate of admission to institutional care in the last five years and are strongly committed to providing excellent preventative care services. All three of our Home Care teams have been assessed as ‘Excellent’ and we support older people with intensive home care relative to population than any other local authority in the UK. In addition, we are a national pilot for the extremely successful LinkAge Plus Partnership, providing joined up services to older people. Last year 13,000 people attended partnership events, 4,000 outreach contacts were made with isolated older people and 1,500 people a month use its services.

Whilst there are challenges facing social care services around the country, Tower Hamlets is one of the local authority areas which has not tightened its eligibility criteria for access to care services since the criteria were adopted in 2002.

We will continue to provide this high level service and are determined that we will meet the cost pressures we face in adult social care through maximising efficiency and not by cutting services.

We have contacted Radio 4 to make them aware of this.