Two Tier Government of Havering

Today, Autistic Conservative Charlie Keeble writes in the Havering Daily.

The local government elections this year are taking place on 5th May to elect 23 councillors to Havering Town Hall. I am out campaigning with my fellow Conservatives to help our candidates make themselves known to the electorate. It is a good and noble thing to be working to serve your community and I am proud to be working hard to campaign for the best candidates that I know. 

One of the best things that I like to hear from the residents is how well the borough is run. I don’t just mean this from the action and work of the Conservative councillors, but the Havering Town Council itself and all it’s staff. To my surprise I often find that when it comes to discussing the politics of the candidates they tend to conflate the work of the councillors with that of the national government and the metropolitan assembly. 

For most people the council is a boring, functional entity that you only seem to care about when things go wrong. Like when there is pile of rubbish overflowing in a park bin. But it’s important to care and be aware of what they do, as they have a more visible presence in your everyday life than your national government. Councils are about school places and park management, not the education system and the way the environmental health of green pastures is run. 

This got me thinking about the way residents understand their government’s roles and the differences between their functions and responsibilities. To find out I decided to take a look at how Havering is run and what the differences there are between the Havering Borough Council and the Greater London Assembly. The two local governments oversee the following functions and services of their citizens.

Havering Council:▪ Housing, parking and roads, town planning, wastecollections, school places, social care, business rates, environment, libraries, parks, leisure centres, street lamps, funerals and public health. 

Greater London Assembly:▪ Policing, fire services, arts and culture, business and economy, environment, healthcare, housing and land, town planning, flood prevention, education and schooling, Transport for London and sports events. 

Now the two governments here may have the same dereliction of duties here in their administrations. But where the councils are concerned they deal with their residents in their boroughs of over 200 thousand people. The work they do involves public services that affect only the local people like the social care of the disabled or the Romford Market business rates. The London Mayor of the GLA deals with a city wide population of 9 million people that affects city wide issueslike the London Underground and the Police and Crime operations. 

Having these two governments however does not do the residents of Havering all that good a service. There are some things that the people of Havering desire from the council that the GLA can veto by the powers of the London Mayor. This means that we have two alternating layers of government that can put one borough at a disadvantage to another borough. It can also lead to one department of the local government having to put up with decisions that benefit the GLA but bring little or no profitability to Havering. 

One battle that has recently been fought between the GLA and Havering Council is the housing crisis. The Mayor puts quotas to the boroughs to say that they need to build these number of houses. This is to provide more houses in Havering that can also be used to house residents from neighbouring boroughs, even though Havering Council likes to prioritise it’s own people’s housing requirements. That can lead to Havering becoming over built and turned into an inner city concrete jungle, and when there is a lack of infrastructure it puts a strain on local services when there are too many people to provide for.

Now there have been some building projects that have been approved, but some of them are not made with the intention of supplying new housing exclusively for locals but new residents from within London. One such example is the Beam Park project in Rainham. This was initially started by the London Mayor Boris Johnson in 2015 to deliver 26,500 new homes for new residents in Barking and Rainham and a new c2c rail station to redevelop South Hornchurch.

Havering Council initially backed it in 2016, but then they pulled out when they realised they couldn’t afford to build it.The council couldn’t provide the resources to build the station so they passed the project onto the GLA by which time Sadiq Khan became Mayor. Now for some reason during the course of this takeover of the Beam Park construction the railway station had never been approved by the Department of Transport. 

Transport Minister Chris Heaton-Harris said in Parliament that the DfT told the GLA in 2017 that the station had a business case that was “very poor” and should be reconsidered. This issue was raised again a year later but the GLA did not contact them for more than two years later about it. This does not surprise me considering how bitter and resentful Mayor Khan behaves in his duties. He acts as if he is running London against Westminster like a rival leader for Londoners. 

So with one local government handling the station’s construction and the central government having approval of the project the Beam Park project came to nothing. The GLA is in charge of railways in London but c2c saw that the railway station was not profitable enough. The cancellation of the train station led to the housing project’s collapse, as the developer believed that it would result in derelict buildings now that there would be no interest in people moving in. 

There may have been tensions between the GLA and DfTabout how the project was going, which also affected Havering. This shows that having two sets of governments for Havering results in non-cooperative action when one of them is at loggerheads with each other. This gets annoying for Havering because it leads to friction and disagreement. Previously I wrote about how London operates like a city statethat dictates the fortunes of the rest of the country, and in turn the GLA mandates the boroughs to serve the interests of the Mayor that are not always in favour with the residents. 

Perhaps it’s time to consider that change of organisation of the GLA to cooperate better with Havering. The local governmentthat gets the final say on what the boroughs and Greater London should have is very subjective, and it depends on the flavour of your politics. Perhaps there would be fewer conflicts if Havering’s council leader also stood as a GLA representative. The kind of which where the GLA members match the boroughs they come from. Some of the Conservative GLA members and Havering councillors seem to think so.

I think the outer boroughs like Havering get so little in rewards from the GLA that they should break away and leave the GLA to work for Inner London from Chiswick toWoolwich.