A New Chief Executive. Or Maybe Not?

Maria Christofi - Newham Council Chief Executive.

Credit Newham Council

Newham has a new Chief Executive.

Or does it?

Maria Christofi has now taken up the top job at Newham Council, having originally arrived from neighbouring Redbridge on an interim basis during the tenure of Paul Martin.

She came with a fairly straightforward mission.

Balance the books.

Get a grip on an organisation that had spent years lurching from one financial problem to another.

And, perhaps most importantly, put Newham Council back on the path towards something resembling stability.

No pressure then.

The early reviews from Dockside are, shall we say, mixed.

Those we have spoken to within the officer corps describe Christofi as ambitious, energetic and perfectly willing to hold the feet of those beneath her to the fire.

Whether roasting your senior managers is the best way to inspire them is another question.

Time will tell.

Political opinion is similarly divided.

Some councillors tell us she has ideas and appears determined to change things.

Others make a rather different observation.

Once again Newham has appointed someone stepping up into the Chief Executive’s chair rather than somebody arriving with a long hinterland of running a major local authority from the top.

Newham does seem rather fond of newly minted Chief Executives.

Perhaps this one will be different.

Because despite the change of name on the Chief Executive’s door, the impression we are getting is that much of Dockside remains stubbornly familiar.

The new political administration arrived after May’s elections with a fairly visible idea of what it wanted to do.

There was certainly no shortage of talk about change.

The question is whether the organisation underneath it is capable of delivering it.

And this is where things become rather more interesting.

We are repeatedly told that parts of the council’s senior leadership appear caught in a state of paralysis.

Meetings are held, Papers are written, options are considered.

More meetings presumably follow.

But the big decisions, the ones which actually change services and improve the lives of Newham residents appear rather harder to find.

Nowhere is this more obvious than housing.

The Temporary Accommodation Problem. Again.

Temporary accommodation was one of the defining problems of the previous administration.

It appears determined to become one of the defining problems of this one too.

The numbers, according to those we have spoken to, are heading in precisely the wrong direction.

More households are presenting as homeless.

The pressure on temporary accommodation continues.

And we have yet to see anything resembling a convincing public strategy explaining how Newham intends to get ahead of the problem rather than simply managing an ever-growing crisis.

This isn’t some obscure piece of council bureaucracy. Temporary accommodation costs enormous sums of money.

More importantly, behind every statistic is a Newham family living through the misery and uncertainty of homelessness.

That rather concentrates the mind or at least it should.

Which brings us to housing leadership.

Newham’s disastrous C4 regulatory judgement did not emerge from nowhere. Nor did the longstanding problems surrounding temporary accommodation. Many will remember that Cllr Shaban Mohammed was metaphorically and literally hung-out to dry over the debacle but what of senior officers at the time? (crickets).

The impression given to some of those we have spoken to is of a housing leadership that has spent rather too much time watching problems develop and rather too little time getting ahead of them.

Perhaps that assessment is unfair.

If so, there is a very simple way to prove it wrong.

Deliver!

Because residents really aren’t interested in the internal choreography of Dockside.

They don’t care who reports to whom.

They don’t care how many transformation boards, working groups or programme meetings take place.

They care whether somebody answers when their home needs repairing.

They care whether their family has somewhere safe to live.

They care whether rubbish gets collected, streets are clean, vulnerable people are protected and council tax is spent competently.

In other words, they care whether Newham Council works.

New Administration. Same Problems?

Mayor Forhad Hussain’s administration is still new.

It deserves the opportunity to demonstrate what it intends to do differently.

But political change without organisational change doesn’t get you very far.

If the politicians want to move in one direction while the council machine remains stationary, eventually somebody is going to have to decide which one moves.

Christoforou therefore has a rather bigger task than simply balancing the budget.

She has to demonstrate that Newham’s senior officer leadership can actually make decisions.

And then, even more unusually, implement them.

Housing and temporary accommodation will probably provide the first serious test.

The same problem helped consume enormous amounts of political and financial energy under former Mayor Rokhsana Fiaz.

It is already threatening to take centre stage under her successor.

Perhaps Maria Christofi really will turn out to be the new broom Dockside needs.

Perhaps the council will finally produce the bold ideas necessary to tackle temporary accommodation, restore confidence in housing and bring some discipline to the organisation.

We await developments with interest.

Breath-holding, however, remains strictly optional.