It was on both BBC and ITV’s London news, in the national media (here) and in London’s Evening Standard (here) this week: the country’s highest-paid council chief executive is leaving London’s poorest borough after only two years in the job. Despite intense media enquiry and speculation, no-one can or will find out why. This, after all, is the hyper-spun media-manipulating one-party New Labour borough of Newham. Think Peter Mandelson. Think Alastair Campbell. Throw in a budget-busting annual £2.5m publicity spend and you’ll get the picture. But you won’t get the facts.
Joe Duckworth was appointed chief executive just two years ago. It had been a long interregnum since the departure of predecessor Dave Burbage (who Box and Cox’d with Duckworth, ending up in the latter’s previous chief executive job on Isle of Wight council). Duckworth was installed in Newham with the brief of improving delivery of services and preparing the borough for the 2012 Olympics.
However it was his pay that became the story (here). Inevitably there is built-in organisational tension between Newham’s two chiefs, the elected executive mayor and the chief executive. To avoid Blair/Brown-style bad blood, mayor Sir Robin Wales fixed Duckworth with UK councils’ top pay packet of £241,000 a year (over £280,000 with pension and perks) and allowed him to continue to live in the Isle of Wight.
Throughout his two-year tenure Duckworth simply visited the borough for just three days a week and enjoyed a four-day weekend at home on the Isle of Wight.
(I called to see him about an urgent legal issue one Monday earlier this year. I sat on the phone in his plush office in Newham talking to him on the Isle of Wight. “It’s a detailed complicated matter,” he said. “It would be much easier if we could discuss it face to face.” Er… really?)
This was an appalling abuse of taxpayers’ money but Wales arranged it to buy Duckworth’s cooperation and amenability. Power-conscious Wales is the boss and he likes it that way. With classic Canning Town coarseness local people called it ‘Duckworth’s bend-over pay’.
The speculation now is that he will receive a £500,000 golden handshake (here), no doubt partly to buy his silence. The poor taxpayers of this deprived borough are likely to be screwed once again.
Why did Duckworth leave? Two separate sources have indicated the chief executive was escorted (‘frog-marched’ said one) out of the town hall on Tuesday evening. A middle-manager told me council bosses are internally promoting a story that Duckworth gave a £600,000 contract to a friend of his called Steve – which sounds to me like Mandelsonian dark arts of character assassination. Others have spoken of repeated clashes between Wales and Duckworth – which seems unlikely in view of the above.
One thing is for sure, we’ll never know for certain. We don’t know what goes on in Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea. Why should we know what goes on in Sir Robin Wales’ Newham?
Posted in Democracy, Newham Politics | 1 Comment »














