Unemployment down except in Queensbridge: Pipe fears Boris betrayal

This is a brief look at how unemployment and Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) claims have fallen again in Hackney and whether the economics suggest that this is likely to continue. 

I'm afraid there are a lot of charts here. If you want a closer look, click on them and they should expand. The data comes from the government's labour market statistics site Nomis.

Hackney canals, concrete, olympics and maps

Above is a call to arms for a Waltham Forest council planning committee on Tuesday. I haven't been following this story but will try and keep up. You can find the details of the proposals here, and it will be discussed at a meeting tomorrow, 7 February 2012. The story was recently covered by East London Lines.

Below is a map of where I have been counting canal boats - I don't really know why I'm doing it yet! If you click on the red dots you'll open a bubble which gives you a list of dates and the number of boats at that spot on those dates. Some of them have photos (Old Ford Lock for example) but most haven't and I'm working on that *(I've just noticed that the data is not the latest set either - it's all a bit experimental at the moment!).

I am also hoping to convert the data I have into eye-friendly charts, a task that has so far proven too much for me - I would be grateful for any tips.






If anyone is wondering what life might be like aboard a canal boat in Hackney here's one boat owner's fairly regular account (no mention of the recent snow yet but the stormy weather last month was covered).

Canal boat statistics - help needed

For the last few weeks I've been counting the number of boats on the waterways on the edge of Hackney.  The stretches of water I looked at were between Markfield Recreation Ground (border of Tottenham and Hackney) down to Wenlock Basin (on the border of Hackney and Islington).

When I started I misinterpreted where the canals of Hackney ended and had to add some extra areas hence the sudden rise in the number of 'layers' at the top of the chart in the run-up to Christmas. 

Otherwise each layer represents the number of boats on a particular stretch of canal. These territories are stretches of water between landmarks, usually bridges, where small communities of boats have grown and then dispersed. 

(This also seemed to be happening on the canal bank too.  This picture shows what looked like the rise of a tiny shanty town growing on the fringes of Hackney Marshes - on the bank opposite the garbage truck area. It was there every week but had disappeared on the last trip, Saturday 28 January.)

As the chart shows, over the last few weeks the number of boats in and around Hackney peaked above 300 during Christmas and New Year. I'm hoping it will be interesting to watch how these boats move about particularly as the Olympics come and go. (Although a lot of the canal I'm looking at is not in Hackney at all but in Tower Hamlets and Walthamstow too.) 

Help needed

The chart has too much information on it to be able to show what area each layer represents and only some of them are listed  down the right hand margin but not all.  So I'm working on how to get all the information into a useable format that I can update. If anyone has any tips or advice it would be greatly appreciated. 

I'm trying to work out how to use Google fusion tables, you can look at the data and copy it etc here and I've also made the data public on something called Buzzdata (I'll make this link live when I've worked out how to use Buzzdata!). 

It's all new to me so any advice on how to collect data, whether this data is worth collecting, and how to present it would be very helpful particularly if anyone has any good examples I could copy.

Boris follows Jude to Petchey Academy

Jude Law and Boris Johnson have both dropped in on the Petchey Academy in the last four weeks. Hopefully all is well at the school. But how would you know? Still no answer on whether a third of the teachers left the school at the end of last year.

Boris was at the school to launch a scheme to provide cheap Olympics tickets for Hackney pupils.

Did senior Hackney lawyer have two jobs?

Did Michael Sobell, Hackney's principal lawyer for property and regeneration from 2006-2009 have two jobs? And did his role at the borough include the olympics legacy?

These were questions that Blood and Property put to the council earlier this week.

No answer was supplied as to whether Sobell had responsibilities for the borough's Olympics work load.

Whether or not he dealt with the Olympics, Sobell was in his post during a difficult time when the borough's legal team was massively under-staffed.

During this period he appears to have been responsible for a parking debt recovery business - a suggestion that has been partially confirmed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

Blood and Property left messages with two call centre staff at Sobell's law firm Graham White but has not yet received a reply.

On August 17 Blood and Property asked the council:

1 What was his (Sobell's) role at the council was it full time or part time?
2 Was it acceptable for him to run a separate legal business while working for the council?
3 When was the council first made aware of his non-council work?
4 Do any other council solicitors run legal businesses that are not related to the council?
5 Did the council ever investigate Mr Sobell's activities beyond his role in the council?
6 Did his work outside the council breach any of the terms of his contract with the council?

In its first response Hackney Council said:

“Michael Sobell worked as an interim agency employee for Hackney Council on a full-time basis between November 2006 and June 2009. He was an Interim Principal Lawyer for Property and Regeneration. As this individual no longer works for Hackney Council, it would be inappropriate for us to comment any further.”

This week Blood and Property asked:

1. Did his role cover the olympics? This council document suggests that Mr Sobell might have had something to do with this.
2. Was Hackney council aware of his extra curricular activities?
3. Also, does Hackney Council check on the non-council commitments of its employees?


Hackney Council said:

“Michael Sobell performed his duties adequately. There is no evidence to suggest that he breached the terms of his engagement through the agency, while working for Hackney Council.”

“Permanent employees of Hackney Council must seek permission to conduct any secondary employment. This does not apply to agency staff. Michael Sobell was agency staff.”

These links suggest that Sobell had work commitments beyond his role at the council.

According to this message board, (http://forums.pepipoo.com/index.php?showtopic=52854&hl=hackney) a letter was sent to the mayor last month to complain about him.

This early mention of Sobell (Oct 2007) notes that he works for Hackney Council:http://ukrights.wetpaint.com/page/MattW+v+MacDonalds+(1)

More links to discussions : http://forums.pepipoo.com/lofiversion/index.php/t36102.html

Discussion about Graham White coincidence: http://forums.pepipoo.com/index.php?showtopic=52778 and here - http://forums.pepipoo.com/index.php?showtopic=25016&st=0&p=230019&#entry230019

And in 2010: http://forums.pepipoo.com/index.php?showtopic=52750&hl=hackney

Hackney Mayor vs Westfield, worlds largest retail property group

This story from "The Wharf" reported the London Assembly's economic development committee's (July 20 2010) discussion about the Olympics legacy.

It included the negative views from a couple of guest speakers on the media centre. One of these speakers was John Burton, the director of Westfield Stratford, who has worked for Westfield for 14 years. Wikipedia's Westfield page describes the company as: "the largest retail property group in the world by equity market capitalisation".

The Wharf report on this discussion said: "The media centre looks to be the most troublesome to fill after the Games with Anna Harding of Space Studios calling it a "monstrosity that is an insult to the creative community of Hackney". She also believes that the centre will need a great deal of further financial investment to turn it into a viable location to house businesses or creative and media companies.

The Wharf also reports: "John Burton, the director of Westfield Stratford City also expressed his concerns over the future of the media centre as there was no obvious tenant to take on ownership. He said: "The centre doesn't have a logical next step. Whether it should be a media facility or not, it will take time to decide. I wouldn't comment on what it should be used for but the biggest problem for the media centre for a developer is accessibility."

Here is Burton on video describing how helpful it was to sign-up John Lewis for his Olympic Park store... so he may be he knows about filling up spaces.

But apparently he's wrong. The latest edition of the Economist says Jules Pipe is pining his hopes on the media centre: "His main longer-term hope lies with the broadcasting and media centres in the Olympic Park. Hackney is home to lots of small firms in “creative” industries, from post-production work for Hollywood studios to printing and advertising, for which the media centre could become a new base. That in turn would spawn work in nearby coffee shops and so forth."

With notoriously problematic projects like The Ocean and Clissold Leisure Centre on his CV, maybe the people of Hackney should ask if the Mayor's faith in the project is backed by research - and whether the borough has managed to put its Local Economic Assessment together yet: Hole in council's economic analysis. (I should confess that I wrote both of these pieces without asking for a response from Hackney Council. I asked them for one today (friday) hopefully everything I've written so far is rubbish and I owe an apology and correction).

(This Building Design piece suggests Space Studios could be under threat)

Hackney space cat

Hackney brothel closure - and leadership update

A story posted in the Jewish Chronicle yesterday reported the closure of a brothel in Stamford Hill using a new law for the first time in Hackney.

Apparently complaints about the place had been made for "more than five years".

Both Detective Inspector Kevin Hyland from the Metropolitan Police and Hackney Labour Councillor, Sophie Linden, called the place a brothel.

Hyland said: "Residents were subject to anti-social behaviour and crime due to the presence of this brothel."

Linden said: "I hope that this successful use of new laws will give residents, who were complaining about noise and abuse from brothel visitors, a greater sense of security and peace of mind."

Good news for residents but taking five years to shut down a noisy brothel next to a children's centre doesn't sound reassuring.

Will this new law be put to use in other Hackney establishments? And could it be related to fears over a burgeoning sex industry in Olympic boroughs to cater for construction workers: Is prostitution in Hackney soaring?

OTHER 'NEWS':

An alleged conversation between Diane Abbott and another Labour MP - Wayne David - in the run up to the Party's leadership nominations. Conservative blogger Iain Dale, claims to be confident that the conversation took place in a lift in Portcullis House. Dale said: "And she wondered why she had difficulty in getting 33 nominations..."

Hackney legal dept recruiting crisis confirmed

Hackney Council has confirmed that its legal department has faced a recruitment crisis for the last three years. At least 25% of positions remained unfilled while the department had to deal with the extra work related to the Olympics in addition to its usual tasks.

In November Blood and Property asked if Hackney's legal team was 25% under-staffed and 50% outsourced?

The questions related to figures mentioned by Hackney's new legal chief in an interview with The Lawyer (links in the older story). This week Hackney Council confirmed these figures.

Questions for the council:

Blood and Property: Was the legal department about 25% under staffed and if so, why?

Hackney Council: Yes, partly due to recruitment difficulties; work previously externalised being brought back in-house, engaging agency staff to cover it pending a restructure

Blood and Property: How long has it been understaffed?

Hackney Council: has been the situation for three years.

Blood and Property: What percentage of the legal department's work has been taken up with contracts for the olympics - would it be possible to get a breakdown of what topics/issues take up most of the legal department's time?

Hackney Council: just under half the time of the five lawyers currently working on 2012-related matters (from staff of 50 including paralegal advisers). Top topics/issues taking up most of legal department’s time: host borough and ODA agreements; governance; planning; procurement.

Blood and Property: Is there a reason why 50% of the borough's work was out sourced before Edila started working at Hackney?

Hackney Council: HR matters, cannot go into further detail, plus recruitment difficulties.

Blood and Property: How much has the department's budget altered over the last few years or has it remained at around £6m? Also, does the department usually over or underspend?

Hackney Council: Budget has not altered, other than 2008/9 when small underspend, service has always been on budget.

Hopefully the council will provide a break down of other departments which are understaffed.

Is prostitution soaring in Hackney? Who are the customers?

The Sun published photos of Albanian gangsters selling women on Oxford Street today and said: "Worryingly, senior officers fear the numbers of East Europeans being trafficked is growing steeply as London prepares to host the Olympic Games in 2012."

But has the problem got worse since a Guardian report back in July? Then the police had noticed a "small increase in women being trafficked into the areas to work in brothels" although officers said they expected a "huge surge" into Olympic boroughs to cater for the 25,000-strong construction workforce and to prepare for millions of visitors in 2012.

Lets hope London is not like Chicago were research estimates that 3 percent of the sex acts performed by prostitutes were "freebies" given to Chicago police officers to avoid arrest.

A more indepth explanation of this claim on the Superfreakonomics website: "Of all the tricks turned by the prostitutes he tracked, roughly 3 percent were freebies given to police officers. The data don’t lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one."

And is prostitution the past-time of construction workers only? This report from the Independent in 1992 shows it probably isn't: "On the same day it re-emerged that at least two IOC members accepted offers of prostitutes from a bid committee trying to land the 1992 Olympic Games for Amsterdam. Prince Frederic von Saxe-Lauenberg said: "I was there [in 1986] and saw it, IOC members being offered women and two accepting."

The Guardian said that research carried out at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 showed that about 10,000 sex workers were operating in the area while in Athens, in 2004, the Greek government reported a 95% increase in the number of human trafficking victims. A story from 2003 said that the Greek authorities were even considering legalising brothels ahead of the games.
In August Boris Johnson said he would target this illegal sex industry by tackling their advertising - often with cards in phone boxes, by asking mobile phone companies to cut off the numbers.

The Sun said that the new unit had rescued 25 sex "slaves", 21 of these were related to the incident on Oxford Street.

APPARENTLY the cops now say that there isn't really that much of a problem (and this might answer the point below about some phone booths being free from sex ads) - this is from EastLondonLines - Olympic prostitution, an expensive non-event

4000 newts move to Hackney?

This piece in the Builder and Engineer said the Olympic project included an: "An ecologic action plan to protect habitats and wildlife including translocating 4,000 smooth newts, 100 toads, 300 common lizards and create over 1 hectare of new wildlife habitat on Hackney Marshes."

So, apparently, all of these newts are being moved to Hackney to the new wildlife habitat - or have they been sent somewhere else? And why so many of them compared to toads and lizards?

Libel and Leabank

Leabank Square blog hit the headlines yesterday with a story that has now been followed-up elsewhere.

Evening Standard: Olympic chiefs threaten to sue 'noise and dirt' blog

The offending material has been removed but blogger Sona Abantu-Choudhury insists: "...down here in the East End of London – it’s called a lie. The person telling the lie – is called a liar. Simple as!"

Good luck!

Diane Abbott: Church is only bastion of order in Hackney

A Parliamentary debate on knife crime (9 June) was mentioned in the Hackney Gazette last week. Like this report from the London Echo the Gazette focused on Diane Abbott's comments about educating mothers, not sending them out "to stack shelves".

In her speech she also raised concerns about the ability of mothers from some communities to parent effectively when not surrounded by their extended families. She also said that the church was sometimes the "only bastion of order" in inner-city boroughs.

Her views not only appear to conflict with government policy, but also with Hackney Council which is attempting to tackle its huge 'workless' (unemployed and not seeking a job) population. Hackney now also faces rapidly rising numbers of dole claimants.

The speech went down well with Conservative David Davies MP for Monmouth (Not David Davis former shadow Home Secretary): "It has been a pleasure to listen to the debate. I am sorry that the House is so empty at the moment, because the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) made, without doubt, the best speech of the afternoon; indeed, it was one of the best speeches that I have heard in this place."

Davies later said that he had visited areas like Hackney and felt intimidated by gangs of youths: "Frankly—I am sorry to have to say this—my thought on returning from one of those visits was, “Thank God I don’t live in that area and my children don’t go to school there.” That is just being honest."

Diane Abbott's response was: "I see the same groups on my way home, as I live in my constituency. I would say this to the hon. Gentleman: if you were a middle-aged black woman
and looked them straight in the eye, you might find that they took a step backwards."

(Diane may have learned her technique on how to handle difficult customers here: technique devised for keeping werewolves at bay)

To which Davies replied: "If the hon. Lady looked me straight in the eye in a venomous way, I would probably take a step backwards as well."

For a link to Diane Abbott's speech click here but scroll down the page to the speech.

Turn to the church?

In one part of her speech Diane Abbott made this surprising statement about the role of the church in areas like Hackney: "The answer to those problems is long-term; there is no question about that. We have to look at our policies on work, and look at how we support parents. We have to look at how we work with the Churches. I admit that I am not a regular church-goer myself, but often the only bastion of order, values and boundaries in inner-city areas is the Church."

The problems she was talking about were that mothers from communities which have a tradition of extended families are not equipped to deal with parenting on their own. She said that this had contributed to the rise in gang culture but she also pointed out that that it was possible to find top performing students and criminal gang members in the same family.

Abbott said: "In the summer holidays, when I took my bus pass—I am not a driver—and took my son to reading schemes in the library, or youth projects in museums, or whatever a person could take a little child to on a bus, I would often find that I was the only ethnic minority parent there. It is not that other minority parents in Hackney do not care for their children, but their notions of being a parent are limited.

"They perhaps come from cultures where the child would have been brought up collectively by aunties and grannies. Instead, they are isolated on some estate, and the aunties and grannies are not within reach. The parents are thrown back on to their own knowledge, which is limited.

"I take the view, I am afraid, that my Government’s emphasis on putting single-parent mothers out to work is wrong. Some of those single-parent mothers need first to be taught to be decent parents. Once they have been taught to be decent parents who are at home when their children come home from school, it will be time to talk about sending them out to work to stack shelves."

Abbott's view on educating rather than employing mothers not only conflicts with the government, it is also appears to conflict with Hackney Council's leadership which has made tackling worklessness a top priority over the last few years - lone parents get a special mention on Team Hackney's introductory page on the borough's economy)

Team Hackney provided further detail on plans to tackle worklessness in its Team Hackney Worklessness Model which "sets out the priority groups and associated targets relating to worklessness" with a "the primary focus" on workless 18 – 24 year olds but also adds that "Other priority groups include lone parents, people on incapacity benefits and those that are economically inactive."

On 10 June the Mirror picked-up DA's story about few Hackney unemployed getting jobs on the Olympic site. London 2012 Olympics: £1.1bn cost but just 115 jobless locals taken on