The Dame's young friend, The Rt. Hon Mr. Mogg, tells her it's not just Whitehall civil servants ripping us off.
Senior K&C officers are working from their homes in the leafy Home Counties whilst simultaneously claiming a fat London Allowance.
This is an insult to hard-pressed K&C taxpayers struggling to make ends meet.
If the Leader had any teeth she would be issuing a command..."I want you back in the office full time or you lose your London Allowance"
On the subject of teeth...one of the Dame's dear friends is Guy Oliver. Guy fought tooth and nail to save Kensington's Art Deco Odeon cinema(the cinema has now been so destroyed there is not a vestige of it left)
Guy had a great idea....why not bulldoze the Town Hall and develop the land for mixed housing?
A radical idea.... but not then of its time.
However, if senior council staff persist in defrauding us the Town Hall offices become redundant.
There is a good precedent for knocking down Spence's Neo-Stalinist horror. A new council chamber could be built in the north of the Borough....
Cllr Nicholas Freeman (older members slaver over this awful fellow) did exactly that with the beautiful old Town Hall in the weekend before it was listed....a nasty piece of work.
In the West Country Mogg is very much a diddycoy(gypsy) name
ReplyDeleteThe Moggs are not all they seem to be.
DeleteTell us more?
DeleteWell, his maternal grandfather was a Welsh lorry driver https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/22/jacob-rees-mogg-roots-conservative-mp
DeleteGoddam it, I thought he was from an ancient recusant family and 'one of us' with his own priest and private chapel. Turns out the fellow is a Welsh milkman.
DeleteNot quite accurate, Milord...his grandfather was the milkman....and don't be such a snob. He married above him
DeleteWhat a great idea. Sell the land for £150 million and build a new office and modest chamber for £30 million
ReplyDeleteThe Dame has taken a propaganda photo of the Town Hall. The carbuncle is the Council Chamber. Of course it should stand out. It is a shroud of mysterious events and passions. Including Mayor Andrew Dalton's gift of a silver service so that Councillors could dine in style after Council Meetings. And the hours spent by Cllr Palmer at Council Meetings tracking his share portfolio on his Mac computer. And Danny boy circling around pretty Cllrs Fielding-Mellen and Mosely on the back benches. Those were the days!
DeleteThe site is worth £300 million to developers
DeleteMoving the Town Hall to North Kensington would be a brilliant political move
ReplyDeleteWhy so?
DeleteBecause it would show investment in the North beyond brutal gentrification, erm, 'regeneration; would provide local employment; would make senior council employees have to spend time in a place they make throwaway decision about; and would move the seat of (God help us) power from leafy quiet streets between church and park to a place that the council have denuded of trees and parks.
DeleteThe likelihood of this happening is zero.
It is a scandal that Officers, including Directors, continue to work from home on full pay. Elected Councillors have lost control and Officers have been marching to the drum beat of the socialist and mixed up Social Scientist Dr Quirk. Another failure of Leadership by useless dizzy Campbell
ReplyDeleteActually I quite like the Town Hall.
ReplyDeleteYou should see the proposal it superseded - a pseudo-Georgian complex in the same style as the Library with a very peculiar Georgian central tower.
You probably like brutalist architecture
DeleteThe Library is a lovely building . If only the Town Hall had been built in similar style
DeleteThe point is that if lazy council staff are not fully using offices then the space is wasted and the land used for some other more productive purpose. You should see the vast offices of the senior directors....enormous...it's as if they are trying to pretend that they run big private companies
ReplyDeleteNot entirely sure what you're referring to re senior directors private offices- the Office is open plan and other than the Chief Executive in theory no directors have private offices. In practice they may regularly book out the communal meeting rooms for personal usage due to the volume of (usually online) meetings that has arisen since the beginning of home working.
Delete7 hours plus of video calls a day is not abnormal. The culture change since Covid began of constant video meetings is one of the single largest reasons stopping full return to office. Travelling into a place of work just to sit with a headset on for the majority of the day is a waste of everybody's time.
You miss the point for your own purposes. Why should they enjoy a London Allowance when they are working from home. Back to the office instead of messing around with video calls.
DeleteThere is a politically enforced minimum 50% of time in the office i.e 3 days a week in practice. In reality this varies significantly by team/department, and senior officers ought to be in more than the minimum. As I mentioned in my reply to anonymous 2 May 2022 at 11.45, the culture of constant and excessive meetings and video calls which began during the initial lockdown and has not yet gone away is one of the large reasons why officers are resisting a full return to the office. This is a large problem that has the much more serious impact that work does not get done efficiently or effectively due to the meetings culture which has been allowed to develop over the last 2.5 years.
ReplyDeleteIn fairness, most RBKC teams already had a 1 day a week/fortnight working from home system in place prior to Covid. Reneging on this would set the Council back significantly in trying to attract new staff- there is already a massive backlog in hiring due to the labour market, and when competitor Councils/organisations e.g. Camden/H&F/NHS Digital have 1-5 days a week PER MONTH requirement in the office, then it becomes increasingly hard to compete.
Why should Council officers think they are in any way different to private sector employees? The only difference is that council officers would never get a job in a profits creative sector. They may call us mugs forced to use the Council customers but we are not. Customers have a choice.
DeleteWell in my time the Director of Planning certainly had his own, large, office with a secretary in an outer office.
ReplyDelete