Forum Topic

Corporate governance LBH

Dealing with the LBH budget meeting on Tuesday night Cllr Lambert says in his blog'Genghis Todd had his set-piece rant about Lampton 360 and Steve Curran had his set-piece retort. It reminded me of my misspent youth in interminable church services where the vicar reads out something from his book (to be fair, he probably knows it by heart) and the congregation respond in unison, saying the same words that they have been saying since 1549. I doubt even Genghis will last for another 500 years, but who knows.'Cllr Lambert knows full well as do his cabinet colleagues  that it's unacceptable to have a LBH senior officer reporting to himself on the performance of our recycling/ waste company or other Lampton company. Huge sums of public money are involved.Guy knows too that there has been no recent performance data on the Lampton empire and despite an item in the forward plan showing this data will be published in February it wasn't. It's easy for the leader to have fun at my expense at Council on this subject without addressing the underlying issue.I sent the following email to the chair of the LBH Audit Committee earlier this week which met on Thursday night. Cllr Lambert is a member of this committee. I understand he didn't  rebut my view provided at this meeting by my colleague Cllr Hearn 'Lampton  360 Ltd and its subsidiariesCorporate Governance concerns You will have heard me raise this at council twice and on both occasions received a derisory and unacceptable response from Cllr Curran.Mr B Walsh remains the managing director of Lampton entities despite being Head of REDE. This is a clear conflict, breaches advice from our corporate governance consultants, recommended good practice and indeed common sense. Please pursue and seek prompt remedial action.'John

John Todd ● 3091d4 Comments

I don't know whether Paul's continued failure to understand what I said back then is deliberate mischief or just plain dumb.John's right that Lampton 360 was discussed at audit committee and I think we were unanimous in welcoming that L360 is top of the list for the internal audit plan going forward, starting with a review of governance to be delivered during March. Of course, we are all very conscious  that this new approach to delivering services needs careful monitoring.  After all, we expect to make major savings compared to the dubious outsourced contracts entered into by the John/Paul administration following their consultancy from KPMG, which I understand cost £5.5M and we really do need to ensure these savings are achieved.

Guy Lambert ● 3091d

This set up surely can't be that far removed from insider trading, talk about a conflict of interests.

Vanessa Smith ● 3091d

The rather strange arrangement between Cllr. Curran and Mr Walsh is dodgy at best.  Far from professional and raising eyebrows in all sorts of places.One wonders how long it will be before the chinese whispers surface into something more revealing.Funny how bullies seem to thrive in an institution that spends huge sums on countering bullying in it's workforce.

Raymond Havelock ● 3091d

The same then new Cllr Lambert who kept insisting that Hounslow had to make 60 million pounds savings a year from each years budget despite I believe being an accountant and heavily involved in a local credit union lol

Paul Fisher ● 3091d