Plug is pulled on Labour think tank

New brooms at Town Hall sweep away £50k contract

A LEFT-WING think tank’s contract with the Town Hall could be torn up with its performance severely under the microscope.

The Institute for Policy Public Research (IPPR) has received around £50,000 a year to work with Camden Council. It is not officially affiliated with Labour but is widely regarded as one of the party’s favourite policy advisers. Former Labour leader Dame Jane Roberts, who stepped down just months before May’s local election meltdown, now sits on the unit’s governing body.

With Labour now out in the cold in Camden, the IPPR’s controversial link with Camden is understood to be under serious threat.

Tory councillor Andrew Mennear said: “We have never been told what benefit this contract has brought residents. People will think what has been the point of it? It is a disgrace.”

One of the most recent pieces of work the IPPR has worked on for Camden is the so-called ‘Social Capital’ survey.

Social Capital has become a buzzword term in local government circles and at Whitehall. In layman’s terms it refers to the everyday links that bind together close-knit neighbourhoods.

The IPPR and the Town Hall went as far as to publish a pamphlet about the survey earlier this year – entitled Sticking Together.

It includes chapters by former Labour council Dame Jane and her successor Raj Chada. Camden’s assistant chief executive Phillip Colligan also worked on the project and co-wrote the foreword.

Mr Colligan works at the Town Hall on secondment from the Home Office where he worked for six years and built up a reputation as a high-flying whizzkid in his post of private secretary to Sir John Gieve, a senior civil servant who is now deputy governor of the Bank of England.

Interestingly, Mr Colligan’s post at Camden has been regarded as unnecessary spending in alternative budgets prepared by the Lib Dems and Conservatives in recent years whilst in opposition.

Nobody was willing to comment on Mr Colligan’s position this week and all members were keen to make sure that there was no personal drive to remove him in what has become an ultra-sensitive issue at the Town Hall.

In the near future, it is the IPPR’s contract that is up for discussion and could be swiftly axed from council spending.

Town Hall leader Councillor Keith Moffitt, a Lib Dem, said: “There are a number of arrangements from the last administration that will be under review and I think this will certainly be one that we will be looking at.”

Labour councillor Theo Blackwell defended the spending on the IPPR. He said: “There is nothing wrong with a council bringing in some of the brightest young policy views to give things a different perspective. It freshens things up.

“The work with the IPPR was ground-breaking and it helped with policy decisions.”