Boris where did £500k for #JubileeStewards go?


8:45 am - June 13th 2012

by Sunny Hundal    


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Boris Johnson will today come under pressure over the Jubilee Stewards controversy that left unpaid workers to sleep under London Bridge.

As this blog first highlighted, a £1.5m contract was awarded to provide stewarding for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee river pageant.

Part of the contract was funded by the Greater London Authority, which is run by Mayor Boris Johnson.

At Mayor’s Question Time today, Boris Johnson will be asked why this company was awarded a public contract, with £500,000 coming from City Hall, by Labour’s Olympics Spokesperson John Biggs.

He will be asked:

if he knew that workers would be unpaid as part of the contract
if he knew those who were paid would only get £2.80 per hour, or £112 per week
what due diligence procedures he put in place when picking the company
whether he feels Londoners’ best interests were served by the deal; and
if he is happy the company has been awarded a £850,000 Olympics contact

In a statement to this blog John biggs said:

It’s a disgrace that public money has gone to this company, not only have they failed in their duty to look after their staff, but they aren’t even paying the London Living Wage which Mayor Johnson supposedly supports.

The fact that anybody, let alone unpaid workers, were forced to sleep under London Bridge is truly scandalous. To make it worse it appears that many of these people were essentially blackmailed into taking unpaid work otherwise they wouldn’t be able to work at the Olympics or would risk losing their benefits.

How many of us would accept working unpaid, being forced to sleep outside and not given access to changing rooms or toilets? This incident is a sad indictment of the way our country is headed.

John Biggs is the Labour London Assembly Member for City and East London, which covers City of London, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Barking & Dagenham.

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About the author
Sunny Hundal is editor of LC. Also: on Twitter, at Pickled Politics and Guardian CIF.
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Reader comments


1. terri

Tory slavemasters at work. Despicable treatment of their ‘volunteers’..

2. Robin Levett

@Sunny OP:

Can we get something straight? The general way the workers were treated was shameful; from forcing them to change in the open air to not giving them access to toilet facilities throughout the day – all on top of not paying them.

BUT; the stewards were not forced “to sleep under London Bridge” or, as the Grauniad caption had it “to spend the night before the pageant sleeping under London Bridge” . They left Bristol at 11pm, and were supposed to be delivered to London at 5:30am and clock straight on. Instead, the coach got there early, at c3am, as a result of which they had to wait around for two hours in the cold and rain, so sheltered under London Bridge. The coach driver didn’t do the sensible thing and wait around (since he wasn’t scheduled to arrive until 5am, he wouldn’t have lost anything by doing so) and let them shelter on board.

3. Freyda

That is bad Robin. They has started work really as soon as they got on coach at 11pm. If they had arrived at the right time they were to do a 14 hr shift without sleep, then had to catch the tube to some communal accommodation in a field-it was not a proper camp site. The firm were paid a fortune that did not go in wages for the 80 who were on one sort of scheme or another. The MD then has the brass neck to say she paid for their training when her company, when the training company was owned by her and she would be receiving money from the government for that=being paid twice. This was a company who was running insolvent last year and avoided disclosure twice-who cannot, it seems organised a piss up in a brewery. We get the same on the mini bus overturning on the motor way. The driver did not work for her company. but fails to mention that company he works for is also owned by her. We need to cut through the bullshit here and get to the truth


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