Robin Wales

Sir Robin Wales
Mayor of Newham
Incumbent
Assumed office 2 May 2002
Preceded by	New Office
Personal details
Political party	Labour
Website	newham.gov.uk/mayor

Sir Robin Andrew Wales is a Labour Party politician and current Mayor of the London Borough of Newham.

Early life

Robin Wales was born in Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire, Scotland in 1955, and was educated at the University of Glasgow where he read Chemistry and was chair of the Glasgow University Labour Club. He formerly worked at British Telecom.

Career

Having moved to London in 1978, Wales was a councillor from 1982 to 1986 and then from 1992 to 2002 in the London Borough of Newham. Elected as Mayor of Newham in 2002, after seven years as leader, the first Labour directly elected Mayor in the country. He was re-elected in 2006 and again in 2010 with an increased majority. The Labour politician was returned in the first count of the Newham mayoral vote in May 2010. He won a landslide victory that gave him a third straight term. He polled 64,748 votes, a majority of nearly 50,000 over the second-placed Tory candidate. Wales won 68.02%, up by 20.19% from the 2006 election.

Robin Wales was Chair of the Association of London Government (now London Councils) from 2000 until the 2006 council elections when he was replaced by Conservative Merrick Cockell.

He currently serves on the Boards of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) for which he earned £8,000 in 2008/09 and £7,000 in 2009/10 as a non executive director. and the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC). He also chairs the Six Host Boroughs, an organisation which represents the interests of those boroughs most affected by the 2012 Games. He has used his position on these Boards to argue for Newham and the wider East End to ensure the 2012 Olympic Games delivers the social legacy promised which won London the bid in 2005.

Wales was awarded a knighthood in the 2000 Queen's Birthday Honours in recognition of his service to local government. He is the father of two children and lives in Newham, East London.^{[citation needed]}

Controversy

Sir Robin Wales was involved in a bitter battle with the Friends of Queens Market, which represents the market traders at Queen's Market. The traders and residents were objecting to plans to demolish the market and replace it with a new market hall with 164 stalls and 6,374m2 of shop units, 350 homes, a new civic building and a library. In May 2009, Mayor of London Boris Johnson overruled Sir Robin Wales' decision to build the 31 storey tower.
Wales has attracted further controversy by being awarded a 4% pay rise taking his salary to £80,029, at a time when government has called for public sector wage restraints and job losses and pay freezes at Newham Council. Wales publicly stated that he would be giving the whole of his pay rise to charity (Mayor's consultation meetings October 2010).^{[citation needed]}|However, Wales' pay has increased 40 per cent from £58,500 since 2002. Newham Council defended this pay increase stating that it reflected the responsibilities of his position.

It has also been reported that Wales will refuse to work alongside the first democratically-elected Mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman.

As Mayor, Wales' Newham Council have come under heavy criticism for their £111m project to relocate council offices in a single Newham Dockside block, including £18.7m of design and refurbishment costs. An investigation by the BBC found this to include at least 5 items of designer lighting each costing over £1,800. Revelations have angered local residents in what continues to be one of the poorest boroughs on the UK.

External links

• Newham Mayor website
• Official biography
• Newham Labour Party Website
• Sir Robin Wales (audio) interview

Political offices
New office	Mayor of Newham 2002–present	Incumbent