The admirable Centre for Public Scrutiny (declaration of interest I helped establish it in the early 2000’s) organises an annual scrutiny awards. Well for the forthcoming year can I put forward Cllr Alan Hall, chair of scrutiny in the Lewisham LBC (declaration of interest, I am a resident), as the scrutiny hero for 2017.

The MJ readers may have noticed over the last few weeks the unravelling of a major development scheme in Lewisham. Much of the attention has focused on the noisy protests of Millwall football supporters (club motto ‘nobody likes us we don’t care’). However the real hard work has been the diligent questioning and teamwork of scrutiny councillors, led by Cllr Hall.