Showing posts with label Ujima House. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ujima House. Show all posts

Tuesday 12 September 2023

Exhibitions this week on Ujima House plans

 

Wates are putting on an exhibition aiming to improve the Ujima House outline planning consent at St John's the Evangelist Community Centre at 1 Crawford Avenuen, Wembley, on Thursday from 4pm to 8pm and Saturday 10am to 1pm.

For background see Philip Grant's guest post HERE

The '100% affordable housing' (which Brent's Cabinet agreed in August 2021 would be all London Affordable Rent) has now been amended to 32 flats at London Affordable Rent, and 22 "Intermediate" flats (either shared ownership or Intermediate rent, suitable for people / households with an annual income of around £60k).Brent Council has recently itself admitted that shared ownership is not affordable for most Brent residents.

After exhibition see ujimahouse.co.uk

Saturday 22 July 2023

Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone – 'Some' Good News! (But what is Brent Council's policy now on unaffordable Shared Ownership?)

Guest Post in a personal capacity by Philip Grant 

 

Architect’s view of Brent’s 250 home Cecil Avenue development.

 

On 14 March this year, Martin’s post “Wembley Housing Zone: Never mind the gloss – what are the details?” shared with us a Brent Council press release, about its deal with Wates to finally build the 250 homes at Cecil Avenue, which it had received full planning consent for in February 2021. The blog included “links” to several of the guest posts I’d written since August 2021, urging the Council to include more genuinely affordable homes for rent in the project, especially homes at Social Rent level which the 2020 Brent Poverty Commission said should be the priority.

 


My “parody” Brent Council Homes publicity photograph (from November 2021).

 

Since 2021, Brent’s plans had been to allow its “developer partner” to sell 152 of the homes on the former Copland School site privately, with only 37 of the 250 for London Affordable Rent, and the other 61 as “intermediate” Council housing (either shared ownership or Intermediate Rent level). 

 

You would have thought that when they arranged additional funding from the GLA, to allow for more affordable homes to be delivered as part of this Wembley Housing Zone project, Brent would have celebrated with another press release, telling us about this “good news” story. Instead, I only discovered it when I spotted an item on the Forward Plan page of the Council’s website, as I was checking whether another item had been included there. It was about a Key Decision made by the Corporate Director, Communities and Regeneration, in April 2023:-

 



There was a “Officer Key Decision Report” on the website, but (true to form) the appendices to it were both “exempt”, so that the press and public were not allowed to find out ‘information relating to the financial or business affairs of any particular person (including the authority holding that information)’. The Report did, however, give an outline of what the amended agreement with the GLA involved:-

 


 

My various attempts, since August 2021, to get Brent to include more genuinely affordable homes at Cecil Avenue, using additional GLA funding where possible, have been ignored, dodged or blocked. I was told that anything other than what the Council already planned would be impossible, because the scheme would not be viable. Now they had an extra c.£10.5m, how many extra affordable homes would they be able to provide? 

 

I had to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to find out, but “Wembley Matters” can (at last) share the Good News!

·      Instead of only 37 of the Cecil Avenue homes for London Affordable Rent, there will now be 59. 35 of these will be family-sized (3 or 4-bed) homes.

·      36 of the Cecil Avenue Council homes will be for Shared Ownership (of which 9 will be family-sized).

·      3 of the Cecil Avenue Council homes will be “Other” affordable homes. (Does that mean at Intermediate Rent?)

·      As before, 152 of the homes being built by Brent Council at Cecil Avenue will be for private sale by Wates (including 20 family-sized).

My title does say ‘Some Good News’. The other part of the Wembley Housing Zone project, across the road at Ujima House, was meant to have ALL of its 54 flats for London Affordable Rent to Council tenants. The revised figures for this block are now:

·      32 for London Affordable Rent (including all 8 family-sized flats).

·      22 for Shared Ownership.

So, the original proposed number of Wembley Housing Zone London Affordable Rent homes was 91 (37 + 54), and the revised number is 91 (59 + 32). Perhaps that is why Brent did not want to draw attention to the extra funding they’d negotiated from the GLA!

The only improvement from the extra GLA funding, and that is genuinely to be welcomed, is that more of them will be family-sized homes for affordable rent, and more will be delivered earlier (Ujima House still only has the outline planning permission approved in February 2021).

Of the original proposed 61 “intermediate affordable homes”, 58 have now been positively identified as being for shared ownership. But didn’t Brent’s Cabinet, just last week, decide to sell off the 23 shared ownership homes it had acquired at the Grand Union development,  because the Council does not have 'the knowledge, experience and the capacity to effectively sell and manage' shared ownership homes?

 

Placard from a demonstration against Shared Ownership.

 

The Report to the 17 July Cabinet meeting clearly showed that shared ownership is well above the affordability level of most families in Brent, and admitted:

 

‘… the market and demand for Shared Ownership, particularly in the latter quarter of 2022 was and has remained turbulent. This is both in terms of too many shared ownership homes available in the market and appetite and demand for these homes reducing.’

 

In a November 2022 guest post, I set out the reality of Brent’s Affordable Council Housing programme, and why they should not include any shared ownership homes. But the decision makers at the Civic Centre are still pressing on with their flawed policies!

 


Cllr. Shama Tatler fronting a publicity photo at the Cecil Avenue site in March 2023.

 

Brent’s March 2023 press release about its Wembley Housing Zone deal with Wates began by claiming: ‘More much-needed housing will soon be a reality following an agreement to build 304 new homes in Wembley.’ From the hard hats and “high-vis” jackets in the photograph that came with it, you might believe that heavy machinery was already at work on the Council-owned Cecil Avenue site, which has been vacant for at least three years.

 

 

The Cecil Avenue site from the top deck of a bus, 26 June 2023.

 

In the extract from the April 2023 Key Decision Report above, it says that ‘start on site [was] recorded on 27 March 2023’. When I went past on the last Monday in June, there was no machinery, no workers and no progress on the Cecil Avenue site, just two portacabins. My recent guest post, 1 Morland Gardens – an Open Letter to the Mayor of London, explains what is required for a “start on site” for GLA funding, and it appears this has not yet happened.

 

It appears that the ‘will soon be a reality’ actually means ‘by 31 December 2026’. Some eventual good news, but I still believe that Brent could have done so much better than 59 “genuinely affordable” homes for rent to Council tenants as part of its 250 home Cecil Avenue development.

 


Philip Grant.

Friday 13 January 2023

Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone contract award – still too many secrets!

 


Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

In a guest post last month (‘Tis the Season to be Sneaky!) I suggested that Brent Council might be trying to use its “urgency procedures” to get the decision to award a major contract for its Wembley Housing Zone (“WHZ”) development slipped through over the Christmas / New Year period, in the hope of avoiding it being called-in for scrutiny.

 

Although the decision was scheduled to be made on 19 December, it wasn’t officially made, by Brent’s Chief Executive, until 10 January, and published on the Council’s website the following afternoon. Normally, 28 days clear notice of a Key Decision has to be given, but the Urgent Key Decision Form sent to a Scrutiny Committee Chair on 12 December said that was not possible. Yet the decision was made 29 days after “urgency” was claimed!

 

Part of the Evaluation Process section from the Officer Key Decision Report.

 

In fact, notice of a Key Decision for this contract could have been given at least several months before 12 December. The Officer Report (undated), on which the decision to award the contract was based, says that the tender process started on 30 April 2022, when the Council advertised for initial expressions of interest from contractors. Eight had provided the necessary responses by the closing date of 31 May. The four short-listed contractors were invited, on 3 July, to submit tenders, and three had submitted valid tenders by the closing date of 18 October.

 

The Recommendation from the Officer Key Decision Report.

 

After all of the evaluation of the tenders by Council Officers, the recommendation which Brent’s Chief Executive accepted was to award the “developer partner” contract to Wates Construction Ltd, for a price of £121,862,500. That is a lot of money! In fact, the report shows that it could be even more than that, perhaps as much as £133m (and that is after an estimated £4m already having been spent on architects’ fees).

 

Extract from the Financial section of the Officer Key Decision Report.

 

It appears that the £126.5m will be the cost of building 304 homes on two sites which Brent Council already owns. That is a building cost of around £416,000 per unit. As para. 4.2 in the Report extract above states, part of this will be funded through capital receipts from the sale of private homes. When Cabinet agreed this scheme in August 2021, it included allowing the development partner to have half the homes (152, and all on the more favourable Cecil Avenue site, which will be completed first) to sell privately, for profit. How much will Wates be paying Brent for those homes as part of the contract deal? We don’t know – it’s a secret!

 

Part of the funding will also come from the ‘capital receipts from … intermediate homes’. In plain English that means the sale of percentages in shared ownership flats within the 152 homes that the Council will own. In August 2021, Cabinet agreed that 61 of the 98 homes which Brent would retain on the Cecil Avenue site should be “intermediate”, with only 37 of them for London Affordable Rent. Following the November 2022 Cabinet meeting, will the figure of shared ownership be increased?  We don’t know – it’s a secret!

 

Wembley Housing Zone extract from the “Affordable Housing” report to Cabinet, 14 November 2022.

 

Martin published a guest blog I had written about that Affordable Housing report to the November 2022 Cabinet meeting, and another which I wrote following the Council Leader’s response to questions which Cllr. Anton Georgiou had asked at that meeting. I showed that there is already a surplus in shared ownership homes on offer in Brent, which is likely to continue and increase, and that shared ownership is not really affordable to most people in housing need in Brent. So why is the Council planning to make many of the WHZ homes shared ownership, which won’t help the people its affordable homes policy is meant to house?

 

Outline of the contract from the Officer Key Decision Report.

 

The contract, as shown by the extract above, is in several parts. This is because although both WHZ sites were given planning permission in February 2021, Ujima House only has outline permission. Because of the long delay in getting to the contract award stage (which has greatly increased the cost of the project), the “developer partner” has to prepare, submit and get approval for the actual Ujima House plans. That’s why there is a completion date of 31 December 2026 (nearly 4 years away!), with a possible extension, for those homes to be delivered.

 

The former office block at Ujima House still has some “meanwhile” occupants, including the thriving Stonebridge Boxing Club, a vital resource for the local community. They have still to find an alternative home. Despite the long lead time before any work at Ujima House can begin (apart from its possible demolition, leaving an empty site, like that of the former Copland School buildings, where work on the Cecil Avenue homes could start straight away), Brent Council wants to ‘seek to assist them in finding suitable alternative premises’ (evict them a.s.a.p.). 

 

Extract from the Equality Implications section of the Officer Key Decision Report.

 

The Report’s determination ‘to ensure a start on site by the end of March 2023’ must mean that the extra £5m funding the Council has obtained from the GLA comes from its 2016-2021 (but extended to 2023) Affordable Housing Programme. There is probably some “spare” money in that pot because Brent will fail to start some of its other New Council Homes projects before the 31 March deadline! The £5m looks like the grant for 50 London Affordable Rent homes, at £100k per home. The Cabinet’s August 2021 decision (possibly since watered down) was for all 54 homes at Ujima House to be for LAR, but only 37 at the Cecil Avenue site, so at least some of the latest GLA agreement must relate to Ujima House.

 

One final point. The documents published with the decision notice include the Council’s Tender Evaluation Grid, where Wates appear as contractor “C” (the identities of “A” and “B” are secret). Although “C” scored highest overall, because their Financial score was much better than the other two (meaning their price was lowest), they were only second in the Quality section. Their Quality score was 68.6 out of 100 (contractor “B” was best with 72.0). Brent has had problems over poor quality housing developments in recent memory.

 

The Quality section of the WHZ contract Tender Evaluation Grid.

 

Non-Cabinet councillors have five working days to call-in the Key Decision for scrutiny, if they consider there are reasonable grounds to do so. As it was published on 11 January, at least five members would need to call-in the decision by 5pm on Wednesday 18 January for the award of the contract to be put on hold, so that (probably) Community and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee could consider it. It will be interesting to see whether that happens!

 


Philip Grant.

 


Thursday 22 December 2022

‘Tis the Season to be Sneaky! Is Brent trying to award the c£100m Wembley Housing Zone contract without scrutiny?

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

The location of the two Wembley Housing Zone sites.

 

If you’re a regular reader of “Wembley Matters”, you will be aware of Brent’s often repeated statements about the urgent need to build more Council homes for the families in temporary accommodation and on the waiting list. They are used to justify the Council’s often unpopular “infill” plans for some of its housing estates, and by Brent’s planners to justify recommending applications that breach some planning policies, and are seen by many as overdevelopment.

 

You will also be aware of Brent’s promise (and Labour Group election pledge) to build 1,000 genuinely affordable Council homes in the five year period ended 31 March 2024.

 

If you’re a regular reader, you will have seen at least some of my previous guest posts about Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone proposals. These include building 250 homes on the Council-owned brownfield site of the former Copland School building at Cecil Avenue. If they had got on and built them as soon as they had full planning permission in February 2021, that could have contributed a quarter of the 1,000 homes target. But as a result of a Cabinet decision in August 2021, 152 of those new homes are to be built for private sale at a profit by a “Developer Partner”. 

 

Title page to the Report which Cabinet approved on 16 August 2021.

 

For much of 2022, I tried to get this (what appeared to be an odd) decision properly scrutinised, but that was finally scuppered by the Chair of the Resources & Public Realm Scrutiny Committee (acting on whose instructions?) in September. Now there appears to be an attempt by those in power at Brent Council to stop any scrutiny of the actual award of the contract for the Wembley Housing Zone scheme.

 

This will be a very big contract, likely to be worth in excess of £100m. Brent advertised in April for expressions of interest from contractors for this, and they had to respond by the end of May. In November, Cabinet were informed that progress had been made, but the details were hidden away in an “exempt” appendix to the Report.

 

Extract from the November 2022 “Update on the Supply of New Affordable Homes” Report.

 

Then, in the past few days, an item appeared on the Forward Plan page, saying that the decision to award the contract, to be Brent’s Developer Partner for the Wembley Housing Zone scheme, would be made this month, under ‘urgency procedures’!

 

The Forward Plan entry from Brent Council’s website.

 

As Brent has been working towards this decision since August 2021 (in fact, long before that) and the contract procurement process has been going on for over six months, why was it urgent and what are those procedures? There are some clues from the document, dated 12 December, that was provided in a “link” from that Forward Plan, which I will ask Martin to attach a copy of at the end of this post, for general information.

 

It appears that there are various degrees of urgency. Normally, at least 28 clear days’ notice of a Key Decision has to be given. In this case, although it would be less than 28 days, it was planned to be ‘at least 5 clear days’ notice.’ The decision would be made on 19 December.

 

Extract from the Urgent Key Decision form.

 

If it had been less than five days, the Chair of a Scrutiny Committee would have ‘to agree that the decision is urgent and cannot be reasonably deferred for the reasons detailed ….’  But as it was ‘at least 5 clear days’, ‘the Scrutiny Chair is only required to note that the decision will be taken.’ In other words, there would be no scrutiny of whether or not the decision was actually urgent.

 

According to the Urgent Decision form, 28 days’ notice could not be provided because: ‘Conclusion of the contractor developer partner procurement was delayed.’ But Council Officers have been working on that procurement for months, and would have known that a decision on it would be required at some time in the near future, so notice could surely have been given earlier.

 

And the reason why it is ‘impractical to defer the decision to a later date’ is said to be ‘to meet delivery timescales and funding conditions.’ With the delays which have already occurred since Brent first entered into its Wembley Housing Zone agreement with the GLA in 2015, delivery timescales don’t seem to have been much of a priority before. As for funding conditions, the Council must have been aware of these ever since funding agreements were made (at least 15 months ago for the extra £5.5m the GLA agreed to offer).

 

As at 6.30pm on Wednesday 21 December the formal decision has not been published on the Decisions page of Brent Council’s website. Perhaps it will be published on 22 or 23 December. But why would Senior Council Officers (and the Cabinet member responsible for this project, who is the Lead Member for Regeneration, despite this being mainly a housing development) delay making the decision, and giving the intention to make it so little publicity, until just before the Christmas / New Year holiday period?

 

Why Call-in matters, from Brent’s Protocol on Call-in.

 

I’ve said before that those behind this controversial Wembley Housing Zone project want to avoid any scrutiny of it. The award of the contract is a Key Decision, so could be called-in for scrutiny. I may be wrong, but I suspect that the decision is being made now to minimise any chance of a call-in. For call-in to take effect, at least five backbench councillors (non-Cabinet members) need to request that a Key Decision is called-in, and they need to do so ‘within 5 days of the date on which the record of the decision is made publicly available.’ 

 

How many councillors, if they were not aware that this important Key Decision was about to be made (because the usual 28 days’ notice has not been given) would be looking at the Decisions page on the Brent Council website over the holiday period? And even if any of them were keeping an eye on it, what would be the chances of organising five members to complete and submit call-in request forms before the end of the fifth day?

 

That’s the main reason I’ve asked Martin to consider publishing this guest post – so that this Festive Season is not used as a cover to sneak through a Key Decision without anyone realising that has been done until it is too late!

 

Philip Grant 

 

Monday 15 November 2021

Brent’s affordable housing needs – is this “answer” acceptable?

 Guest Post by Philip Grant in  a personal capacity



Brent’s future flats at Wembley High Road, from the plans approved in February 2021.

 

On 13 August, Martin published an article I had written about Brent’s plans for Council homes in its Wembley Housing Zone. This set out why the Cabinet should question the recommendations made to them by Council Officers, particularly the lack of any social housing provision, and why it was proposed that two-thirds of the 250 flats and maisonettes in the Council’s Cecil Avenue scheme would be handed over to a developer for private sale. 

 

I sent a document copy of my article to all members of the Cabinet, for their consideration before their meeting. None of them replied, and on 16 August they accepted the Officers’ “preferred delivery option” for the developments at Cecil Avenue and Ujima House.

 

As I’d not received a reply from the Lead Member for Housing, Cllr. Eleanor Southwood (or any of her Cabinet colleagues), I raised this matter again with her when she did answer another housing matter which I’d written to her about [Brent’s “secret” Council Housing projects and the Council’s response]. I emailed her about the Council’s Cecil Avenue proposals on 19 September, with a copy to her Regeneration colleague, Cllr. Shama Tatler, and Brent’s Strategic Director for Regeneration, Alan Lunt. 

 

Cllr. Southwood responded on 23 September, writing: ‘Dear Mr Grant, just acknowledging your email, which I will respond to substantively shortly.’ Despite a reminder to her on 8 October, I did not receive any response, either from her, Cllr. Tatler, or any Council officer on their behalf.

 

As I believe this is a matter of some importance, I was not prepared to let it drop. On 16 October, I submitted a Public Question, to be answered at Brent’s Full Council meeting on Monday 22 November:-

 

Question to the Lead Member for Regeneration, Property and Planning:-

New Council Homes at Cecil Avenue, Wembley.

 

Brent Council has an urgent need for new Council homes, and has accepted the Brent Poverty Commission recommendation that more social rented housing should be a priority.

 

Brent Council owns the vacant former Copland School site at the corner of Cecil Avenue and Wembley High Road, and since February 2021 has had full planning permission to build 250 flats and maisonettes on this site.

 

Yet, at its meeting on 16 August 2021, Brent's Cabinet approved a 'preferred delivery option' that included only 39% affordable housing for this development, with less than a quarter of the total homes being rented at London Affordable rent levels (not Social rents), the balance of the affordable housing being at Intermediate rent levels or for shared ownership. Under this 'preferred delivery option', the majority of the homes at the Council's Cecil Avenue site would be sold privately by a 'developer partner'.

 

At the same meeting, Brent's Cabinet also resolved: 'To delegate to the Strategic Director of Regeneration & Environment, in consultation with the Lead Member for Regeneration, Property & Planning, the decision on alternative development scheme proposals and procurement routes, if procurement of the preferred option was unsuccessful in relation to the Sites.'

 

My questions are:

 

1) Given Brent's urgent need for social rent housing, why is Brent Council not proposing to build all 250 of the homes at Cecil Avenue as affordable rented Council housing?

 

2) As, since 16 August, the GLA has approved a grant to Brent Council of around £111m under its 2021/26 New Affordable Homes programme, to be used mainly for social rent housing, will the Lead Member, in consultation with the Strategic Director of Regeneration & Environment, now recommend that Cabinet changes its mind, and approves alternative proposals to make the Council's Cecil Avenue scheme 100% affordable housing?


The answers from Lead Members to Public Questions are published in advance of the Council meetings, as part of the agenda package. This is Cllr. Shama Tatler’s answer to the two points which I raised in my question:

 

Response:

1) Brent Council’s redevelopment of council-owned Cecil Avenue and Ujima House sites as part of the Wembley Housing Zone programme together proposes 50% affordable housing. However, because it is vitally important to ensure the long term sustainability of the Housing Revenue Account (which ultimately would be responsible for repaying loans secured to deliver new housing) it is not financially viable to deliver all 250 homes at Cecil Avenue as socially rented housing. 

 

2) Brent Council’s £111.7m GLA grant under the 2021-26 New Affordable Homes Programme is separate from the Wembley Housing Zone programme, and allocated to deliver an additional 701 socially rented homes across the Borough.

 

The response from the Lead Member is brief, and ignores much of the detail that my question was about!

 

Cllr. Tatler writes that Cecil Avenue and Ujima House together will provide 50% affordable housing. She doesn’t say that NONE of this will be Council housing at social rent levels, which is what homeless families and people on the Council’s waiting list desperately need. 

 

Ujima House is expected to provide 54 homes, all at London Affordable rent levels. Of the 250 new homes on the Cecil Avenue site, only 98 will be “affordable”, with 152 handed to a developer partner for private sale (‘to cross subsidise the affordable housing and regeneration of the area’). Of the 98 “affordable” Council homes, only 37 will be at London Affordable rent levels, with the other 61 as “intermediate housing” (‘either shared ownership or intermediate rent’).

 

 

The Wembley Housing Zone sites.

 

I realise that Council housing provided through the Housing Revenue Account must have long-term financial sustainability. The expected rental income over the period of the loan borrowed to pay for the homes (usually sixty years) must be sufficient to pay the interest on that loan, and to repay the capital sum. But with interest rates as low as they are ever likely to be, I find it difficult to understand why this Wembley Housing Zone development could not be financially “sustainable”, especially as the report to Cabinet on 16 August said that: ‘the GLA have also agreed in principle an additional £5.5m grant to deliver the scheme.’

 

It all comes down to “viability” (and we know from planning applications that the financial experts who developers employ can come up with any figure for viability that their client wants, in order to reduce the amount of affordable housing they have to include in their plans!). The viability of Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone scheme is, of course, known only to Cabinet members and the Senior Officers advising them. It is hidden away from the rest of us in a document named “Appendix 5: WHZ internal financial appraisal summary (exempt)”.

 

Cllr. Tatler writes that ‘it is not financially viable to deliver all 250 homes at Cecil Avenue as socially rented housing.’ But Brent is not delivering ANY socially rented housing at Cecil Avenue. Surely it would be financially viable to deliver at least some!

 

But, fear not, with the money from the GLA’s 2021-26 programme Brent promises ‘to deliver an additional 701 socially rented homes across the Borough.’ Around 300 of these might be provided through the “infill” of part of the open space beside the St Raphael’s Estate. More would be from the “infill” of (green!) spaces on existing Council estates, together with “airspace” developments on top of blocks in these. There is also an opportunity for ‘New Build for Rent in South Kilburn’ (Granville Park?).

 

Having asked a Public Question, I am allowed to ask a supplementary question at the Council meeting on 22 November. I’m not able to be present at that meeting myself, but hope that someone (I have asked the Mayor if she would be kind enough to do so) can ask it on my behalf. I’ve not made up my mind exactly what to ask, so if you have any (polite) suggestions, please feel free to make them as comments below, during the next couple of days.

 


Philip Grant.