Low vaccination rates leave London vulnerable to outbreaks

 Image: Emerging Pathogens Institute, University of Florida

 

From London Assembly Health Committee

  

London is facing a growing risk of preventable disease outbreaks, the London Assembly Health Committee has warned, after a surge in measles cases linked to low vaccination uptake.

 

An extraordinary committee evidence session on the measles outbreak found vaccination rates in London are just 70%, well below the level needed to prevent outbreaks. There have been 167 measles cases in 2026 so far, with the majority in Enfield, where vaccine uptake is just 64%. Around one in five cases has required hospital treatment, with infections largely among unvaccinated children. Experts warned similar risks are emerging across other diseases.

 

Following the meeting, the Committee has written to the Mayor of London and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, urging them to consider how they can support boroughs with low vaccination uptake to deliver sustained, localised vaccination campaigns.

 

The Committee is also calling for improved data sharing to boost uptake.

 

Chair of the London Assembly Health Committee, Emma Best AM, said:

 

Measles is one of the most infectious diseases we know, yet it is preventable with a safe and highly effective vaccine. What we are seeing in London should set alarm bells ringing as vaccination rates are amongst the lowest in the country, and as a result, preventable outbreaks are becoming inevitable rather than exceptional.

 

We heard clearly from health leaders that this situation is not unexpected. When coverage drops, diseases like measles, and increasingly others such as meningitis, exploit those gaps quickly, particularly in dense urban areas and communities facing deprivation.

 

While the response on the ground has been strong, we cannot keep relying on emergency catch-up campaigns. We need sustained, targeted action to rebuild routine vaccination coverage, improve access in communities, and ensure no child falls through the cracks. Without that shift, London will remain exposed to repeated outbreaks that put children’s health and lives at risk.

 

Proposed Stopping-up Order near Olympic Steps – here we go again, and why this reflects what is wrong with Brent Council decision-making.

  Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity 

Legal Notice from the “Brent & Kilburn Times”, 19 March 2026.

 

My guest post on 1 January opened with an image like this one, giving notice of a Magistrates’ Court hearing on 22 January at which Brent Council would be applying to stop-up (that is, to extinguish the right of pedestrians and vehicles to pass across) two areas of highway near Engineers Way, and close to the Olympic Steps at Wembley Park. An update to a subsequent article, Does Brent Council really want to embarrass itself in Court?, reported that the Council had asked for that hearing to be adjourned. 

 

Hopes that common sense would prevail were dashed when a Council Officer informed me, a couple of weeks ago, of a new hearing date on 16 April. I waited until the formal notice (above) had appeared in our local newspaper, before responding to it:

 

‘I have seen the Notice in yesterday's "Brent & Kilburn Times" about the new hearing date of 16 April at 2pm for the Council's Section 116 application. As requested in the Notice, I am writing to formally advise you that I intend to appear at this Willesden Magistrates' Court hearing, to object to the application for a stopping-up Order.

 

The grounds for my objection are that the application under Section 116 is wrong in law, because the two areas of highway shown on the Plan are not "unnecessary".

 

I will use the illustrations in the document "Brent Council’s proposed Engineers Way S.116 Stopping-up Order areas in pictures", which I supplied you with a copy of on 12 January 2026, as evidence that it is necessary for pedestrians and vehicles to pass across the areas of highway which the Council seeks to stop-up. You should ensure that whoever will be representing Brent Council at the hearing has a copy of that document.

 

Even at this late stage, it would be possible for the Council to withdraw its application, as you must realise that it has little hope of success, on the basis of the facts and law. Please let me know, as soon as possible, if the application is withdrawn. Thank you.’

 

I received two brief responses from Council Officers:

 

‘Thank you for letting me know of your intention to attend the stopping up order court hearing. I can confirm, as explained in our previous correspondences, the Council is intending to request the magistrate to approve this order under section 116 of the Highways Act 1980.’

 

‘I can confirm that we have a copy of your submission from 12th January "Brent Council’s proposed Engineers Way S.116 Stopping-up Order areas in pictures" and will ensure our barrister has sight of the document prior to the hearing.’

 

So not only are the Council going ahead with the application, they will be represented in Court by a barrister (I will be representing myself!). Hopefully, Quintain Ltd will be paying the barrister’s fee, as apparently, they were the ones who asked Brent to make the application in the first place. 

 

View from the Olympic Steps, showing that one of the areas Brent seeks to stop-up (in red)  would block the entrance to Olympic Way East, and impede pedestrians from using the Engineers Way crossing between Olympic Way and the Olympic Steps.

 

You only need to look at the areas the proposed stopping-up order would apply to, as shown by even one of the images (above) in the evidence document I supplied in January, to see that it is necessary for pedestrians and/or vehicles to pass across them. Yet Council Officers and an important Council committee are supposed to have considered the details before agreeing that an application for a Section 116 Order should be made to the Court.

 

The committee involved was Brent’s General Purposes Committee, at a meeting as long ago as 7 March 2022. This is one example, of many possibles, which illustrates how the decision-making processes at Brent Council have deteriorated over the past decade or so. This can lead to ill-considered decisions, which often end up wasting money (sometimes £millions) and to poor services. In this case, it was obvious to me as soon as I saw the plan showing the areas involved that they were not “unnecessary”, so why was it not obvious to the decision-makers?

 

I wrote in October 2016 about the way in which Brent’s General Purposes Committee, which used to be a strong group of senior “backbench” councillors, had been “hijacked”. The title of that article was: Does Councillor Butt have too much power?. Here is an extract from it:

 

‘[Brent’s] Constitution (in its own words) ‘…sets out how the Council operates, how decisions are made and the procedures which are followed to ensure that decision making is efficient, transparent and accountable to local people. Some of the procedures are required by law, while others are a matter for the Council.’

 

“Responsibility for Functions” is an important area, which should mean that there are “checks and balances” to ensure that power is shared across the Council, so that no single person or group within it has too much (to guard against that power being abused). The Constitution gives the Leader, or the Leader together with the Cabinet, considerable powers, but there are also ‘functions which cannot be exercised by the Cabinet’, ‘functions not to be the sole responsibility of the Cabinet’ and ‘functions that may only be exercised by Full Council’.

 

One area of particular concern is the General Purposes Committee, which ‘carries out a number of functions on which the Cabinet cannot take decisions, including public rights of way, setting the Council Tax base and approving staffing matters’.  The committee has eight members, and the Constitution used to say that at least one of these must be a member of the Executive (the previous title for the Cabinet). That proviso, which gave a very strong hint that most of the committee should be made up of back-bench councillors, has been removed, and for the past few years seven of the eight members have been Cabinet members, with the official Opposition Leader as the eighth.

 

Cllr. Butt is Chair of the General Purposes Committee, and of its Senior Staff Appointments Sub-Committee. This has given him considerable influence over the Council’s senior staffing structure, who is appointed to the Senior Officer posts, and the terms on which they are appointed.’

 

Whereas the General Purposes Committee used to hold “full length” meetings, when councillors would discus and decide matters publicly and transparently, they now start just half an hour before the Monday morning Cabinet meetings.  There were six substantive items on its agenda for the meeting on 22 March 2022. The minutes show that it began at 9.30am, and record that ‘the meeting closed at 9.49am’! 

 

 

I did follow-up my October 2016 guest post with an email to Brent’s then Chief Executive, who chaired the Council’s Constitutional Working Group (of which the Council Leader is also a member), suggesting that it:

 

‘should consider ways to ensure that the functions of the General Purposes Committee and its sub-committees are carried out independently of the Council Leader and the Cabinet. This is not just something which affects the present personnel, or situation on Brent Council, but a question of good governance.

 

The Leader and Cabinet already have considerable powers in those roles, and yet there are more than fifty other elected councillors whose knowledge and experience could contribute to the functions carried out by General Purposes Committee, if the majority of seats on that committee, and its Chair, were to be reserved under the Constitution for members who are not in the Cabinet. I believe that this would also ensure a better balance of power within the Council as a whole.’

 

The reply I received to my detailed email was short:

 

'Dear Mr Grant

 

Thank you for your email. The Chief Executive notes your concerns about the constitution of the General Purposes Committee. The Chief Executive and I consider that the composition of the Committee is satisfactory from both a legal and operational perspective.

 

Best wishes,

 

Chief Legal Officer'

 

Both the Chief Executive and Chief Legal Officer at that time had been chosen by the Senior Staff Appointments Sub-Committee, chaired by ………. you’ve guessed who.

 

Would a properly (in my view) constituted General Purposes Committee, which could spend more time considering reports presented to them by Officers, and would have had time to look at the plan which was one of the appendices to the Stopping-up Order Report, have agreed the recommendation ‘to approve the submission of an application to the Magistrate Court’? I can’t be sure, but I believe it was an avoidable error, which has wasted a lot of Council Officer time.

 

Willesden Magistrates’ Court. (Image from the Courts Service website)

 

We will find out whether it really was a bad decision when I see Brent Council in Court, on the afternoon of Thursday 16 April!

 

Philip Grant.

England v Uruguay Friday - road closures & bus diversions from 3.45pm

 

'Underground, overground, rumbling free' - HS2 surveys South Kilburn residents before tunnelling begins

 

 The HS2 route to Euston through South Kilburn

 

With HS2 now tunnelling to Euston under the South Kilburn estate and surrounding neighbourhood, they have rather belatedly asked residents to register property details 'in order to share the information with organisations working on behalf of HS2 Ltd's 'to minimise the risk of injury, health impacts and wider environmental concerns.'

This sounded rather ominous to residents.

 Much of the property is ultimately owned by Brent Council so one would expect them to be able to fill in the detail if they have recently completed condition surveys.

 

South Kilburn residents have had to put up with regeneration disruption including noise and dust for years now, so any impact will be an additional  nuisance.  The vent shaft (marked HS2 on the map) is in place at Canterbury Works, next to a primary school,  after Brent Council negotiated its siting  there, rather than the original site in the car park adjacent to Queen's Park station. The route is also close to Wilberforce Primary School on Kilburn Lane, in Westminster.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another visit to the former Wembley Town Hall (now the Lycée International de Londres Winston Churchill), and its wartime history.

Guest post by local istorian Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

The new Wembley Town Hall (Photograph from “The Architect’s Journal”, 26 January 1940)

 

Last September, I wrote about a visit to the former Brent Town Hall during Open House weekend, as part of the 10^th anniversary of the Lycée International’s opening in Wembley. In December, they kindly invited me back for a tour of parts of the building which weren’t included during the public open day, particularly the basement. You may think this would not be of much interest, but please read on, as I uncover some of Wembley Town Hall’s wartime secrets!

 

The start of work on the new Town Hall, for the combined Urban Districts of Wembley and Kingsbury, was reported in the “Wembley News” on 23 July 1937: ‘The first sod of the site in Forty Lane, where Wembley’s new Town Hall is to be built, was cut on Tuesday morning by Councillor H. Gauntlett, Chairman of the Town Hall Committee.’ This photograph shows a surveyor setting out the site for where the basement of the building would be, a few weeks later:

 

A surveyor at work on the Town Hall site, 31 August 1937.

 

Although the outbreak of the Second World War was still two years away, the potential threat from German rearmament, and Hitler’s territorial ambitions, was already realised. The original plans for the Town Hall, prepared by the architect Clifford Strange, were amended to include a reinforced concrete roof for the basement areas, which could be used as shelters in the event of air raids.

The basement had a “secret tunnel”, linking it to the gardens alongside Forty Lane. It is shown on the original plans as a ‘fresh air intake duct’, and that may well have been its purpose, allowing air into the underground area which included the Town Hall’s boiler room. But it was also big enough to allow people to walk along, in single file, if the building had been bombed and staff sheltering there could not escape through the normal exit. I was able to walk along it a short way, before it dipped down and was flooded!

 

                The doorway to the “secret tunnel”, and inside the tunnel itself.

 

War was declared on 3 September 1939, after Germany’s invasion of Poland, and by the end of the year staff had moved into the new Town Hall, and an Air Raid Precautions control room had been set up in the basement. A telephone exchange, linked to Wembley’s eighty A.R.P. warden posts and other wartime emergency services, was manned 24-hours a day throughout the war, with a staff room beside it where the Council volunteers operating it could rest when not on the switchboard. These were still marked on a post-war basement plan.

 

Extract from a Town Hall basement plan, with exchange arrowed.

 

But did the basement exchange have a wider wartime use than just for local A.R.P. services? In her commentary on the building in a book about the Lycée in 2015, Mireille Rebaté, the Head of School, wrote that it ‘played a major role as a secret communication hub during the Second World War.’ I’m not sure what her source of information was for that statement, but I do know from research on the Borough of Wembley’s Distinguished Visitors Book that a range of senior military figures came to the Town Hall during the war, and that their visits were not reported publicly in the local newspaper! Here is a small selection of their signatures in the book:

 

Some of the military “top brass” who visited Wembley Town Hall in WW2.

 

One of the reasons I looked through the Distinguished Visitors Book was to see whether Winston Churchill had ever visited the Town Hall, as the Lycée was named after him. His signature was not in the book, but in May 1943 an “All Star Ball” was held in the Grand Hall to raise money for a wartime charity fronted by his wife. Mrs Churchill’s Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund benefitted when around three hundred residents paid to join stars of film and stage at the ball. The stars signed lots of autographs, in return for a one shilling donation towards the fund for each, and hosted an auction of celebrity items. However, as the “Wembley News” reported, ‘The cigar box, autographed and presented by Mr Winston Churchill, was withdrawn, owing to its reserve price not being reached.’

 

Newspaper advert for the “All Star Ball”, and Clementine Churchill addressing the crowd at a Wembley Stadium wartime charity football match for her “Aid to Russia” Fund.

 

The Town Hall basement would not have been large enough to shelter all the Council’s staff, so a large space with a reinforced roof was created under the Grand Hall. According to Muriel Lander, who was a 17-year-old typist in the Borough’s legal department when they moved to Forty Lane from offices in St John’s Road at the end of 1939, it was ‘a vast, steel-doored bomb shelter.’ She told a “Wembley Observer” reporter in 1996 that they had to go down to the shelter when a whistle was blown to warn of a possible air raid. ‘A lot of the older Council staff were scared, but I took it in a light-hearted way because I was so young.’

 

Muriel Lander (right) and her typist colleagues at the Town Hall during WW2.
(Brent Archives – “Wembley Observer” newspaper microfilms)

 

Muriel also recalled that she and her colleagues had to take a turn at fire watching, because of the risk from German incendiary bombs. If you were on that duty, you slept fully-clothed on a Z-bed in your office, and when the sirens sounded an air raid warning, you ran up to the Town Hall roof and stood by with a hose, in case a fire bomb landed on the building.

 

The large shelter at the Town Hall was also available for local residents or passers-by to use, accessed by the service road from Kings Drive. The service road, at the back of the main office building, was used for deliveries, including coal or coke to fire the boilers, which would have been tipped through large manholes down into the basement fuel store beside the boiler room. The service road ended at a building, which was literally “the end of the road” for some Wembley residents, the Borough’s mortuary!

 

Plan of the Wembley Town Hall mortuary building.

 

The National Health Service was not set up until 1948, so that when the Town Hall was built it was Wembley Council’s Medical Officer of Health who had responsibility for carrying out post mortems, when deaths in the borough required them. My visit did not include the mortuary, as it is no longer there!

 

Something else no longer there is the entrance (or exit?) of the “secret tunnel”, at the Forty Lane end. It has been blocked off, and no one now knows where exactly it came out. You can’t go very far along the tunnel from the basement, because its lower section is flooded, but it still had to be checked (by a French Security Service frogman!) before the then French President, François Hollande, came to officially open the Lycée in September 2015.

 

François Hollande at the official opening of the Lycée in 2015.
(Courtesy of the Lycée International de Londres Winston Churchill)

 

The photograph above is from the book about the building, “Un Espace d’Histoire & de Futur” (a blend of heritage and future). I found my visit to the former Town Hall’s basement, and its links to local World War Two history, very interesting, and I hope you have enjoyed reading about it too.

 

Philip Grant.

Further details on re-opening of Welsh Harp Environmental Education Centre

 

The thrill of bug hunting at the Welsh Harp Environmental Education Centre

Brent Council has responded to a Wembley Matters request and provided further details on the re-opening of the Wesh Haro Envirinmental Education Centre to primary school goups in April.

The £30k Brent Council found will be split with £10k for refurbishment of the classroom block and £20k towards Thame 21's running costs.

The charge to schools with be £10 per child for a full day and £6.50 per child for the 2 hour half-day session.  

Brent Council said:

The new charge balances the need to make this provision affordable with ensuring it’s sustainable.

 

We will be keeping the finances under review and monitoring demand in case we need to consider any changes.

School bookings are currently on track to reopen on Monday 20th April and schools can book by emailing Thames21 at welshharpcentre@thames21.org.uk.

 

 

 

 

LETTER: Cllr Kathleen Fraser on leaving the Labour Party

  Cllr Kathleen Fraser (Barnhill ward)

Dear Editor,

 

I am grateful – as so many Wembley residents must always be – to you for maintaining Wembley Matters as a forum for airing matters of public interest, and giving a platform for those unable to rebut accounts of events on matters of importance to them published in other media. 

 

I have now, as of today, resigned from the Labour Party. This means that I am now no longer bound by the code of silence imposed on me by the Party for the last 18 months following a complaint lodged with the Party by a local resident. A silence with which I have scrupulously complied, notwithstanding the barrage of adverse publicity, which ensued when the Party suspended me just over a month after my installation as Deputy Mayor. 

 

Some may be aware that the London Evening Standard reported the suspension on24th June – as stated in their article: “In a leaked internal party email seen by the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), members of the group were informed that Councillor Fraser had been "administratively suspended" whilst a confidential investigation takes place.”) This “leak” was never investigated. The damage to my reputation was clear. I have also suffered national attention - a Daily Mail article dated 17 November 2025 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article- followed by a request from ITN for an interview in relation to this. I made no comment to any of those media enquiries. 

 

I received no help from the Labour Party in a time of severe emotional distress and pressure, notwithstanding that others were apparently free to traduce me locally and in the media. For the avoidance of doubt, the events underlying the complaint dated back to summer 2022, and raised with the Party in January 2024. I heard nothing of it until the Party wrote to me in October 2024, raising 18 different questions giving a tight deadline to respond. I treated them to 14 pages of detailed response refuting the allegations (with 9 attachments of supporting evidence) on 6 November 2024. I then heard nothing until my suspension on 19 June 2025 - just over a month after I became Deputy Mayor, I was told that I would hear “in due course” about a hearing. “In due course” turned out to mean 8 months later. 

 

I received a letter from the Party dated 18 February 2026, which finally informed me of a hearing, in which I was invited to engage. I read it with increasing incredulity, and – finally, I admit – fury. The allegations I completely refuted were essentially repeated; no new “evidence” is provided. They have added insult to injury by amplifying the accusations in the “charges “against me in one ill-written paragraph (defamatory in nature). (I do not know whether it has been shared.) I have responded to the Party’s 18 February letter, as I took the strongest issue with the way the charges were phrased and the seriousness and persistence thereby imputed. However, if the Party did not read them the first time, I had no faith it would read them now, even under a differently constituted Panel. 

 

The whole process of the investigation of this complaint, first lodged in January 2024 has been flawed, has lacked transparency, and the disinterested observer might reach conclusions about the timing of its outcome and potential to maximise the damage to myself, and what I hope is my long-established standing in my community. I cannot omit making a point about the potential for continuing and ongoing harm to the complainant, who, self-describes as a ‘vulnerable person struggling with mental health problems’ who may continue to believe that the Labour Party will be offering support, when it is quite apparent that the Party has already cut them loose. In fact, I have, lost entire faith in the Labour Party although I have continued to serve the residents of Barnhill as an Independent Councillor.

 

In conclusion, to my response to the Party, I took the greatest satisfaction in saying that there would be no need for a Hearing as I was resigning from the Labour Party with immediate effect. I stand on the principle of natural justice, transparency and fairness. Sadly, based on my own bitter experience, for me the Party I was once proud to stand for no longer represents any of those qualities. 

 

Kathleen Fraser

 

17.3.2026

 

UPDATE: MEETING POSTPONED UNTIL MAY AT REQUEST OF BRENT COUNCIL. Are Brent Council, the Environment Agency, Canal and Rivers Trust prepared for flooding as a result of climate change? Brent ACE Meeting with councillors, March 24th 6.30pm on-line

 

College Road, Preston, Wembley

Climate change means more severe weather events LINK including torrential rain swelling rivers and leaving drains unable to cope.

Are Brent Council, the Environment Agency, Canal and Rivers Trust prepared for this and what is the situation in different Brent localities?

 

An invitation from ACE (Action on the Climate and Ecological Emergency)Brent: 

With 9% of the Brent population at risk of flooding and 15% expected to be in the future (FoE data), ACE Brent's next meeting with council members is on the topic of flood prevention. 

ACE Brent meeting with Cabinet members Cllr Krupa Sheth and Cllr Jake Rubin, Tues 24th March 6.30-8pm 

Click for Zoom link (If asked for Passcode, enter BrentFoE)

We will be discussing lessons from the Woodcock Park community-led flood alleviation project, hearing about other flood risk areas, finding out how the council is responding and pushing for more urgent action.

We have requested officer updates before the meeting - please respond to receive this information before the meeting. info@brentfoe.com 

Brent flood risk information   here

you can check your flood risk   here