Monday 7 March 2022

Democracy in Brent – are Cabinet Meetings a Charade?



 

Guest Blog (by Philip Grant in a personal capacity)

 

I watched the Live Stream recording of Brent’s Cabinet Meeting on 7 February 2022, as I have an interest in housing matters, and wanted to see how the petition from residents about the Council’s “infill” plans at Kilburn Square was dealt with. Martin published a “blog” about this, and underneath it you can see in the comments that I sent a follow-up email to the Leader of the Council.

 

My email to Cllr. Muhammed Butt linked his attitude at that meeting, and claims that building new Council homes was his top priority, to Brent’s plans to only provide 37 affordable rented homes in the 250-home development on land that it owns at Cecil Avenue in Wembley. Cllr. Butt replied, and his full response was included in my “guest blog” on 9 February.

 

At the end of his email to me, Cllr. Butt wrote: ‘I look forward to hearing that you will be watching the next Cabinet meeting; it is a fantastic thing to see more people actively involved with local democracy.’ But how much “local democracy” do we really receive through these Cabinet meetings?

 

Margaret, on behalf of the Kilburn Village Residents’ Association, was allowed to speak to the Cabinet. This was one of the democratic “improvements” which Cllr. Butt introduced after his Labour landslide win in the May 2014 local elections. He told our local newspaper soon afterwards: ‘New proposals allow the public to speak in council meetings for the first time ever is aimed at bettering how the community engages with the council and allows residents to hold us to account.’

 

But how much difference did what she said to them make? How much difference could it have made? I’m afraid that evidence I’ve recently received, under a Freedom of Information Act request, suggests that the decisions supposedly made at public meetings of Brent’s Cabinet, which people can watch and even participate in, have already been made beforehand, at meetings between Cabinet members and Senior Officers behind closed doors.

 


 

Regular readers will know that I have been trying to understand the justification for Cabinet’s decision on 16 August 2021 to allow a private developer to profit from the sale of 152 of the 250 homes on Brent’s Cecil Avenue housing scheme. This is the main site in the Council’s Wembley Housing Zone (“WHZ”). It was difficult to discover the reasoning, partly because most of the supporting documents were “exempt” (= secret), and partly because Cabinet members (and their Officers) were reluctant to provide explanations.

 


Extract from the WHZ report to Cabinet on 16 August 2021.

The statement that ‘Cabinet Members were consulted in July 2020’ was the subject of my latest FoI request, because there was nothing about that in the minutes of the Cabinet Meeting held on 20 July 2020! 

 

I asked for details and supporting evidence about that “consultation”, and the results were a surprise (to me at least). These showed that, as well as the formal public meetings of Cabinet, for which we can see the agenda and reports and watch a broadcast, there are at least two other types of regular meetings of Cabinet Members and Senior Council Officers, to which we are not invited.

 


Heading from the WHZ Report to the internal Policy Co-ordination Group meeting in July 2020.

 

The “consultation” which the 16 August 2021 Cabinet Report referred to actually happened four days before the 20 July 2020 Cabinet Meeting, at a meeting of the Policy Co-ordination Group (“PCG”), a body that I had never heard of before. In many ways, it appears to be very like a Cabinet Meeting, except that the public are not made aware of it, and are not invited! This is the “preferred delivery option” paragraph from the WHZ Report to that meeting:-

 


 

From this, it appears that the “preferred option”, to involve a private developer who would sell half the WHZ scheme homes for profit, had been on the cards since at least December 2019! It is not only the Report that looks very like one prepared for a Cabinet Meeting. The written record of this meeting, though described as ‘PCG Meeting Action Points’, looks very like the minutes of a Cabinet Meeting. I received this document in response to my FoI request, although Council Officers treated it as an Environmental Information Request, which allowed them to redact one paragraph in it.

 

 

Extract from “minutes” of the Policy Co-ordination Group meeting on 16 July 2020.

 

I understand, and accept, that there does need to be some co-ordination of policies across the different service areas of Brent Council, but does this really need a quasi-Cabinet Meeting to achieve that result?

 

My FoI request had asked for details and evidence of any other discussions of the “preferred delivery option” between July 2020 and the official decision on this at the Cabinet Meeting on 16 August 2021. The response to that produced evidence of another type of internal “Cabinet Meeting”, referred to as a Leader’s Briefing, held on 26 July 2021. This “briefing” appears to be effectively a trial run-through for the Cabinet Meeting, but held three weeks before the public meeting!

 

As well as all members of the Cabinet, the FoI response gave details of the Senior Officers attending:

 

16 Council Officers were invited to attend the briefing, positions below :

 

 

Chief Executive; Head of Executive & Member Services; Strategic Director Children & Young People; Personal Assistant to the Leader of the Council; Director of Finance; Head of Communications, Conference & Events; Strategic Director Community Wellbeing; Strategic Director Customer & Digital Services; Director Legal, HR, Audit & Investigation; Assistant Chief Executive; Governance Manager; Strategic Director Regeneration & Environment; Scrutiny Officer; Head of the Chief Executive Officer; Senior Administrator; Operational Director Regeneration, Growth & Employment; Head of Regeneration.’

 

 

It is interesting that the Head of Communications attends these Leader’s Briefing meetings. Could that be so that he can prepare the publicity for the Cabinet decisions, in advance of them officially being made? 

 

 

The “minutes” of the Leader’s Briefing meeting on 26 July 2021 are in the form of an email from a Governance Officer, and I will ask Martin to attach a copy of that document at the end of this article, should you wish to read them. You will note that there may, or may not, be amendments to the Reports which Cabinet members have received for the briefing, before they appear along with the agenda for the official Cabinet Meeting on 16 August. There was also mention of another PCG meeting, scheduled for September 2021.

 

 

The reports that went to the Leader’s Briefing meeting were marked “Restricted”. This may be because they might be changed, or because they should not be “leaked”, which would reveal that Cabinet members had already considered them before the official meeting. There was actually a slight change in the wording of the “preferred delivery option” paragraph 3.5.1 between the two dates. 

 

 

In the 26 July report (below), members had ‘endorsed’ Delivery Option 2 a year before. In the 16 August report (see third image above), they had ‘indicated a preference’ for it. This may only seem a small difference, but it gives the suggestion, in the first publicly available document, that no final decision had been reached before Cabinet officially considered the matter in August 2021.

 


Extract from the draft WHZ Report to the Leader’s Briefing on 26 July 2021.

 

What happened when Cabinet did consider the WHZ publicly on 16 August 2021 (having previously considered it in private several times since December 2019)? There were problems with the Live Streaming of that meeting, and the recording is only available towards the end of the WHZ item. 

 

 

We hear Cllr. McLennan speaking about the ‘really, really good news’ that WHZ includes a number of larger homes for families in housing need, and that ‘many of them will be affordable’. Cllr. Butt then starts by saying ‘this is actually great news’, and goes on for over a minute, commending how well the Council is doing with its housing programme, and delivering homes for people who need them on its waiting list.

 

 

The Council Leader speaking about WHZ at the 16 August 2021 Cabinet Meeting.


 

The Leader of the Council was actually talking about a Brent housing scheme, on Council-owned land at Cecil Avenue, where 152 of the 250 homes would be sold for profit by a private developer, 61 of the so-called “affordable” homes would be for shared ownership or Intermediate Rent, and only 37 would be available for rent to local people in housing need at London Affordable Rent level! On the other WHZ site, across the High Road, although the 54 flats would be for London Affordable Rent, only 8 of them would be family-sized.

 

 

To me, that performance was just misleading “grandstanding” – playing to the public gallery over a decision that had been made in advance of the formal Cabinet Meeting, and which he hoped no member of the public had actually read the detail of the Report (and could not read any of the details in the “exempt” Appendices to it).

 

 

I asked in the title ‘are Cabinet Meetings a charade?’ You may know “Charades” as a game involving guessing words from acted clues. I think that Brent’s Cabinet are playing a game with the borough’s residents. They are acting at their meetings as if they have considered and decided the Reports attached to their agenda, after hearing what any members of the public or backbench councillors have to say at the Cabinet Meeting.

 

 

A charade (singular) is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘an absurd pretence’. If the items on the Cabinet’s agenda have been considered and decided in advance, at a Policy Co-ordination Group meeting or Leader’s Briefing, then Cabinet Meetings are a charade.

 

 

Philip Grant.

 

11 comments:

  1. There is no democracy in Brent. The Labour Councillors then elect their Leader (a foregone conclusion because of Butt's family and other links, plus his patronage). Once he becomes Leader the Labour Councillors select their Deputy Leader and Chief Whip, again a foregone conclusion for the same reason Butt becomes Leader. The Leader then selects the other Cabinet members utilising, yes, you've got it. So we end up with a Council run by Butt and condoned by his approximately 30 cronies. The remaining 20 plus Labour Councillors are just there for their Whipped votes. Democracy this is not.

    The Leader controls all decisions in Brent.

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  2. I hate to disagree with Anonymous (7 March at 11:29), but Muhammed Butt is Leader of Brent Council as the result of a democratic process, the Brent local council elections in 2018.

    Labour candidates at those elections received over 50% of the votes cast, and under the "first past the post" voting system, that gave them all but three of the seats on Brent Council. As the Leader who had brought his party such electoral success, it was not a surprise when those Labour councillors voted to give him four more years as Leader of Brent Council.

    I do agree that the almost unlimited power in Cllr. Butt's hands has brought some unwelcome results in Brent during the past four years.

    If residents are looking for a change, hopefully for the better, then the way to try and bring that about is democratically, through the local elections in May 2022. The key to that will be getting far more people to vote than the 37% of the local electorate who voted in May 2018.

    If you are dissatisfied with the way that Brent Council ignores your views as a resident, and with the policies (and planning decisions!) which may threaten the quality of life in the borough in future, you need to speak out about it.

    Share your views with friends and neighbours, through residents' groups, and especially on social media (including sharing blogs from "Wembley Matters", "Life in Kilburn" or other sources that do not just promote "positive" stories about Brent Council and its leadership).

    Mobilise the people who feel the same way as you, and encourage them to vote for candidates who you (and they) feel will stand up for their local community, challenge what they feel to be poor policies, and not just be "yes men/women", or stay silent when they are asked to vote for something they believe is wrong.

    The biggest danger to the chances of change for the better is apathy. Nothing will change if people just shrug their shoulders and believe there is nothing they can do about it.

    There is something which you, and they, can do about it. That is to vote, and vote wisely.

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    Replies
    1. Thing is when people vote, they largely vote for a party and its values and not individuals, unless the individual is spectacularly good. The problem we have in Brent is family members of Butt are being engineered to stand, and they end up getting in because people largely vote for the party

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  3. The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 was state created policy for a time of war trauma, financial collapse and under mushroom cloud threat- spreading social resilience evenly and delivering on that. Government hedging across society in readiness for what happens next and for where and who survives?

    2022, and the new replacement Planning bill (the 1947 approach seen as not fit for present times), is being state re-thought in a context of continued financial crisis, global pandemic, inflammable cladding, climate emergency and war with nuclear Armageddon threatened? I guess the governments advisory panel must have changed radically since 1947 to now include the agendas of hostile powers to degrade, sanction and resilience infrastructure pre-destroy many UK neighbourhoods, the very opposite of the public funded 1947 plans aims and successes.

    That is some wider context for Brent politicians to ponder. A bad growth Brent Local Plan is a bad growth Brent Local Plan is a bad growth Brent Local Plan and it should be emergency skipped A.S.A.P

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  4. Fantastic research Phil and shocked to learn that important and significant decisions are actually being made at meetings other than Cabinet meetings, i.e. by the Policy Co-ordination Group and at Leader Briefings.

    One problem with this type of decision making is as you say, there is no point in the public attending and addressing the Cabinet before they vote on a decision, if in reality the decision has already been made at a different meeting 4 days or a year ago.

    Secondly, there are three groups voting on a decision. Who is accountable? The Cabinet group will blame the Policy Co-ordination Group who will in turn blame the Leader Briefing Group.

    I have personally heard people say that the Leader of the Council - Cllr Muhammed Butt is running a dictatorship but did not fully understand the basis of these statements.

    I can now see that by setting up decision making in this manner the Cabinet Members have no actual authority or decision making role. They are elected to represent us, the public, in decision making, however they are no longer able to exert this role because the decision has already been made at a different group meeting. This means that the Leader of the Council is in fact a dictatorship.

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  5. Philip is of course absolutely right. The 'Policy pre Cabinet Meetings' probably last 4 hours and everything is agreed in advance. The Cabinet is a charade as everything is predetermined and they will want to have the meeting over with as quickly as possible. Allowing a public contribution is also a bit of a sham as they will not change their pre agreed decision however the good presentation or argument put forward by a member of the public.

    I think that the famous 'Yes Minister' Comedy show is an excellent example of how things work. The Officers always want to get their way and will bamboozle Councillors in private meetings and make sure that the Public Meeting is simply a show and finished as quickly as possible to avoid a risk of any wobbles.

    This will persist as long as we have one party Cabinet government at local Council level and the quality of debate and genuine challenge to officer recommendations will only happen when we get a return to the Committee system when different parties and different voices can engage in debate and questioning of officers.

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  6. The treatment of Margaret von Stoll was shameful -- patronising her with platitudes -- then shutting her down. Yet Brent Council have so much time to waste during Cabinet Meetings on the repetitive "Whoop Whoop aren't we so all so great" rhetoric.

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  7. Dear Anonymous (8 March at 16:37),

    Thank you for your comment.

    What you have said so clearly is exactly what I thought when I watched the Live Stream recording of the 7 February Cabinet Meeting.

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  8. All residents would agree that this Brent Labour Leadership don't give a flying fig about residents, they are more bothered about grandstanding and self congratulation than helping the residents.

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  9. Dear Anonymous (8 March at 17:17),

    To say that 'all residents would agree' is a sweeping statement, but I'm sure that there are many, among the residents who take an interest in what is happening in our borough, who feel that way.

    If the situation is to change for the better, ALL the residents who feel that way need to vote in the local elections in May, as suggested in my comment of 7 March at 16:08 above.

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  10. Phillip is correct, Brent has some very cozy protected and agencies help piled-on conservation area suburb zones of de-growth and continuous year on year health and wellbeing resilience improvements.

    Brent gives plenty of figs, but it has a highly fixed inequitable way of zonal distributing them.

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