‘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