Council housing – does Brent know what it is doing?

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

An aerial view of the Newland Court estate. (From Google Maps satellite view)

 

Although much of the attention at the 15 November Planning Committee meeting will be on the deferred Kilburn Square application, there is another Council infill housing application which may well be on the agenda. 

 

Brent New Council Homes Programme’s Newland Court garages proposals (22/3124) were first submitted on 7 September 2022. Many residents, both on the estate and whose homes backed onto the very narrow site, objected to the plans. My own objection was mainly because the established trees along the boundary, protected as part of the Barn Hill Conservation Area, grow both over and under the site, making it impractical for the proposed development.

 

Brent’s April 2023 revised five homes plan for the Newland Court infill scheme.

 

Although Planning Officers should have refused the application, they instead allowed the Council’s architects and planning agent to submit revised plans in April, which reduced the number of homes from seven to five (so extra cost, reduced viability). Surely this scheme could not go ahead? I’m grateful to Marc, and other Newland Court residents, for their permission to quote from correspondence they have received from Brent Council over recent months, which has inspired the title of this guest post.

 

As this threat of a detrimental development had been hanging over her head for a year, one resident wrote to Brent Council’s Head of Housing and Neighbourhoods in September 2023, to ask what was going on. This was the reply she received, from Brent’s Tenancy and Neighbourhoods Service Manager on 18 September:

 

‘Thank you for your e-mail dated 5 September, which is addressed to Kate Dian, Head of Housing and Neighbourhoods.

 

Newland Road is not a Private Road, as the site is own by the Council and based on a public land.

 

Due to current financial pressure the proposed infill will not go ahead. This has now been confirmed by our housing supply and partnership services.

 

Your site is included in the next round of consultation for ‘Off street-controlled parking’. We expect the consultation to take place before the end of this calendar year. As the proposed infill will not go ahead, the associated cost and its implications are now not relevant issues, which requires further clarity.’

 

The reply was shared with her neighbours, to great relief, although there was some puzzlement over the reference that “Newland Road” ‘is not a Private Road’, as the Council’s signs at either end of it say the opposite.

 

Signs at the gated entrance to one end of the Newland Court estate road.
(Courtesy of Michelle Hart)

 

Marc, one of the Newland Court residents who has been leading the battle against the plans, and the way in which he and his neighbours have been treated by the Council over them, was not convinced by this “good news”. He’d been told that Brent’s application would be going to Planning Committee on 18 October. He wrote to the Lead Member for Housing, seeking clarification, and this was the response he received on 4 October:

 

‘Dear Marc,

 

Firstly, I would like to apologise for the delay in responding to your enquiry. I have now had an opportunity to review this matter and liaised with the development team; my findings are as follows.

 

As you will appreciate there is a chronic housing shortage in Brent, which the Council is committed to addressing, by utilising available resources to increase the supply of affordable homes.

 

Although building costs have increased due to the current economic climate, the Council are reviewing the pipeline and will continue to pursue planning permission for schemes within the New Council Homes Programme, including the Newland Court development site: should planning approval be secured, then an extensive financial review to assess the financial viability of each development going forward will be undertaken.

 

At this stage, no formal decision about the Newland Court development proposal has been made and on behalf of the Council I would like to sincerely apologise for any confusion caused because of recent communication which has been circulated.

 

I recognise this may not be the response you hoped for and note your comments, but I trust the above clarifies the Council’s position in respect of this matter.

 

Cllr Promise Knight
Stonebridge Ward
Lead Member for Housing, Homelessness, and Renters’ Security’

 

So, Brent Council’s housing team is spending time and money, pressing on with seeking planning consent for schemes (often small ones) which it doesn’t know whether it will ever be able to afford to build.

 

I have to say, yet again, that if they had got on and built the 250 homes on the vacant Council-owned brownfield site at Cecil Avenue (the former Copland School), which they obtained full planning consent for in February 2021, and built them all as Council homes, they would have done much better in ‘utilising available resources to increase the supply of affordable homes.’ Instead, those homes won’t be available until  2026, 152 of them will be sold privately by Brent’s “developer partner”, and only 59 will be for Council tenants at London Affordable Rent.

 

The Rokesby Place car park on 3 October 2023.

 

They received planning consent for at least two small infill schemes last year. The August 2022 Planning Committee meeting approved Brent’s application to build two four-bedroom houses on the car park at Rokesby Place. These were supposed to be homes at Social Rent level, for Brent families in housing need, although Planning Officers changed that to London Affordable Rent (which would be £772 a year more, at 2022/23 levels).

 

By November 2022, Brent’s Cabinet were told that Rokesby Place would not be viable as genuinely affordable housing, so that one of the two houses might have to be sold privately. Even then, no action seems to have been taken to build the two houses, as shown by the recent photograph of the car park “site” above.

 

In December 2022, Planning Committee approved another Brent two houses infill application, for the garage site behind homes at Broadview (a late 1950s Wembley Council estate in Kingsbury, now with many houses privately-owned through “right to buy”). They did so despite misleading information from Planning Officers, which had been brought to their attention by objectors!

 

Has any progress been made on building those “much needed Council homes”? None that I can see, and I suspect that they will never be built. The houses on this tiny unsuitable site would cost more than usual to build because they would need extensive soundproofing (because they would be just 20 metres from the Jubilee Line tracks), and will need a special water tank constructed under the front forecourt (as fire engines could not get close enough to them, because of a long access drive only 2 metres wide).

 

Cllrs Butt, Tatler and Knight at the Watling Gardens “groundbreaking” event, October 2023.
(Brent Council publicity photograph)

 

Brent Council does claim that it is having some success in “Delivering New Council Homes”, as shown by this staged photograph taken at Watling Gardens. Their planning application was submitted in 2021, and received full consent in April 2022. Eighteen months later, they are just starting work on the project, and it will be ‘winter 2025’ before the homes are finally “delivered”.

 

That is not all. The Council’s June 2022 press release, headed “Another 125 new council homes for local families”, was rather misleading, as a blog by Martin at the time pointed out. 42 Council homes are being demolished to make way for the redevelopment, and 34 of the new homes will be used to house displaced tenants. 45 will be 1-bedroom “independent living” flats for elderly people (not for families). The Cabinet decided that 24 of the remainder should be “converted” from London Affordable Rent to shared ownership. That leaves only 22 of these “New Council Homes” available for local people waiting for a genuinely affordable home to rent.

 

The Cabinet Member for Housing, Homelessness, and Renters’ Security,
in a July 2022 Brent PR video promoting its Clement Close infill proposals.

 

There is no dispute that Brent needs thousands more genuinely affordable homes to rent, and the borough’s Labour leadership promised to build 1,000 of these in the five years up to March 2024, and a further 700 (part-funded by a promise of over £100m from the GLA) by 2028.

 

I agree with the Council that the steep rise in the cost of building materials, and in interest rates, has made their task more difficult. But poor decision making, and poor advice from some Council Officers, have played a big part in delaying some schemes, and seeing others put on hold.

 

Why has so much time and effort (and money) gone into small infill schemes which common sense should have told them would never work, either practically or financially?

 

Why have they wasted two years trying to push through an unacceptable proposal for Kilburn Square (missing out on the chunk of GLA 2016-2023 Affordable Homes Programme funding which would have been available), when if they had worked with the local community on a smaller scheme, construction could already be underway?

 

And to go back to my original question on Council housing: ‘does Brent know what it is doing?’

Philip Grant

'NEWLAND COURT - POSTSCRIPT:

A number of Newland Court residents have copied me into emails they have sent in the past ten days to Brent's Council Leader, Chief Executive, Planning Committee members and others at the Civic Centre.

These emails have listed what is wrong with the plans for their estate, the lack of any meaningful consultation with them over the proposals, the ignoring of their objections by Planning Officers, the Council's off-hand responses to correspondence over the proposals (one example: email responses 'seem like the respondent is reading of a script like a cold fish. We are not stupid, please get to the facts and stop insulting our intelligence.'), and they have called for the Planning Committee to visit the estate and see for themselves how ridiculous the plans are.

Councillor Muhammed Butt, or his Complaints and Casework Officer on his behalf (it's interesting that the Council Leader needs his own Complaints Officer!), has sent a letter to one of the residents, copied to others who have drawn these important issues to his attention. It says:

'Your enquiry has been forwarded to the respective department, who will look into the issue and make every effort to resolve it.'

I will ask Martin to add a copy of the "Office of the Leader" letter below my article above, as evidence of his apparent indifference to the views of local residents, who are also Council housing estate tenants and leaseholders.