Wednesday 8 November 2023

Cllr Tatler on the 'perfect storm' facing Brent Council finances

 Cllr Tatler made no bones about it at Brent Scrutiny last night: Brent Council is facing a 'perfect storm' regarding its finances:

 

 

As already reported by Wembley Matters the combination of increased homelessness (150 families a week seeking help from Brent Council), inflation, rising interest rates, rising private sector rents and reduced private sector rental properties as a result of landlords exiting the market; combined has led to a £13m overspend by the Council.

The Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee delved deeper into the repercussions and possible mitigations last night.  

One focus was the 600 plus empty properties that could easily house the 500 families and single people (858 people in all) currently in expensive bed and breakfast accommodation.  The challenge was how to contact the owners so that the Council could lease the property.  Some councillors there were more than 600 empty properties and asked how the  Council collected the figures. A councillor asked if this coudl be checked against the most recent census. In response Cllr Tatler said that the Council could reactivate the campaign to ask residents to report empty properties.

Contact Empty Property Team

Opening hours: Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Stop giving planning permission for student accomodation when the land could be used to build permanent homes - neither the students nor the building owners pay any council tax but they use allow of our already overstretched local services!!!

Martin Francis said...

Perhaps there's been a substantial movement since last year with increased mortgage rates etc. I would hope Cllr Tatler's information would be up to date but I can ask Brent Council.

Martin Francis said...

This is the relevant extract from the Officers' Report:

London Councils commissioned Savills and the London School of Economics
(LSE) to produce a report on the Supply of PRS (Private Rented Sector)
Accommodation in London. The report has found that London’s PRS is
affected by multiple factors driving a reduction in the availability of properties
for rent. The report highlights that demand for housing is continuing to
increase while supply is reducing across the whole market. It has found that
greater reliance on the PRS to house lower income households and
increasingly limited housing benefits are making accommodation less
affordable and available. Currently it appears to be supply side factors notably
taxation, interest rate changes and uncertainties about future regulation that
are reducing availability at the lower end of the PRS

Anonymous said...

Info above covers London though not just Brent - every house that goes up for sale around here gets snapped up by landlords and quickly rented out.

Philip Grant said...

Flyer from an estate agent this week proudly stated that they had let a 3-bed semi in my street in Kingsbury for £2,800 per calendar month.

I don't know how many people are living there, to be able to pay that much in rent.

This is a problem, high property prices and high rents, which has been building up for years, particularly since "fair rent" controls were abolished. There does not appear to be the political will to tackle this problem (possibly because a good proportion of politicians, and many of their wealthy friends who make donations to them, are landlords who benefit from the current situation).

Anonymous said...

What a complete mess this Labour administration have got us into.

If a private rental is withdrawn then surely the property is sold and new people move in.

Agree about the Student accomadation plus all the Airbnb's

Additionally allowing developments without contributions to affordable housing needs to stop. Any developer who wants to make a whoping profit won't want to provide affordable, nor a contribution. So they build higher so the cost per unit goes up and the overall profit is more, however, the margin falls below the viability threshold. Try it this way 10 storey building with 100 units gives 20% affordable, 20 storey building with 200 units falls below the 15% margin so no affordable. Yet the overall profit on the 20 storey is more than the 10 storey and no affordable contribution either. Simple?

Brent do not know what they are doing, their regeneration will yet bankrupt the borough.

Anonymous said...

Wealthy local landlords have driven up house prices and monopolised rent levels! A neighbour was having problems with tenants in the house next door to them, they approached the landlord to visit and help them, the landlord said we own so many properties locally we dont have the time to visit any. Imagine how much profit they are making.

Anonymous said...

We will all know who was responsible for the bankruptcy of Brent Council as it's all logged in Brent Council records and there are millions of photo ops posted on Brent Council social media and the waste of money that is the Brent Magazine.

Anonymous said...

I am truly ashamed of this council which has been fully complicit with private landlords and His Majesty's Government in driving up property prices and rental levels in our borough.

One of the mistakes the Council made was letting the estate agents know they were buying properties on the open market which seriously inflated prices in the borough. Another mistake is allowing developers to avoid providing affordable homes as specified by planning policies. It has now got to the point that developers can get away with minimal affordable provision. Only a few days ago the Planning Committee agreed to a development with no affordable homes contribution at all. The method of avoidance is simple, just build high enough to increase costs per unit and make the profit margin small enough to avoid providing affordable while increasing the overall profit margin of the schemes. This loophole has been provided by the Council's new Local Plan etc which allows higher and higher buildings to the point of inappropriateness.

As for Towerblock Tatler's reasoning and comment about it all being down to 13 years of austerity and landlords exiting the sector, does she take us for fools? (Yes, she does).

This £13.4 million deficit lies directly at the feet of this Labour administration. They have embraced social cleansing of the borough for 13 years through their regeneration policies and changes to the borough's planning policies that make Brent the perfect area for developers to make massive profits while giving nothing but pain to local residents. The developers have now found new methods of avoiding providing affordable housing; perhaps they will take on CIL next?

The massive numbers of student units, Airbnb, holiday lets, second homes is doing nothing for the residents of Brent other than forcing them out due to high rentals and lack of homes to buy.

Anonymous said...

Labour run Brent Council gave £17.8million of our NCIL money, which should have been spent on local community projects, to multi billion pound developers Quintain for their vanity project steps outside Wembley Stadium - totally against the true Labour principles of helping people and levelling up society - shows their poor judgement.

Labour should be voted out for that decision alone!

Anonymous said...

If they want us to report empty properties let's start with...

- Brent Civic Centre Atrium, such a waste of space;

- the disused pub and bank buildings opposite Sainsbirys in Alperton;

- the huge office blocks on the corner of the North Circular and Harrow Road that have stood empty for at least 25 years;

- and now all the empty luxury flats in Wembley Park and Beresford Avenue.