Brent’s Council Housing – A Tale of Two Sites. The reality behind Brent Council press releases

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

From the Brent Council website home page, 18 March 2024.

 

Two news items about Council housing on Brent’s website caught my eye this month. Before I look at these schemes individually, let’s have a recap about their targets for affordable homes.

 

When Brent’s New Council Homes Programme was launched five years ago, the aim was for 5,000 affordable homes to be built in the borough between April 2019 and March 2024 inclusive. As part of that aim, the Council set itself ‘a strategic target of delivering 1,000 new council homes at genuinely affordable rent by 31 March 2024.’

 

Promise’s “promise”, from the Spring 2024 edition of “Your Brent” magazine.

 

Having failed to meet those targets by next Sunday, the Council is doing its best to ignore that fact, and to publicise their new target instead. The ‘5,000 affordable homes in total within Brent’ is given an extra four years, and although an extra 700 new Council homes is added to the target to be achieved by 2028, rather than March 2024, they are no longer promised to be at genuinely affordable rent.

 

The Brent news release banner, from the Council’s website on 15 March 2024.

 

The first housing scheme that a Brent news release celebrated this month was the start of construction on the Neville and Winterleys site in South Kilburn. Among the white hard hat “crowd” in this Council publicity photograph are “the usual suspects” from Brent’s Cabinet, including the Council Leader with a spade (as in the Watling Gardens “groundbreaking” photo last October). But who are the others in this “flash mob”? Are they local residents waiting to be rehoused, celebrating that something is actually happening, or workers from a nearby site operated by the same contractor? Please add a comment below if you know the answer.

 

Brent applied for planning permission for this development in December 2018 (application 18/4920), and these were the details of the homes, and split between Social Rented and Private Sale, approved by Brent’s Planning Committee on 18 February 2020 (more than four years ago!):

 

Extract from the Final Officer Report to the 18 February 2020 Planning Committee meeting.

 

After minor changes to the design, the number of flats to be built here has been increased from 219 to 225, but the number of Council homes has gone down from 112 to 95. Despite this, Brent’s Lead Member for Regeneration can still put a positive “spin” on the numbers:

 

Extract from Brent’s 15 March 2024 news release.

 

The “almost half” is actually 42.2% of the new homes, and these will all be for existing Council tenants in South Kilburn, being decanted from other blocks that will be demolished as part of the troubled South Kilburn Regeneration Project. None of the ‘more than 200 much-needed homes’ will go to provide housing at genuinely affordable rents for local families on the Council’s waiting list, even though the 95 for existing tenants will be counted as ‘new Council homes’. 

 

Despite Brent celebrating the start of construction now, those homes may not be built in time for the 2028 target, as the news release says: ‘The scheme will be delivered by Countryside Partnerships (part of Vistry Group) and is due for completion by 2029.’ [I may add a comment below later about Vistry Group.]

 

Another Brent news release banner, again picturing some of “the usual suspects”, on 18 March 2024.

 

The second housing scheme that Brent issued a news release for this month is the former Euro House site in Wembley Park, now known as Fulton and Fifth. The development initially received planning consent in December 2020 for a total of 493 homes, which was increased to 759 (of which 218 would be “affordable”) under a second application to Planning Committee in November 2021 (with one Labour member, since removed from the committee, voting against approval). From the news release, it seems that the final figure is 876 homes, with 294 of them as new “affordable” Council homes.

 

It's amazing how many homes you can squeeze onto a site of 1.29 hectares, which used to be a two-storey warehouse. And the five towers have gone up quickly, as you can see on the left in this photograph, which I took earlier this month, while looking at what had happened to parts of the British Empire Exhibition grounds of 100 years ago (when there was a coal mine here!):

 

The Fulton and Fifth site, with its tower cranes, seen across Engineers Way from Canada Gardens.

 

It is very good news that all 294 ‘will go to council tenants on the council’s housing waiting list.’ But, as they say, ‘the devil is in the detail’, and these are homes that the Council is buying, on long leases, from a private developer, not Council homes that Brent is building itself.

 

In the 2021 proposals, there would only have been 80 homes for London Affordable Rent (“LAR”), with 62 “affordable” at no more than Local Housing Allowance (“LHA”) rent level and 76 for Shared Ownership. I explained LHA and Shared Ownership in detail, in a November 2022 guest post. 

 

The press release says that now ‘118 will be at London Living Rent, and 176 homes will be rented at London Affordable Rent.’ 176 homes at the “genuinely affordable” LAR rent level will be very welcome (although that rent level does not include a cap on the level of service charges). But 176 is slightly less than the 181 which will be sold privately, or as Shared Ownership, on Brent Council’s own development at Cecil Avenue in Wembley, with only 56 of the 237 being built at that site for rent to Council tenants at LAR level!

 

You may not be familiar with London Living Rent (“LLR”), so I will take this opportunity to explain what it means. It was introduced by the Mayor of London, and the GLA website says: ‘London Living Rent is a type of intermediate affordable housing for middle-income Londoners who want to build up savings to buy a home. … it is designed to help people transition from renting to shared ownership.’

 

To qualify for an LLR home, you need to live or work in London, be in housing need, but not be able to afford to buy a home (even a Shared Ownership one!) and have a household income of no more than £60k a year. Your tenancy, if you get an LLR home, will be for a minimum of three years, and up to ten years. During that time, you will be expected to save, so that you can buy a share of your home through Shared Ownership.

 

London Living Rent levels from 1 January 2024 for each Brent Council Ward. (From a GLA spreadsheet)

 

LLR rent levels are based on one third of average local household incomes, on a Ward-by-Ward basis across the capital, and are recalculated each year. Currently, the monthly LLR rent level for a 1-bedroom flat in Wembley Park would be £1080, rising to £1320 for a 3-bedroom home. For 2024, there is a cap of £1400 a month for LLR rents.

 

Extract from Brent’s 18 March 2024 news release.

 

What the LLR rent levels for Wembley Park will be in 2026, if the promised homes are ready in ‘just two years from now’, will depend on figures for household incomes in that area. Given the large number of new Quintain Living (and other private) apartments being let, and the rents that people have to pay for them, “local household incomes” are likely to rise, with the LLR rents rising as well.

 

Quintain Living advert, photographed on a Jubilee Line train in March 2024.

 

As an example of what is currently charged by Quintain Living, the advert above says that you can rent a studio apartment from £1703 a month. That’s more than £20,400 a year for a home only big enough for one or two people, so not affordable for most local people in housing need. (You have to look very closely for the “small print” on ‘one month rent free’, as it’s printed in white on a light background – it only applies to selected unfurnished apartments with a minimum 12-month tenancy.)

 

One final point on Brent’s affordable housing at the Regal London Fulton Road development. 294 homes is only 33.5% of the total being built there. Brent’s own planning policies say that at least 70% of the affordable housing provided on large developments should be “genuinely affordable”, but the Council’s 176 LAR homes are just under 60%, while the 118 “intermediate” LLR homes account for just over 40%. Not even following their own rules!

 

I hope you have found my latest look at Brent’s Council housing of interest. I’m sure it is more informative than Brent Council’s press releases!

 

Philip Grant.

 

 

EDITOR'S FOOTNOTE

 

Meanwhile MYLONDON reports on private renting:

 

The average cost of renting privately in one North West London borough has exploded over the past 12 months. Since February last year, tenants in Brent have seen their housing costs increase sharper than anywhere else in the country, leaving some residents feeling like life has become about nothing more than simply working to afford the extortionate prices.

 

The cost of renting the average private home in Brent is 20 per cent more expensive than it was in February 2023, according to data from the government’s Housing Market Indices Team. This increase is five per cent more than the next worst affected London borough, and more than double the national average.

 

FURTHER INFORMATION FROM PHILIP GRANT

 FULTON AND FIFTH SITE:

In case anyone is wondering how the 759 home scheme approved by Brent's Planning Committee was magically increased to an 876 home development, here is the answer.

Among the many further planning applications arising from conditions set out in the November 2021 planning consent was application 22/3123, seeking variations of (among others) 'conditions 2 (approved drawings/documents), 3 (residential units)'.

One of the variations was to add an additional floor within the buildings, making the tallest 24 storeys rather than the 23 approved, but to do so without raising the consented height of the building.

How do you do that? By reducing the ceiling height of the flats on each floor! The ceiling height would now be 2.5 metres, which is still acceptable for housing standards. One of the two blocks where this reduction would be made was block E, with 176 homes - and it is no coincidence that 176 is the number of homes for LAR which Brent Council tenants will be offered!

This planning application did not go to Brent's Planning Committee. It was approved by a Delegated Team Manager, and signed off by Brent's Head of Planning on 9 June 2023.

This was despite the Report on the application saying: 'It is acknowledged that the proposal would continue to be in excess of the indicative site capacity of the whole site allocation,' - squeezing them in, as my article points out!

The Report also says: 'Of the 876 units, 122 of these would be 3-bed (13.9%). Under the extant consent, 79 out of the 759 units were approved to be 3-bed (10.4%). While there is an uplift of 3-bed units, these still fall short of the requirement for 1 in 4 dwellings within a development to be 3 bedrooms or more, sought by the Local Plan Policy BH6.' So, a big shortfall in the family-sized homes which Brent desperately needs.

The 3-bed flats which Brent Council will receive are shown to be 56 for LAR in block E and 36 for LLR in block D. (That's 56 family-sized homes for "genuinely affordable" rent in a development of 876 homes!).