Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity
Cllr. Tatler (front right) on the Cecil Avenue site in March 2023.
(from a Brent Council press release announcing the
WHZ development contract with Wates)
Following my guest post on 28 April, setting out the truth about the Council’s ownership of the Wembley Housing Zone site at Cecil Avenue, I added a comment below which shared the text of an open email I had sent to Councillor Shama Tatler.
Martin asked whether he could publish that email as a separate post, but I said it might be better to wait until I had also sent an email to the members of the Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee, and publish both together. That is what this guest post does.
Open email to Councillor Shama Tatler, Brent’s Cabinet Member for Regeneration,
on 29 May at 8.30am:
Subject: Incorrect statement on Wembley Housing Zone land at Scrutiny Committee on 23 April
This is an Open Email
Dear Councillor Tatler,
You may recall that I have been taking a close interest in the lack of genuinely affordable housing at Brent Council's Cecil Avenue development, which comes under your Wembley Housing Zone regeneration portfolio, since August 2021.
I was therefore interested when the subject came up when you were speaking to the Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee meeting last Tuesday (23 April) when they were considering Regeneration.
You stated (and I have transcribed this from the webcast of the meeting): 'With the Wembley Housing Zone, we didn't own the land. We had to purchase the land.'
That statement was untrue.
Brent Council did own the freehold of the Cecil Avenue site (which will provide 237 of the 291 WHZ homes). That land, which for a time had passed to Copland Community School when it was a foundation school, had come back to Brent Council ownership, for nil consideration, under a land rationalisation agreed in 2014.
The only WHZ land which Brent Council had to purchase was Ujima House (the smaller site, providing only 54 of the 291 WHZ homes), acquired in 2016 for £4.8m, and funded out of the £8m initially provided to Brent by the GLA for the Wembley Housing Zone.
I'm sure that you are at least as aware of those facts as I am, and yet you appear to have chosen to mislead the Scrutiny Committee, as part of seeking to justify the impact on viability which has led to the poor number of genuinely affordable homes homes for rent to Council tenants at your Wembley Housing Zone scheme.
I am bringing this to your attention, and the fact that the true position is now in the public domain*, so that you can write to the Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee to correct the error in what you said above (and any other false information included in your statements to them on 23 April) and apologise for misleading them at their meeting.
I am copying this email to Councillor Conneely, the Committee Chair, for her information, and as it is an open email I will also include its text as a comment under the online blog post, which you can read via the "link" below. Yours sincerely,
Philip Grant.
* https://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/2024/04/regeneration-at-scrutiny-meeting-truth.html
[Thirty-six hours later, I have yet to receive any acknowledgement or response from Cllr. Tatler, and on past experience, I’m not sure that I will.]
Wembley Housing Zone location plan, with added description in key.
(Original version taken from a Report to Cabinet in
August 2021)
As I have little confidence that Cllr. Tatler will take my advice, and bring the error I have pointed out to the attention of the Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee, my second email was addressed to them.
Email to Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee, on 30 May at 8.27pm:
Subject: Correction to information given to you on Wembley Housing Zone land at meeting on 23 April.
Dear Chair and members (including substitutes) of Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee, I was interested in item 6 on your 23 April agenda, Regeneration in Brent, and watched some of the meeting on the webcast.
You may remember that, in 2022, I was seeking to get your committee to scrutinise various aspects of the Council's delivery of affordable housing, and in particular the lamentably low proportion of genuinely affordable homes to rent which were proposed for the Cecil Avenue site of the Council's Wembley Housing Zone project.
I was pleased to hear Councillor Conneely express your Committee's support for more genuinely affordable homes on Council schemes. However, I was astounded to hear what Councillor Tatler said about the Wembley Housing Zone scheme, which comes under her Regeneration portfolio. This is what I transcribed her saying, when I went back to check it on the webcast recording (with my bold type for emphasis):
'With the Wembley Housing Zone, we didn't own the land. We had to purchase the land. That impacts viability as well.'
She was claiming that the Council could not provide more genuinely affordable homes than the 88 at London Affordable Rent (out of a total of 291 homes to be built, with 150 of those for private sale by Wates) because purchasing the land reduced the viability of the project.
But Brent Council did not have to purchase the land for the main part of the project, the former Copland School site at Cecil Avenue, where 237 of the 291 homes will be built.
I double-checked that I was correct over Brent's ownership of that vacant brownfield site, before sharing the truth about this online. I also wrote to Councillor Tatler yesterday morning (29 April), and am appending the full text of that email below for your information (although I did copy the original to your Chair).
I am not confident that Councillor Tatler will write to correct the false statement she made to you on 23 April, so I decided to write to you as well. Please base any follow-up work you do on Regeneration, and any recommendations your Committee may make on the Wembley Housing Zone, on the true position over land ownership at Cecil Avenue. Thank you.
As set out in the online article which I provided a "link" to at the end of my email to Councillor Tatler below, effective scrutiny in holding the Cabinet to account relies on Cabinet members, and Council Officers, being honest in the information they provide to you. I hope that you will make that point clearly when dealing with this matter, because the work that you do is very important.
Thank you. Best wishes,
Philip Grant.
So, the key public footpath through this housing zone to the active traffic bridge south to Alperton over rail lines is a long narrow winding alley by design now?
ReplyDeleteTwo miles south is a beautiful new in 2019 active traffic ramp bridge over rail tracks at Chiswick Park (on the Hounslow and Ealing boundary). Anti-congestion good population growth planning for car-free new infrastructure can and does happen where there is political interest.
Why no Green Party content at all here? You have published nothing on what our potential mayor or AM member for brent and harrow might say on anything and it’s an election today.
ReplyDeleteWembley Matters is a campaigning blog on environmental and social issues but not an official Green Party publication promoting candidates. That can be seen on the Brent Greens blog here: https://brentgreens.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteThe Nolalan principles are always worth repeating:
ReplyDeleteSelflessness: Holders of public office should act solely in terms of the public interest.
Integrity: Holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. They should not act or take decisions in order to gain financial or other material benefits for themselves, their family, or their friends. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.
Objectivity: Holders of public office must act and take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias.
Accountability: Holders of public office are accountable to the public for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this.
Openness: Holders of public office should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from the public unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing.
Honesty: Holders of public office should be truthful.
Leadership: Holders of public office should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and be willing to challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs.
And who scrutinises what these holders of public office are doing??? No-one they are all in it for themselves.
DeleteDear Anonymous (2 May at 15.49)
DeleteThe person responsible for overseeing compliance with the Nolan Principles, and the Members' and Employees' Codes of Conduct which include that they must be adhered to, is Brent Council's Monitoring Officer.
The Monitoring Officer is Debra Norman, one of the Council's Senior Management Team, whose other title is Corporate Director for Governance and Law.
Anyone who genuinely believes that a councillor has broken the Brent Members' Code of Conduct can make a complaint to that effect to the Monitoring Officer, who should consider the complaint, including arranging for it to be independently investigated, if the matter is serious enough.
Most.such complaints, far as I am aware, are either dismissed, or if upheld are dealt with privately, rather than referred to the Council"s Audit and Standards Committee ( there used to be a separate Standards Committee).
The Monitoring Officer has to make an annual report to that committee, summarising the number and nature of conduct complaints received, and action taken on them - you should be able to find the latest report attached to the agenda for one of the Audit and Standards Committee (or its linked Advisory Committee which has an independent Chair) on Brent Council's website.
It is interesting which political party will General Election dare to venture into the car-free 'tall town,' no public services infrastructure, no green infrastructure, no active traffic infrastructure, massive service charge extraction zones for votes.
ReplyDeletePopulation growing zoned is a time when this vote will matter. I guess council tax will soon need to be zero in such bare life global corporate slab tower colony zones?