Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity
Brent Council would like you to believe that the answer is 530 new affordable homes. That is the number they included in the leaflet they sent out to every household in the borough last month, with our Council Tax bills for 2025/26. The claim that 530 affordable homes were delivered is on a page headed “Where Your Council Tax Goes”, directly following the words ‘Here’s how we spent your council tax last year’, so there should not be any doubt that it relates to homes delivered by Brent Council itself. But that claim is untrue!
When I saw that figure, I couldn’t understand where all those homes had been completed in the borough during the past year, so I put in an FoI request. Here is the answer (in red) that I received to the first point, which as well as confirming that the claim relates to the year 2024/25 says that 530 affordable homes was actually 434.
Extract from email of 31 March 2025 from Brent’s Strategic Housing Partnerships Manager.
I realise that, as the leaflet had to be printed around two months before the year end, there had to be some estimating, but to publish a figure of 530, more than 22 per cent higher than the actual number at 31 March is stretching the facts. Brent has claimed, in response to being challenged on the figures by the Local Democracy Reporting Service, that 530 was ‘correct at the time of going to press’, but that can’t be true either.
But the situation gets worse for the Council, as the second point I raised in my FoI request was where these affordable homes were “delivered”, and whether they were built by Brent or by another registered provider of social housing (such as a housing association). This is the response I received:
So, there it is, in black and white. Brent Council did not deliver 530 affordable homes in the year to 31 March 2025, and not even 434, the revised total of all of the affordable homes completed in the borough in that year. The Council itself delivered just 26 affordable homes in the year, less than 5% of the number its leaflet to Council Taxpayers would have you believe!
When Brent set out its five-year New Council Homes plan in 2019, it promised to deliver 1,000 new homes at “genuinely affordable” rents between 2019 and 2024. It failed to do that, and quietly changed the target to 1,000 “affordable” homes by 2028, just one example of the misleading information they have given over affordable housing. In the third part of my FoI request, I asked for a breakdown of the different types of affordable housing included in the 530 (or 434) figure, This was the answer:
This shows that only 101 out of 434 of the new affordable homes was at the “genuinely affordable” London Affordable Rent (“LAR”) level, that is just over 23% of the total. Brent Council has a planning policy which states that at least 70% of affordable homes provided (and 50% of new homes in developments of 10+ homes are meant to be “affordable”) should be genuinely affordable, so our planning system is clearly failing to deliver on what is an identified need for the people of Brent.
More than half of the affordable homes delivered were not even homes for rent, but shared ownership (45% of the total) and discount market sale (14%). ‘Discounted market sales housing’, which like shared ownership technically counts as “affordable housing”, even though it is not affordable to most people in housing need in Brent, is defined as homes which are sold ‘at a discount of at least 20% below local market value.’
The other claim over housing in the Council Tax leaflet is that ‘1,000 new council homes [are] being built this year.’ I asked for the details behind that claim as well, and this is the answer I received:
You will note that, again, between sending the leaflet to the printers and 31 March, the Council had to revise its figure down from 1,000 to 899. These are ‘expected completions’, and who knows how many more of these will not actually be completed by 31 March 2026?
From the names and addresses of these ‘new council homes’ being built, at least three large sites, Alperton Bus Garage, Fulton Road and Quay Walk, amounting to 564 homes (62.5% of the total) are private developments, where Brent is borrowing large amounts of money to buy flats from the developers, rather than building new homes itself.
And this is the odd thing. It is (or should be) much cheaper to build new homes on land that you already own, but instead of building all of the homes on the Council owned former Copland School site at Cecil Avenue for rent (at the genuinely affordable rents which local people need), Brent has agreed that Wates, the contractor building them for the Council, can sell 150 of the 237 homes there privately. Only 56 of the new homes there (just over 23%) will be for renting to Brent families at the “genuinely affordable” LAR level.
Brent also owns all of the blocks of housing, and the land on which they stand, which are part of its long-running and much delayed South Kilburn Regeneration programme. In the latest deal for this, with Countryside, the developer will get more than half of the homes to be built on the site of Neville and Winterleys, to sell privately. The homes retained by the Council will all be for social rent, which sounds like a good thing, but that is because they will all be for existing Council tenants, being rehoused so that their homes can be demolished. There will be no new homes available for rent to families on the Council’s waiting list.
These dishonest housing claims, which have gone out to every home in the borough, give the impression that Brent Council is providing much more affordable housing itself than is actually the case. Who benefits from this deception? The principal beneficiaries are Cllr. Muhammed Butt (whose “Dear Resident” letter is on page 3 of the leaflet, saying what a good job his Council is doing, despite the huge cuts to its Central Government funding since 2010) and his Labour councillors. This propaganda on their behalf is in an official Brent Council leaflet, paid for out of our Council Tax, as they sent us the bill for this year’s increased amount!
The back cover of the leaflet contains an advert about Brent’s campaign against fly-tipping, featuring a photograph with “the usual suspects”. As the leaflet contains the lies I’ve exposed above, I will end this piece with an amended version of that advert.
Parody of the back cover advert. (Image by Brent Council, amendments by the author)
Philip Grant.
12 comments:
Excellent comment Philip, with accurate facts and figures presented in plain english for us all to understand. Let's hope everyone who reads this will vote for a change at the next Council elections.
Thank you for an excellent piece exposing some of the dubious claims the Council makes. It could be added that the various claims for many different levels of rent only serves to confuse (by the Council, not Phillip Grant). The only housing which the Council should be building if it was concerned to address the housing crisis, would be Council housing at social rent. The majority of people on the Council's waiting list can't afford to pay more than that.
Labour run 'Bent' Council follow a very simple principle in all their Council Taxpayers propaganda - "If you tell a lie often enough - it will be believed as the truth". Well done Philip Grant for exposing another major failure of the Councillor Butt led Labour Administration.
Are people really earning such low wages in 21st Century London? Or is it easier to be on a low wage with multiple benefits topping up their incomes?
Are they not willing to move for a better job or cheaper housing as many many millions of people have always had to do?
We are from a huge families where all of us always worked really hard, sometimes with 2 of three jobs each, and we've bought or rented where we could afford. We haven't relied on the state for benefits or housing.
Labour have always wanted to create a 'dependency' culture. While in opposition they make promises to specific groups of people and when they get into power (as happened now) reality sets in and they suddenly realise that there is not enough money around to keep making handouts so Labour are forced to make CUTS - in benefits, winter fuel payments and in provision of services. This is why support for Labour is collapsing - people are realising that the time for handouts has come to the end and that Labour are as good at delivering CUTS and Austerity as the Tories.
Ordinary people are struggling to live in Brent.
Five years ago, Brent published the report of its independently chaired Poverty Commission. It's results confirmed that tens of thousands of ordinary residents in the borough struggle to meet the cost of living in Brent (as Anonymous at 00:23 has said).
One of the major reasons for this was, and is, the high price of rented housing. Brent 's Cabinet accepted the recommendations of the Report, including that at least 50 per cent of the homes it built should be for social rent level.
Not a single Brent housing project approved by the Cabinet since then has delivered that identified needs!
Excellent information— thank you very much
How did the Poverty Commission gather this information?
If the rent is too high why live here?
Dear Anonymous (17 April at 13:20),
For information about the Brent Poverty Commission and its findings, please see Martin's excellent August 2020 blog on the subject at:
https://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/2020/08/brent-povety-commission-calls-for.html
You can also read about the Council's evasion and misleading information, when I tried to challenge their housing claims made in a Poverty Commission "progress" report to a Scrutiny Committee in 2022:
https://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/2022/05/deputation-on-brents-poverty-commission.html
Dear Anonymous (17 April at 13:22),
An alternative question would be: why are rents allowed to be so high that ordinary working families can't afford to live here?
If you have a job in London, and children at school in Brent, why should you be forced to move to a cheaper part of the country, far from London, and away from your family and friends?
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