Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity-
The Scrutiny page on Brent Council’s website includes the following question and answer:
For the Scrutiny system to operate effectively, the information given to Scrutiny Committees by Cabinet members and Council Officers needs to be truthful. Within the Brent Members’ Code of Conduct, this is spelt out: ‘you must comply with the seven principles of conduct in public life set out in Appendix 1.’ The seven principles include “Honesty”, and “Accountability” which is defined as:
‘You should be accountable to the public for your actions and the manner in which you carry out your responsibilities, and should co-operate fully and honestly with any scrutiny appropriate to your particular office.’
Martin posted a blog article, “Cllr Tatler taken to task on regeneration issues”, following the Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee meeting last Tuesday (23 April 2024). It included a video, taken from the Council’s webcast of the meeting, which I watched with interest.
I have tried several times, since January 2022, to get proper scrutiny of the August 2021 Cabinet decision to allow a developer to sell at least half of the homes at Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone (“WHZ”) development (including most at the more favourable Cecil Avenue site) for private profit. WHZ was in the first of the regeneration growth areas dealt with in the Officer Report to the Scrutiny Committee meeting:
When I heard what Cllr. Shama Tatler said about WHZ when addressing the meeting, I could hardly believe what I had heard. I submitted a short comment, saying: ‘I'm sure I heard Cllr. Tatler claim that Brent did.not own the Wembley Housing Zone land, which is why it was not viable to build more affordable housing there.’ I finished my comment with: ‘Was Cllr. Tatler being "economical with the truth"?’
After further research, I submitted a follow-up comment, which Martin has agreed to post as a separate item on Wembley Matters. This is what I wrote:
‘I asked above: 'Was Cllr. Tatler being "economical with the truth"?'
This was in relation to the Wembley Housing Zone, where I have been campaigning for more genuinely affordable housing, and writing guest posts about it, since August 2021.
I have gone back to the webcast, and transcribed what Cllr. Tatler said. Martin kindly sent me a document from a Brent Executive meeting in April 2014 on proposed land rationalisation at Copland Community School and adjacent lands.
This is the relevant extract from the webcast of Tuesday's Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee meeting, with Cllr. Tatler addressing the committee on Brent's regeneration schemes:
'With the Wembley Housing Zone, we didn't own the land. We had to purchase the land. That impacts viability as well. And we are looking at how we deal with affordable housing on the scheme. Ideally we would want to deliver 100% social housing on any of our land ....'
This is the key paragraph from the April 2014 Report to Brent's Executive (now Cabinet), whose recommendations were approved and put in place. CCS is Copland Community School, which had been served with an Academy Order by the Secretary of State, and the IEB is the Interim Executive Board, which Brent Council as Local Education Authority had put in place instead of CCS's previous governing body, to run the school until it was taken over by the Ark Academy group.
'CCS is a foundation school and therefore the land and buildings are mainly in the ownership of the school itself, the responsibility for which is vested in the IEB. The IEB has expressed agreement to transfer the freehold of the site which it currently owns to the Council instead, in order for the Council to rationalise the ownership and use of the site overall, ensuring an optimum footprint for the school. The ARK would under these proposals be granted a 125 year lease on the final school site.'
In the "Financial Implications" section of the Report, these were the key points from the proposals (which were approved and put in place):
'2. The IEB transfer to the Council the freehold interest in the CCS site at nil consideration.
3. The Council accepts a surrender of CCS’s leasehold interests at nil consideration.
5. The Council grants the ARK a short term lease of the existing CCS buildings at peppercorn rent.
7. The Council will grant the ARK a 125 year lease of the new school siteat a peppercorn rent.
8. The ARK will surrender the lease to the existing school at nil consideration.'
So, Brent became the freehold owners of all of the original Copland School site and playing fields in 2014, granting ARK a temporary lease of the original school buildings from 1 September 2014.
When the new school was built on the playing fields behind the original school buildings, Brent then granted ARK a 125 year lease for the new school site, BUT retained the freehold of the original Copland School land, now the Wembley Housing Zone Cecil Avenue site, at no cost to the Council.
The other, smaller, part of Brent's Wembley Housing Zone scheme, for which it received an £8m grant from the GLA in 2015, is Ujima House. Brent bought that office building in 2016, using £4.8m of the initial £8m GLA funding. It has since received further GLA funding to be used on affordable housing as part of the WHZ.
Cllr. Tatler DID mislead the Scrutiny Committee when she said that Brent
did not own the Wembley Housing Zone land and had to purchase it!’
Map showing the land around Copland School and its ownership, prior to
the rationalisation.
(From an Appendix to the Report to the April 2014
meeting of Brent’s Executive)
If there was any doubt about Brent Council’s ownership of the former Copland School site, the freehold of all the land hatched in green on the map above was transferred to Brent in 2014. The only land that Brent had to purchase for its WHZ scheme was the much smaller Ujima House site (which will provide 54 of the 291 WHZ homes, scheduled for completion in 2026).
Back in November 2021, Cllr. Tatler, in answer to a public question I had asked ahead of a Full Council meeting, said: ‘it is not financially viable to deliver all 250 homes at Cecil Avenue as socially rented housing.’ [Her scheme only delivered 37 affordable rented homes there then!]
Yet neither she, nor anyone else at Brent Council, has been willing or able to answer my question of why it would not be viable to build far more of the Cecil Avenue homes for genuinely affordable rent to Council tenants (see my January 2024 guest post for the latest figures), when the vacant site to build them on was already owned by Brent, they could have gone ahead with the development themselves as soon as they received full planning consent in February 2021, and interest rates were very low (and did not shoot up until autumn 2022).
Philip Grant.
