Brent’s New Affordable Council Homes promises shredded!

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity 

 

When I shared my open email to the Council Leader on Morland Gardens in a guest post earlier this week, I drew attention to the “Update on the supply of New Affordable Homes” report, which is going to next Monday’s Cabinet meeting. Now I will highlight some points from that.

 

It’s only a month since I wrote about Brent’s Affordable Council Housing – the promises and the reality, but that reality has got a whole lot worse. Then I was writing about Social Rent, London Affordable Rent (“LAR”) and Shared Ownership (“SO”), which is neither ownership nor “affordable” housing. Now Council Officers want to include some new terms, Open Market Rent (“OMR”) and Open Market Sale (“OMS”) into Brent’s New Council Homes programme.

 

Extract from the “Update” Report for the 14 November Cabinet meeting.

 

They are saying that some (in fact, quite a lot!) of the new homes the Council builds can no longer be for social housing, which is what Council homes are meant to provide. They will have to be for rents that are not genuinely affordable, such as OMR (or Local Housing Allowance level, as it is sometimes referred to), or they will have to be for shared ownership or sold off privately, the same as any other developer would do. 

 

‘What is the point of the Council building new Council homes which are not new homes for rent to Council tenants?’ you might ask. The answer from the Corporate Director, Resident Services, is that you have to “convert” some of those homes to unaffordable homes, or homes for sale, in order to be able to afford to build other homes which are for affordable rent. But the Council, as a social housing provider, can’t offer unaffordable homes to Council tenants, so it has to pass on the OMR and SO homes it is “converting” to someone else.

 

The start of a long list of recommendations for Cabinet to agree on 14 November.

 

The Report recommends that the “conversion” will be done by ‘Officers’. Which Officers? – it doesn’t say (why is that?), but many of the other recommendations delegate the power to make decisions to the Corporate Director, Resident Services (the Officer who signed off the Report, Peter Gadsdon). 

 

As will be seen from my first extract from the Report above, the “conversion” will be ‘via the Council’s wholly owned subsidiary company i4B.’ Because i4B is a separate “legal person”, it can charge higher rents than the Council itself would be allowed to charge. The Council would build the homes to be “converted”, then sell them to i4B (who would pay for them with a loan from the London Borough of Brent), for rent to Brent residents (possibly homeless families). 

 

But as well as making these recommendations, Peter Gadsdon is also a director of i4B, which would benefit from the extra properties in its portfolio. Isn’t that a conflict of interests? And another director of i4B is Cllr. Saqib Butt, the brother of the Council Leader who will chair the Cabinet meeting considering the recommendations. I have raised these potential conflicts of interest with Brent’s Monitoring Officer, and await her response.

 

How many of the New Affordable Homes are likely to be “converted” to unaffordable ones? It could be as many as 50% of them, on the basis of this recommendation from the Report:

 

And it is not just ‘new planning permission applications’ that that are at risk of losing up to 50% of their affordable homes. Windmill Court, which has an “affordable housing” condition in its planning consent specifying that the tenure of the homes must be for no more than LAR, is one of the schemes proposed for “conversion”. The planning consent gave the reason for the LAR condition as: 'In the interests of proper planning.'

 

Extract from the Update Report, including proposals for Kilburn Square and Windmill Court.

 

Also on this particular list (there are others) for “conversion” is Rokesby Place. Regular readers may remember that I have been challenging the action by Brent’s Planning Officers in secretly changing the tenure for those two new 4-bedroom Council houses from Social Rent to the more expensive LAR. Now the Report to Cabinet wants to change things again, and either sell off one of the houses, or transfer it to i4B, to be let out at OMR! 

 

The Rokesby Place  planning application was pushed through, against the wishes of existing residents, on the grounds that the Council had to use any “spare” land on its estates to build genuinely affordable homes for local people in housing need. Now one of the two houses won’t be, despite the Report’s empty words: ‘Large family sized homes at low rent remain a priority for the Council.’

 

 
The Update Report’s section on the Council’s Wembley Housing Zone.

 

Another housing “battle” I’ve been having with Brent, for the past 15 months, is to try to get more genuinely affordable Council homes at their Cecil Avenue development. It’s a vacant, Council-owned site which has had full planning permission for 250 new homes since February 2021. The Report says that since Cabinet approved the project in August 2021, ‘officers have advanced competitive procurement of a delivery partner.’ When there are 250 homes which could be for Brent residents in urgent housing need, that’s very slow progress!

 

The delay has been even longer, because Officers carried out a “soft market testing” exercise in April 2021 (which was so soft that it guaranteed the result they wanted, to justify their recommendations to Cabinet). They could have started the project last year, when the cost of borrowing to build the homes (152 for the “developer partner” to sell for profit, 61 as intermediate housing - SO or OMR – and only 37 for LAR!) would have been much lower. What further cuts to the affordable housing in the Wembley Housing Zone are hidden in ‘(Exempt) Appendix 3’, which the public will never be allowed to see?

 

 Now, quickly, here are two more recommendations to Monday’s meeting from the Report: 

 

 

What are Modern Methods of Construction (“MMC”)? I would suggest you read a blog article on “Airspace” which Martin published in October last year. ‘A minimum of 25% of all homes’ out of the 700 the latest round of GLA funding will almost certainly include Gauntlett Court in Sudbury, and probably Campbell Court and Elvin Court in Kingsbury. Has there been any genuine consultation with residents of those Council estates yet?

 

 

 

 

The Report is recommending “conversion” of LAR homes the Council proposes to build to SO, when it has no evidence that there is any demand for them! There are already a large number of shared ownership homes built by, or in the pipeline from, private developers on big schemes in Wembley and elsewhere. Those developers are forced to provide a proportion of affordable homes as part of their plans, and they make as much of it as possible shared ownership, because that is recognised for planning purposes as “affordable housing”, even though it is unaffordable to most people in housing need in Brent.

 

There was an interesting Q&A on Council housing, and shared ownership, as part of consideration of Brent’s Draft Borough Plan 2023-2027, at the Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee meeting on Tuesday, 8 November. I’ll end this post with a transcript (from the webcast recording - at around 2hrs 5mins in!) of that exchange. 

 

Cllr. Anton Georgiou (“AG”): Just for complete clarity for the committee, what does Brent Council define as a Council home? Most people define a Council home as being a property owned by the Council that is let at Social Rent.

 

Carolyn Downs, Chief Executive (“CD”): That is what we do as well.

 

AG: From documents that I’ve read, it seems that Brent have extended this to include Shared Ownership, London Affordable Rent, temporary accommodation and assisted living.  

 

CD: Absolutely not. When we talk about one thousand general new Council homes they are Council homes. It is Council housing.

 

 

AG: This isn’t Shared Ownership?

 

CD: We have not ever built a single Shared Ownership. Developers might, we the Council haven’t.

 

Shout from an unidentified person: Not genuinely affordable!

 

Cllr.Muhammed Butt, Council Leader:  Apologies. What you just said there, right, comes under the broad banner of affordable homes, right, but we do actually build Council homes.

 

Cllr. Rita Conneely, Chair: So, I’m going to draw this item to a close.

 

You can make up your own mind, from what was said at that meeting and from the Report, how committed Brent Council are to their promise of ‘genuinely affordable housing for families in Brent’. 

 

My own “Update on the supply of New Affordable Homes”? Far fewer than were promised ahead of last May’s local elections!

 

Philip Grant.

 

Brent Council's Cecil Avenue Housing Scheme: Scrutiny - What Scrutiny?

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

The purpose of the committee, from Brent Council’s website.

 

In a guest post last May, I set out the efforts I’d made to get a proper explanation from the Council about why 152 of the 250 homes at the Council’s housing development on the former Copland School site in Wembley would be built for a “developer partner” to sell at a profit. And why only 37 of the remaining 98 homes (less than 15% of the site total) would be for “genuinely affordable” rent to Council tenants (with the other 61 being for shared ownership). 

 

I asked ‘Where is the Scrutiny?’ Proper scrutiny was needed, because all that Cabinet members and Officers would tell me was that it would not be viable to offer more affordable homes at Cecil Avenue. That answer did not appear to make sense! 

 

Illustration from Brent’s April 2021 Wembley Housing Zone “Soft Market Testing” exercise.

 

The Council already owned the site (so none of the high land costs they use to justify the “infill” schemes on existing Council estates). They already had millions in funding from the GLA for their “Wembley Housing Zone”, as well as £5.5m extra for this scheme. And they could borrow money for the construction from the Public Works Loans Board at historically low interest rates.

 

Of course, the Council would not let me (or any other citizen of the borough) see their “Viability” report, not even under the Freedom of Information Act, because it was “confidential”. But councillors on a Scrutiny Committee would be allowed to see it, and question the relevant Cabinet members and Council Officers about the figures; and about why Brent could not offer more affordable homes on this development for the families in housing need that they claim to be so keen to build “New Council Homes” for!

 

My old parody Brent publicity photo for its Cecil Avenue Council Housing scheme.

 

I’d been trying since a guest blog in January 2022 (“It looks bad. It looks wrong!”) to get one of Brent’s Scrutiny Committees to take a close look at the Cecil Avenue project. And I did manage to include this as part of in a deputation to the 9 March meeting of Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee about the Poverty Commission Update report.

 

It took two months for the Council to provide a written (partial) reply to my deputation, by which time there had been local elections, and a new committee with a new Chair, Cllr. Rita Conneely. I wrote to her on 12 June, recommending that she include “Brent Council’s Cecil Avenue Housing Scheme” on her committee’s agenda for 19 July. I explained why, and said: 

 

‘Senior Council Officers and the Lead Member(s) involved do need to be put on the spot, to explain how they arrived at this apparent "giveaway" of much needed genuinely affordable Council homes, and if they can't give a satisfactory explanation, to come up with something better.’

 

Extract from minutes of the 9 March 2022 meeting of Resources & Public Realm Scrutiny Committee.

 

I received no reply, but after the minutes of the 9 March meeting had been published with the agenda for the committee’s 19 July meeting, I wrote to Cllr. Conneely again. I pointed out that the written response to my deputation totally ignored my points on Cecil Avenue. The claims made at the 9 March meeting about moving forward on the Poverty Commission recommendations, and ‘all homes being ring-fenced as being at affordable levels of rent’ were also false. The 2020 Poverty Commission had recommended Social Rent level, and no New Council Homes were yet being built for Social Rent!

 

The Social Rent recommendation from the Brent Poverty Commission Report.

 

On 18 July, Rita Conneely replied to me, saying: ‘Many thanks for your follow up on this. I am looking into this & seeking relevant additional information for the committee & its members.’ She referred to this, under “Matters Arising”, when those minutes were considered at the 19 July meeting, and indicated that this would be dealt with when the committee met in September. 

 

I was looking out for the agenda for the 6 September meeting, and when it was published there was no mention of the Council’s Cecil Avenue housing scheme on it. Worse than that, this is what the minutes of the 19 July meeting showed:

 

Extract from the minutes of Resources & Public Realm Scrutiny Committee meeting on 19 July.

 

“None”! I wrote to Cllr. Conneely on 30 August, including a transcript of what she had said at the 19 July meeting (from the webcast, beginning at 3.35 minutes into the recording):

 

‘And then we’re going to do “Matters Arising”. After our paper (?), so we have received …. Prior to this meeting we received a deputation from one of our residents, Mr Philip Grant, in regards to a presentation which was made to this committee in our previous municipal year, on the Poverty Commission. We’ve received some further information from our, from the Housing Department, in regards to that which the committee will be looking at in future, and we’ll be commenting on any of our further recommendations at our September meeting.’

 

In my email I asked that the minutes should be corrected, and also wrote:

 

‘An opportunity to put the decision makers "on the spot" at the 19 July meeting was missed, but I was led to believe that this would be done at your September meeting. Please let me know how, and where on the agenda, you will be doing that, so that I can request to speak on that item, if appropriate.’

 

I heard nothing back from the Chair of the committee, but did receive a promise from its Governance Officer (who my email had been copied to) that the minutes would be corrected. The day before the 6 September meeting, the agenda was republished. There was still no mention on it of the Cecil Avenue housing scheme, but revised minutes showed:

 

Extract from the revised minutes of Resources & Public Realm Scrutiny Committee’s 19 July meeting.

 

So what did happen on 6 September about the outstanding matters from my 9 March deputation, and especially the answers to the points I’d raised about the lack of genuinely affordable housing proposed for the Council’s Cecil Avenue development? There was no consideration by the committee, and no recommendations. This is a transcript (from the webcast, beginning at 1hour 8minutes and 25seconds into the recording) of the monologue from the Chair:

 

‘Next on my list – Minutes of the previous meeting. Does anybody have any challenges to the minutes of the previous meeting? [Pause – nothing heard] Lovely.

 

Matters Arising. I need to confirm that following a deputation that was received by this committee, historically, in the last municipal year as well actually. The deputation came from one of our residents, Mr Grant, and it was primarily regarding issues of affordability.

 

And I just want to flag in regard to that, as the Chair has received information which, er I’m sorry I’ve lost my …, I’ve received information which reassures us about the accuracy and the quality of the information that was presented to the Scrutiny Committee.

 

However, I do want to flag, a bit like my comment about acronyms earlier, affordability has a lot of different phrases now, and I think clarity in our meetings is important, both from us as councillors when we’re asking, that we’re clear what we are asking about, and that we try as best as possible to use the up-to-date and accurate terms when that information is being shared from officers.

 

So, we’d really, really appreciate an effort from all of us to keep meetings as clear and transparent as possible, so residents continue to be really as confident as possible in the information that is being shared. 

 

And again, just to reiterate that the issues of affordability in our housing stock is of serious concern to this committee, and the Community and Wellbeing Committee, and I know a lot of our residents as well. And I know the Cabinet of this Council as well. So, thank you all.’

 

Tucked away in that statement is the key sentence, which slammed the door shut on any consideration of the outstanding Cecil Avenue points (although that scheme is not mentioned by name):

 

‘I’ve received information which reassures us about the accuracy and the quality of the information that was presented to the Scrutiny Committee.’

 

What information was received? And what ‘information that was presented’ did it reassure “us” about? Did other committee members even see any of that information, or is “us” just the committee Chair? I think it’s fair to point out a lack of transparency here! 

 

And did you notice the hesitation before that sentence was read out? It certainly sounded as if Cllr. Conneely had to find the piece of paper that sentence was written down on – a carefully constructed form of words that prohibited any further discussion of this “matter arising” by committee members, without giving away any details of why that was the case. Did the Chair write those words herself (and if so who advised her on the best words to use), or was she just given the piece of paper by someone else, and told what she must say?

 

In my blog about this back in May, I said: ‘Brent’s Cabinet and Senior Council Officers do not want their Wembley Housing Zone proposals to be scrutinised.’ Well, they’ve got what they wanted, and Resources & Public Realm Scrutiny Committee have allowed them to get away with it.

 

It’s not just on this issue that Brent’s Cabinet and Senior Officers seem to control what the committee scrutinises. A report to the Full Council meeting on 11 July, headed “Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee Chair’s Report”, but actually written by Council Officers and signed off by the then Assistant Chief Executive, included this section on the committee’s work plan for the year ahead:

 

Extract from item 11 on the Full Council meeting agenda, 11 July 2022.’

 

‘Scrutiny is the mechanism by which the Cabinet is held publicly to account.’ But if Brent’s Cabinet is telling the Resources & Public Realm Scrutiny Committee what subjects it can look at, those words are meaningless. 

 

Scrutiny – What Scrutiny?

 

Philip Grant.

Brent’s Cecil Avenue Housing Scheme – Where is the Scrutiny?

 Guest post by Philip Grent in a personal capacity

If you have read my recent guest post, Deputation on Poverty Commission Housing Update – Brent finally responds! , and my Deputation to the Resources & Public Realm Scrutiny Committee meeting on 9 March, you may have noticed that something was missing. 

 

Information on the Committee from Brent Council’s website

 

The Council’s reply of 9 May completely failed to acknowledge or respond to this section of my Deputation:

 

‘One place where Brent could increase investment in social housing is the former Copland School site. It is vacant land, owned by the Council, which has had full planning permission to build 250 homes there for over a year.

 

I wrote to Cabinet members last August, when that item was on their agenda, urging them to fulfil their Poverty Commission promises, and make at least some of this development homes for social rent.

 

Instead, they approved a proposal which allows 152 of the new homes there to be sold privately. Of the 98 Council homes, 61 would be for shared ownership, and only 37 for London Affordable Rent.

 

Overall, the Wembley Housing Zone scheme claims to provide 50% “affordable housing”. But the balance of that is 54 flats at London Affordable Rent level on the Ujima House site, and only 8 of those would be family-sized homes.

 

There would be NO social rented homes. That’s the reality hidden in this Poverty Commission Update.

 

You, as a Scrutiny Committee, need to challenge that, and demand that Brent Council does better.

 

You can recommend that in meeting its Poverty Commission commitments, it should invest in more social rent housing as part of the New Council Homes programme, including at its Cecil Avenue development.’

 

The Resources & Public Realm Scrutiny Committee meeting on 9 March was the last before the 5 May Brent Council elections, and the last with Cllr. Roxanne Mashari in the Chair before she stood down as a councillor. Chairing that committee must have been a frustrating role, trying to hold Cllr. Muhammed Butt’s Cabinet ‘publicly to account’.

 

I could see her frustration in emails she wrote, apologising to me for the continuing delay in getting a written response to my Deputation. It should have been provided within ten working days, and was initially expected from Cllr. Ellie Southwood, Lead Member for Housing, who had been the Cabinet member presenting the Poverty Commission Update report to the Scrutiny Committee. In her final email to me, on 5 May, Roxanne wrote: ‘I would finally like to thank you for your continued engagement with policy and practice at the council and for playing an active role in holding the council to account.’

 

From the Scrutiny section of Brent Council’s website.

 

I have certainly tried to hold the Council to account over the plans for Cecil Avenue in its Wembley Housing Zone. My initial approaches to Cabinet members from August 2021 got no response. I tried using a Public Question at last November’s Full Council meeting to get a proper explanation over why 152 of the 250 homes on a Council housing development should be for private sale, and only 37 at affordable rent for people on the Council’s waiting list, but without success. 

 

I even tried a satirical approach, using some of the Council’s own images of the three key Cabinet members involved (Cllrs. Butt, Tatler and Southwood), to show graphically how their Cecil Avenue proposals made a mockery of their “New Council Homes” promises. Still no real engagement on the issue from councillors or Council Officers!

 

Parody of a Brent publicity photo for its “1,000 New Council Homes” programme.

 

Brent’s website says that ‘Scrutiny … seeks to involve the public,’ and in January I wrote to the Chairs and Vice Chairs of both Scrutiny Committees. I sent them a copy of a guest blog I’d written about the Cecil Avenue proposals, saying ‘It looks bad. It looks wrong’, and asking: ‘Why are Brent’s Scrutiny Committees not asking for explanations?’ 

 

The (then) Vice Chair of the Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee, Cllr. Suresh Kansagra, copied me into an email he’d sent, saying that he thought it should be an item on the agenda for their next meeting (9 February). The day before that meeting, a Scrutiny Officer at the Council wrote to me saying: ‘As the issue you have raised relates to housing, your request falls under the remit of the Community and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee.’ 

 

I queried this, and three days later she wrote again, saying: ‘It is correct that this is within the R & PR Committee remit and I am sorry for my misinterpretation of your request as a housing matter.’ Unfortunately, the agenda for the next (9 March) meeting was already full (that was the chaotic “joint” meeting which spent two hours considering Baroness Casey’s report on the Euros final at Wembley Stadium).

 

I had to resort to including my Cecil Avenue points in a Deputation on the Poverty Commission Update report. As you will have seen at the start of this blog article, those points were not answered. Brent’s Cabinet and Senior Council Officers do not want their Wembley Housing Zone proposals to be scrutinised. That makes me all the more convinced that they do need to be scrutinised, and soon!

 

Notice of an intended decision, posted on Brent Council’s website.

 

Last month I wrote a guest blog about a “hush hush” decision over the terms of a contract for the Wembley Housing Zone project. The actual decision was due to be made on 4 May (the day before a new Council was elected), but this doesn’t appear to have been confirmed yet (as of 12 May).

 

What has appeared, on the gov.uk “contracts finder” website on 30 April is an invitation to contractors to apply to be Brent’s “Delivery Partner” for the Wembley Housing Zone development. They must do so by 31 May 2022, with the construction contract expected to begin on 28 March 2023, and be completed by 31 March 2026. The advertisement had first been put online earlier that day, but was quickly taken down and replaced. 

 

The only change made, as far as I could see, was that the original start date was shown as 1 April 2023. My guess is that the additional funding of £5.5m, which the GLA agreed for Brent Council’s Wembley Housing Zone housing scheme last year, is only available if work begins “on site” by 31 March 2023!

 

Main contract details from the official public “Contracts finder” website.

 

Proposed Development details from the “Contracts finder” website.

 

From the published details, it appears that there has been no change in the proposals for Cecil Avenue from when the Cabinet approved them in August 2021. The 39% “affordable” would be 98 homes, with only 37 at London Affordable Rent and 61 for shared ownership (or intermediate rent level, which would be unaffordable to most Brent residents in housing need). The remaining 61%, that’s 152 (with 20 3-4 bed) of the 250 homes Brent Council will be building here, would be for its “Delivery Partner” to sell privately, for profit. How can that be right?

 

Proper scrutiny of the proposals for Cecil Avenue is needed urgently. Can Cabinet members and Senior Officers explain in detail how their plans are justified? If not, they should be told by a Scrutiny Committee that they must do better. Why can’t all of the 3- and 4-bedroom family-sized homes be for Council tenants, as that is meant to be a high priority for Brent? Even if only 98 of the 250 can be affordable, surely they should all be for “genuinely affordable” rents, as recommended by the Brent Poverty Commission?

 

As Brent Council’s website clearly states, Scrutiny is there ‘to ensure that decisions are made in line with council policy and in the public interest.’ We deserve to see this work in practice!

Philip Grant.