Brent Council poised to lease out 8th floor of Civic Centre to HMRC agency

Civic Centre office floors

Brent Council appears to be likely to lease the 8th floor of the Civic Centre to the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) and Executive Agency of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC).   The 7th floor is already occupied by Air France.

The space has been marketed by Colliers International who were also agents for the Brent Town Hall. Their advertisement can be view HERE.

Potential occupation has been limited by the fact that there is no public access to these floors and any access change would require additional expenditure.  A report going before Cabinet notes that interest in leasing the space has also been expressed by Job Centre Plus and the Brent Clinical Commissioning Group.  The latter would have advantages in terms of developing the working relationship with the Council. The VOA would be a back office operation with no 'public facing' role.

It is proposed that the space be leased for 10 years with a 5 year rent review and tenant break option.

Meanwhile Job Centre Plus has expressed an interest in property at 6 St Johns Road Wembley.

The report LINK notes:

3. Letting to the VOA also should significantly contribute to that [Property] savings target. It is not commercially sensitive to note that it should save £80k annually based on 2016/17 business rate figures, as these become the responsibility of the VOA. However, it is important to note that these savings are predicated on the 2016/17 valuations and not the 2017/18 revaluation. Therefore, these savings would likely be offset by a probable increase in rates.
   

The likely revenue from the lease has been deemed commercially sensitive and is available to Cabinet members but not the public.

A new hotel for Wembley Central to replace tax office

Valiant House

Brent Planning Committee will be recommended to approve another Wembley hotel at their meeting on January 14th.

This hotel will replace Valiant House which is on the corner of the High Road and Cecil Avenue and currently occupied by HMRC, which is closing its offices. Copland Community High School is on the other side of Cecil Avenue.

This, the latest of several such applications, proposes a 116 bedroom hotel with an additional three storeys above the present building. The small car park in Cecil Avenue would be closed if the scheme goes ahe

Euro Hotel Elm Road

The hotel would be run by the Euro Hotel Group which already owns the Euro Hotel in Elm Road Wembley. They have other hotels in Clapham, Peckham, Leyton and Croydon.

Their hotels are at the budget end of the market. Elm Road has just one star. A room there is currently quoted as low as £15 on the internet.


According to the documentation only one objection LINK has been received. The objection was based on insufficient parking, adding to traffic congestion and disturbance caused by 'revellers' at the hotel's bar and restaurant.

The architects, Dexter Moren Associates describe the project thus:

Illustration on Dexter Moren website

Looking at ways to add value to our clients’ developments by efficient spatial planning and maximising the number of rooms is one of our core skills as specialist hotel architects. Working with Euro Hotel Group, DMA have submitted plans to Brent Council for the development of a hotel on the High Road Wembley. Our proposal looks to extend and reconfigure the existing “Valiant House” to create a hotel with 116 bedrooms with basement and ground floor public areas. A three storey contemporary box has been introduced to sit above the existing red brick building which steps down to the rear of the site where a lower extension adheres to the more domestic street scene.  The whole is clad in high pressure laminate coloured to enhance the red brick of the existing structure while large windows and brightly coloured deep reveals add a sense of play. Internally the layouts have been carefully considered to best utilise the existing plan and extend in a sensitive and informed manner creating a flow of space that offers a practical solution that both maximises accommodation on the site and adheres to planning constraints.

Another hotel is planned south of this down the Harrow Road on the site of the Bridge Park Sports Centre and more hotels are due to be opened in the Quintain development in Wembley Park.

At the same meeting the Committee will decide whether an expansion of Preston Park Primary School to accommodate 840 pupils should go ahead. Details HERE

The PFI scandal that led to NHS Trusts going bust

I received the posting below as a comment on Natalie Bennett's NHS speech LINK  but I feel it is important enough to be published as a Guest Blog:

What an excellent assessment of the problems facing the NHS, and what needs to be done to protect it! Thank you for publishing this speech, Martin.

I write as someone who was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes in my late 20's. My care through the NHS for more than 35 years must have cost a lot of money, but because of it I was able to continue with a relatively normal working life, and pay large amounts of income tax and NIC. That, to me, is the way things should be.

Hopefully, with a newly-diagnosed Type 1 diabetic in the cabinet, there might be a better appreciation of the NHS within government, but I won't hold my breath!

I spent 25 years of my working life as a Tax Inspector, and in the early 2000's had to consider the first accounts of a company which had won a PFI contract to build a small hospital and provide all of its support services for 30 years. I was concerned at the odd accounting treatment of the transaction, which it appeared would guarantee that the company would automatically make losses (for tax purposes)until the final year, when it would make a huge profit. The losses each year would be set against the trading profits of the two large groups which owned the company 50/50 (one a construction group, the other a major services provider).

I asked for a copy of the PFI contract, and other supporting documents, to see whether I could challenge what looked like artificial tax avoidance, and after a lot of delay and prevarication, I eventually received them. The contract was about 150 pages long, and very complex, but effectively meant that the NHS (or hospital trust involved) would repay the £30m capital cost of the building, plus a generous rate of interest on the "mortgage" for this amount, over the thirty years. The company could charge whatever it wanted to (with very little chance of the NHS being able to challenge the amount) for the services provided during the thirty years, with no chance of the hospital renegotiating the contract, finding another provider or taking the services back "in house".

How had the NHS allowed itself to be tied up in such a bad contract? Because of instructions from the government that, in order to encourage private companies to get involved in PFI projects, it would guarantee to pay their legal and professional costs of entering into contracts. So, in the case I was looking at, the NHS had paid £1.5m for the company's lawyers and accountants to draw up a contract which "stitched-up" the NHS and gave the opportunity for tax avoidance by the two big groups behind the PFI company (one of which had a former cabinet minister as its Chairman).

Why were Chancellors Ken Clarke and Gordon Brown so keen on promoting PFI contracts? Because it kept the cost of providing major capital projects "off Balance Sheet" as far as the government's accounts were concerned. They could claim to be providing new hospitals without this being charged against their budget deficit, even though the eventual costs of doing things this way would be much higher (hence NHS Trusts going bust).

I'm afraid that the Official Secrets Act prevents me from identifying the hospital and companies involved, or from disclosing the outcome of my investigation of the accounts, but it was an episode towards the end of my career in the Inland Revenue that left me frustrated by the actions of my "masters" in the Treasury!