Cllr Mili Patel takes on the challenge of leading on Children and Young People

Cllr Mili Patel (Alperton) has taken over the role of Lead Member for Children and Young People in the Brent Cabinet.   She succeeds Cllr Wilhelmina Mitchell-Murray whose role had been covered by Cllr Muhammed Butt since December 1st 2016 because Cllr Mitchell-Murray was said to unwell. Today the Kilburn Times has quoted Muhammed Butt as saying that Cllr Mitchell-Murray had resigned for 'personal reasons.

The resignation means that three members of the 8 strong Cabinet (Pavey, Mashari and Mitchell-Murray) have resigned since Butt's successful retention of the Labour leadership in May 2016 after a challenge from Michael Pavey.

Cllr Patel had been Lead Member for just 25 minutes when she was asked to speak at last night's Council Meeting so  understandably she limited herself to a brief introduction.

Cllr Patel went to Furness Primary School and Claremont High and is a parliamentary researcher.   She previously worked for Frank Dobbs MP. She is married to fellow Brent councillor  Matt Kelcher who is chair of Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee.

Mili Patel is on the board of Brent Housing Partnership which is likely to be dismantled when Brent Council brings council housing back in-house.

Her other Council positions are listed as:

• Corporate Parenting Committee (Chair)
• Council
• Employees' Joint Consultative Committee
• General Purposes Committee
• Health and Wellbeing Board
• Highways Committee

The Children and Young People position is challenging at the best of time, covering as it does local authority schools, children's social work, safeguarding and the wellbeing of all young children and young people in Brent regardless of the type of school that they attend, but with funding cuts to schools in the headlines, the job is even more daunting.

Cllr Patel would have got a taste of that in the debate that took place at Council on school funding  when the following Labour motion was discussed. She did not contribute to the debate.

PROTECT BRENT’S SCHOOLS FROM GOVERNMENT CUTS

This Council condemns government proposals for a National Schools Funding Formula and rejects any effort to pay for the failure of an ideologically imposed programme of austerity by choking off essential and already insufficient funding for the education of children and young people in Brent.

Councillor Patricia Harrison Preston Ward

During the debate Cllr John Warren lambasted various Labour councillors quoting the bank balances of schools where they were governors. He claimed Brent schools had up to £30m  stashed away.  He did not mention that schools have to justify these  balances to the Council  and provide evidence of the ear-marked projects to which they are allocated.

The debate can be seen here:

Does Councillor Butt have too much power?

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Guest blog by Philip Grant

The article below was submitted as a comment on the blog about the possible delay in filling the Stronger Communities Lead Member role on Brent’s Cabinet LINK t
I am repeating it here, for comment and discussion, as part of Local Democracy Week.

In my earlier comment, I explained why I believe that Cllr. Butt is within his rights, under Brent’s Constitution, not to appoint a new Lead Member for Stronger Communities straight away, but to take on the responsibilities of that role in addition to his role as Leader. This does not mean that I believe it is the right (i.e. correct) thing for him to do. Overall, I believe that Cllr. Butt has too much power, and some of it is a result of an abuse of Brent Council’s Constitution.

That Constitution (in its own words) ‘…sets out how the Council operates, how decisions are made and the procedures which are followed to ensure that decision making is efficient, transparent and accountable to local people. Some of the procedures are required by law, while others are a matter for the Council. The Constitution is divided into 8 Parts. …. In particular, Parts 3 and 4 set out the rules governing the conduct of the Council’s business and which part of the Council is responsible for various functions.’

“Responsibility for Functions” is an important area, which should mean that there are “checks and balances” to ensure that power is shared across the Council, so that no single person or group within it has too much (to guard against that power being abused). The Constitution gives the Leader, or the Leader together with the Cabinet, considerable powers, but there are also ‘functions which cannot be exercised by the Cabinet’, ‘functions not to be the sole responsibility of the Cabinet’ and ‘functions that may only be exercised by Full Council’.

One area of particular concern is the General Purposes Committee, which ‘carries out a number of functions on which the Cabinet cannot take decisions, including public rights of way, setting the Council Tax base and approving staffing matters’.  The committee has eight members, and the Constitution used to say that at least one of these must be a member of the Executive (the previous title for the Cabinet). That proviso, which gave a very strong hint that most of the committee should be made up of back-bench councillors, has been removed, and for the past few years seven of the eight members have been Cabinet members, with the official Opposition Leader as the eighth.

Cllr. Butt is Chair of the General Purposes Committee, and of its Senior Staff Appointments Sub-Committee. This has given him considerable influence over the Council’s senior staffing structure, who is appointed to the Senior Officer posts, and the terms on which they are appointed. There are suspicions that, during the time that Christine Gilbert was interim Chief Executive and Cara Davani was HR Director, the Leader of the Council may have been complicit in some of their alleged misconduct over staffing matters.

The appointment of the Council’s Head of Paid Service (Chief Executive) is one of the functions which can only be exercised by Full Council, and not by the Cabinet or the Leader. Despite this, Cllr. Butt was able to appoint Christine Gilbert in September 2012 as ‘interim Chief Executive’, supposedly for a few months while the Council advertised for and appointed a permanent Chief Executive. In June 2013, Full Council was asked to extend Christine Gilbert’s role as interim Chief Executive – it agreed to do so, but only for a FIXED TERM which should have ended in June 2014.

The permanent post was still not advertised, and at the meeting in September 2014, Cllr. Butt extended Christine Gilbert’s tenure (eventually until September 2015) without seeking the consent of Full Council. The minutes recorded:

‘The Leader referred to the decision taken in June 2013 regarding the appointment of a new Chief Executive.  He stated that the external auditors were reporting back on how the Council was operating and whilst there was progress being made, stability within the Council would enable further progress to be made.  The current arrangements would therefore remain in place until a recruitment process began in the new year which would tie in with the launch of the new Borough Plan.’

Does Cllr. Butt have too much power? I would suggest that he does, and that the Council’s Constitutional Working Group, chaired by its properly appointed Chief Executive, Carolyn Downs, should consider ways to ensure that the functions of the General Purposes Committee and its sub-committees are carried out independently of the Council Leader and the Cabinet.

Philip Grant.