Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity
Brent Start’s former Stonebridge Centre at 1 Morland Gardens, 26 June 2023.
In a guest post about my recent Open Letter to Brent’s Chief Executive LINK, I said that I would also share with you a second letter I had sent on 26 June, this time to London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan. I will ask Martin to attach a copy of that letter at the end of this article, so that anyone who wishes to read it in full can do so. Whether you do, or not, this is a shorter version of the story.
I’d written emails to the Mayor (all emails to the GLA go to mayor@london.gov.uk) on 3 April and 4 May, to point out, with evidence and pictures, that Brent Council’s Morland Gardens project had not “started on site” by 31 March 2023. That was the date by which Start on Site (“SoS”) had to be achieved in order to qualify for funding from the Mayor of London’s Affordable Homes Programme 2016-2023.
However, GLA Officers told me that Brent had claimed it had achieved the SoS “milestone” for Morland Gardens in January 2023. They were not inclined to take any action, as their funding system relied on “self-certification” by grant recipients, with a “compliance audit” only carried out after the development being funded had been completed. At that stage, the GLA would seek repayment of any funds wrongly claimed, with interest.
It seemed madness to allow Brent’s project, which involved the demolition of an important Victorian heritage building and destruction of a community garden (and loss of much needed trees by a busy road junction), to go ahead, then for Brent to find that it had to repay many £m’s in several years time. The Morland Gardens project was unviable with £6.5m of GLA funding, which is why Brent applied for a larger amount from the GLA in January. This was approved, but the figure was redacted from copy emails I received in response to FoI requests.
That is why I wrote an open letter, addressed to the Mayor of London personally. I’ve asked Sadiq Khan to arrange for the evidence I’ve provided to be considered by the GLA’s Housing & Land and Legal teams, and to let Brent Council, and me, know whether he accepts the claim that SoS at Morland Gardens occurred by 31 March 2023, within the terms of the GLA funding agreement. If it did not, Brent should not be entitled to any funding, especially if their claim was based on false information.
There is a clear definition of what is required for a Start on Site in the GLA’s funding agreement document, which Brent Council will have signed. All three conditions listed have to be met:
Brent entered into a two-stage contract with Hill Partnerships Ltd (“Hill”) last September, but the only part of that which has been committed to is the Pre-Construction Services Agreement (“PCSA”), not the second “Build” stage. In the Affordable Housing Update Report to Brent’s Cabinet in November 2022, Morland Gardens was included in the section headed “Schemes not yet in contract”.
Brent claimed on 20 January that Hill had taken possession of the Site on 17 January 2023. However, they do not appear to have read the definition and interpretation details in the funding agreement, which show:
Hill only took possession of the 1 Morland Gardens part of the site, and put heras fencing round it. They did not take possession of the highway / community garden land, as Brent has no right to develop that land (and Hill cannot take possession of it) unless or until there is a Stopping-up Order for a section of highway, and the land has been appropriated for planning purposes.
That is two out of three conditions not met, what about the third? This is how the GLA’s funding agreement defines “Start on Site Works”:
It is obvious from even the 1 Morland Gardens part of the site, five and a half months after Brent’s claim, that none of the works at (a), (b) or (c) have been carried out. In answer to the GLA’s query, this is what Brent claimed (in red) as the “enabling works” under (d):
The heras fencing was part of taking possession of the site (or part of it). Since sending my Open Letter, I have received Brent’s response to an FoI request I submitted on 1 June for evidence in support of the claims made by the Council to the GLA in January. There is clear evidence that an asbestos survey was carried out at 1 Morland Gardens in January, but the instruction to disconnect the telephone lines was not until 25 April:
Email from Brent’s Project Manager to Openreach, 25 April 2023.
Two of the most important claims made by Brent in January 2023, as part of their application for additional GLA funding for their Morland Gardens project, were that demolition was scheduled for 1 March 2023 and that main build construction works were due to begin in the week commencing 24 April 2023. These dates and events supported the impression that actual construction of the homes would ‘immediately follow on’ from the very minor “enabling works” they said had happened in January, which was a requirement if SoS was claimed.
On 29 June I received the response from Brent to my request for evidence of the January claims. 2(c) and 2(d) were my requests over the demolition date, with Brent’s answers in bold type following on:
Brent did not include a copy of the “attached” programme document, and although I requested that on 30 June, I’ve still to receive it as I write this post.
It is one thing to say that ‘the agreed programme’ [circulated by the Council’s Project Manager] ‘states 01 March as the date for demolition works to start’, but another entirely as to whether that was a realistic expectation. The Project Manager, and other Council Officers involved, were aware that no decision had yet been made by the Mayor over whether an Inquiry was necessary over the proposed Stopping-up Order (the decision was not made until 20 March), and that it would not be possible to carry out demolition unless or until stopping-up and appropriation of the land outside 1 Morland Gardens was achieved. As at 20 January, the 1 March demolition date was totally unrealistic.
There was greater clarity in response to my request at 4(a) over the claim that main build construction work would begin in April 2023. That claim was a fiction!
Information on the work carried out by Hill at Morland Gardens was supplied to the GLA on 24 May by Brent’s Senior Development Manager, in response to the GLA advising him of my assertion that SoS had not commenced by 31 March, and that I had submitted an FoI request to the Mayor for copies of Brent’s SoS claims. The information apparently came from a document supplied by Hill, as part of their “valuation” when seeking payment for work carried out under the PCSA up to the end of April 2023. The email said:
‘They have also initiated the striping out of various elements of the build and carried out the site clearance and trees and shrubs removal as per their programme attached that clearly shows activities completed to date.’
I could not resist including this photograph, taken on 26 June, in the Open Letter I sent to the Mayor:
It’s not hard to spot the trees and shrubs within the heras fencing at 1 Morland Gardens, which shows that no site clearance has taken place. A local resident, when writing to me last month, commented: ‘Altamira is beginning to look like Sleeping Beauty's palace, being hidden behind a screen of trees and bushes!’ You’d have thought that someone at Brent Council would have checked that the work which payment was being claimed for had actually been carried out.
I have followed-up my Open Letter to the Mayor of London with an email, setting out the further evidence over the false claim to SoS from Brent’s FoI response of 29 June. I concluded my email by saying:
‘I hope you can now confirm, to Brent Council and to me, that Brent's Morland Gardens project does not qualify for funding under AHP 2016-2023.’
Will Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, hold Brent Council to account over their false claim for GLA funding? We will have to wait and see.
Philip Grant.
