Wembley Housing Zone – Brent’s latest “spin” versus the facts!

Guest Blog by Philip Grant in a personal capacity    

 

 

 Zephaniah House under construction in Wembley High Road (with “The Pages” opposite).

 

On 24 February, Brent Council issued a press release: “More affordable homes coming as Zephaniah House reaches key milestone”. Its content has already been shared by websites including Kilburn Times, Harrow Online and Construction News. Like most stories from Brent Communications, it tells a positive tale, including “quotes” from Cabinet members, to give the impression that all of this “good news” is the work of our local Labour councillors. [What would you expect, when the Cabinet Lead Member for Communications is Cllr. Muhammed Butt?] 

 

“Topping out” at Zephaniah House (image courtesy of Brent Communications)

 

The news item this time was the topping out ceremony at Zephaniah House (on the former Ujima House site in the High Road), part of the Brent Council/Wates Residential Wembley Housing Zone development. The press release says that this is ‘an important step toward delivering 54 new affordable homes on the former Ujima House site in Wembley.’ As you can see from my opening photo, there is still a lot of work to do on the building before the homes there will be ready for occupation, which is supposed to be by 31 December 2026. But with local elections in just over two months, I’m sure they would like you to think it would be sooner!

 

“Quote” attributed to Cllr. Teo Benea (from Brent’s press release)

 

The featured “quote” in the press release is from Cllr. Teo Benea, as the Wembley Housing Zone is a Regeneration project which she inherited from her predecessor in that Cabinet role, Cllr. Shama Tatler. There is also a “quote” attributed to Cllr. Fleur Donnelly Jackson, the Housing Lead, which includes the lines: ‘… our ambition is to deliver as many affordable homes as we can. Zephaniah House will help reduce our waiting list …. This is what it looks like when a council commits to tackling the housing crisis head on.’ I don’t know whether Cabinet members really compose these “quotes” themselves, or whether someone at the Civic Centre writes them. I will share this guest post with them, so they have the chance to reply!

 

I agree that building genuinely affordable Council homes for the people on the waiting list (around 34,000 is the most recent figure I’ve read from Brent Council) should be a top priority, so the 54 homes at Zephaniah House will go a small way towards ‘tackling the housing crisis’. But, yet again, the Council is using the term “affordable homes” to cover more than the genuinely affordable homes (that is, either at Social Rent level, or the slightly higher London Affordable Rent – “LAR” - level), which its 2020 Poverty Commission Report showed was all that most Brent residents in housing need could afford.

 

The start of my first Wembley Housing Zone guest post, in August 2021.

 

The most recent information I have on the 54 homes on the former Ujima House site was from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2023. These were originally all meant to be for rent at the genuinely affordable LAR level, but this had been changed to 32 (including all eight family-sized flats) at LAR, and 22 for shared ownership. If that has changed, I hope the relevant Lead Member can update us.

 

I have been writing about the Wembley Housing Zone since August 2021 (see illustration above), when I highlighted the fact that the proposals going to Cabinet ignored the Brent Poverty Commission’s housing recommendations, which they had accepted less than a year before, writing:

 

‘If the Council is going to undertake and manage the construction on the two sites, why not make ALL of the homes it builds “affordable housing”, providing 304 Council homes for people (especially families) on its waiting list? Ideally, these should all be for social rent, for those most in need, as recommended in Lord Best’s report. If that is not financially viable, an alternative could be 50% let at social rent levels, with the other 50% (presumably the better ones on the Cecil Avenue site, which a developer would have wanted for “private sale”) at London Affordable Rent.’

 

A pdf copy of my guest post was sent to all Cabinet members a few days before the 16 August 2021 meeting, at which they formally decided to go down the “development partner” route. I received no response, and my views were ignored. When I later emailed the Lead Member for Housing, asking why they were not building more homes for genuinely affordable rent, she replied that as this project was under her colleague, the Lead Member for Regeneration, she’d forwarded the email to Cllr. Shama Tatler, who would respond to me. (She didn’t!)

 

I later discovered, through FoI requests, that this ‘preferred delivery option’ had already been informally agreed at an unpublished Policy Co-ordination Group meeting in July 2020. That followed on from a previous “go ahead” for the option, by as few as two Cabinet members (the Council Leader and Lead Member for Regeneration?), in 2019. As a result, there had been at least two “soft market testing” exercises, in February 2020 and April 2021, which were used to justify the recommendation to Cabinet in August 2021. You can read the details in my January 2022 guest post “Brent Council, the developer’s friend – the proof in black and white”, and its December 2021 prequel.

 

My November 2021 “parody” Brent Council “publicity photo” for its Cecil Avenue housing scheme.

 

The Zephaniah House press release also refers to the larger Wembley Housing Zone development, across the High Road on the Cecil Avenue site, which it says ‘will bring 237 new homes, including 84 affordable homes.’ As shown in my “cartoon” above, when this received full planning consent in February 2021, it was intended to include 250 homes. The August 2021 Cabinet decision meant that only 98 of these would have been “affordable”, and only 37 at the genuinely affordable LAR level. Big posters on the hoardings around the site now claim that Brent is “delivering new Council homes” there, but the reality is that 150 of them will be for private sale by Wates.

 

 

Two signs from the hoardings round the Cecil Avenue site (with my linking comment).

 

Of the 84 “affordable” homes, information from an FoI request, which I shared in January 2024, shows that 56 (that’s just 23.6% of the 237) would now be for rent to Council tenants at LAR level, while 28 would be for shared ownership. The drop in the “affordable” figure (87 to 84) must be the three which I was advised would be for “discounted market sale”, a form of so-called “affordable housing” available if your annual income is no more than £90k!

 

It was claimed in the press release that Brent Council’s ‘ambition is to deliver as many affordable homes as we can.’ But is that what they have done with the Wembley Housing Zone? They already owned the former Copland School site at Cecil Avenue, and had previously used money provided by the GLA to purchase the Ujima House office block. Without having to incur the cost of purchasing the land, Brent should have been able to build all of the homes there as Council housing. That would particularly have been the case if they had got on with the scheme in 2021, when interest rates on loans from the Treasury were lower, and building costs had not risen as much as they have now.

 

A sign on the hoardings at Cecil Avenue, about Brent’s WHZ “Vision”.

 

So why didn’t they? That must be down to the Council’s Wembley Housing Zone “Vision”, driven by the then Lead Member for Regeneration and supported by the Council Leader. It was clearly their wish to make it a joint venture with a “developer partner”, which led to a delay until early 2023, when they awarded the building contract to Wates Residential (agreeing to pay them £121,862,500). And although Cllr. Tatler posed for this photo with Wates on the Cecil Avenue site in March 2023, for a press release announcing the contract award, it was February 2024 before construction began.

 

Cllr. Shama Tatler and Wates officials, from a March 2023 Brent press release.

 

Cllr. Tatler’s “vision” for the Wembley Housing Zone can be summed up in this sentence from her Cabinet Member Foreword, in a report to a Cabinet meeting on 8 April 2024 (which approved ‘up to £11.23m Strategic Community Infrastructure Levy to deliver a new publicly accessible courtyard garden’ on the Cecil Avenue site):

 

‘The regeneration that underpins the Wembley Housing Zone, is exactly that – an effort to build a better Brent, a place where home ownership is a reality, not just a dream.’

 

That is NOT a vision to build as many homes as possible, for genuinely affordable rents, in order to reduce the number of local people in real housing need on Brent’s waiting list!

 

As early as January 2022, I was calling for proper scrutiny of the August 2021 Cabinet decision, with a view to increasing the number of genuinely affordable homes in the Wembley Housing Zone scheme, but all my efforts were thwarted by councillors or Council Officers. It was only at a Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee meeting on 23 April 2024 that Cllr. Tatler was finally asked to explain why Brent had not delivered more genuinely affordable homes as part of that project. When I watched the webcast of that meeting, I could not believe what I was hearing, so I played it through several times, and this is the answer Cllr. Tatler gave:

 

‘'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 ....'

 

What she publicly told the Committee was untrue, as recorded on “Wembley Matters” at the time. I wrote to Cllr. Tatler, with a copy to the Scrutiny Chair, but she never replied to me, and as far as I am aware she never apologised to the Committee for misleading them.

 

If you want facts about Brent’s affordable housing, rather than “spin” or misinformation, I suggest you read Martin’s blogsite, and don’t rely on what you hear from the Council!

 

Philip Grant.

Wembley Housing Zone – Estate Management Company and The Pages. Will the arrangement leave Brent Council at risk?

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

Work in progress on the Cecil Avenue site (aka The Pages Wembley), 9 June 2025.

 

I was in the High Road on Monday, and discovered that the Council’s Wembley Housing Zone (“WHZ”) development at Cecil Avenue is now being marketed as “The Pages Wembley”. More on that later, but Cecil Avenue is also on the agenda for next week’s Brent Cabinet meeting, over an Estate Management Company.

 

Readers may remember that although Brent Council owns the Cecil Avenue site, and received full planning consent for the development there in February 2021, it was not until March 2023 that it entered into a WHZ partnership agreement with Wates. Work did not actually start on site until February 2024, and by that time I’d found out (through a Freedom of Information Act request) that under this “partnership”, 150 of the 237 homes would be for Wates to sell, and of the 87 Brent Council homes, only 56 (half of them family size units) would be for letting at London Affordable Rent level. Of the other Brent Council “affordable” homes, 28 would be for shared ownership and 3 would be sold at a discount from market price.

 

These are the main recommendations in the Report to Brent’s Cabinet, and the “Cabinet Member Foreword”, which gives the Council Officers’ “spin” on why they want our top elected councillors to agree the recommendations they have made:

 

 

 

All of the WHZ Council flats in Ujima House and the Council’s London Affordable Rent homes at Cecil Avenue will come under Brent’s Housing Revenue Account, but the Estate Management Company (“EMC”) will also require payment of service charges from tenants living on that site. As the services provided by the EMC are quite broad, and it appears that it will hire a managing agent to carry out some or all of those services, tenants at the Cecil Avenue site are likely to face quite high service charges on top of their “genuinely affordable” rent.

 

 

As ‘Wates have experience of setting up similar companies’, Brent will let them take the lead on setting up this EMC, but once Wates have sold all 150 of the 237 homes at Cecil Avenue (which our Council allowed them to have under the 2023 partnership agreement) they will walk away from the EMC. ‘Brent Council will then have full control, ownership and responsibility for the Company’, which in turn means that the Council will have full responsibility ‘for repair and maintenance of the structure’.

 

I may be a pessimist and a cynic, but I can’t help feeling that this will leave Brent Council, through its by then wholly-owned EMC subsidiary, at risk of a situation similar to that experienced when it had to bail out its First Wave Housing subsidiary over Granville New Homes. Those homes had been built through a partnership between Brent and the developer, Higgins. (Disclaimer: I am not suggesting that Wates workmanship is on the same level as that of Higgins on that 2009 South Kilburn project!)

 

 

Turning to “The Pages”, when I was in the High Road, trying to take photographs of the Cecil Avenue site hoardings across the street (through the traffic tailed back from road works at the Ealing Road junction!), a visitor to Wembley asked me if I knew why the development had been given that name. Was it because it used to be a printing works, or something like that? I said it was the first time I had seen “The Pages Wembley” name, that there used to be a school on the site, and my guess was that it might be a reference to the Page family, who were major landowners in the area several centuries ago.

 

Sure enough, when I searched for "The Pages Wembley” online, I found that: ‘The name is a nod to the Page family, who became major landowners in Wembley in the 16th century.’ I also found that Savills are already marketing the private homes here on their website. This is a small sample of what is on offer:

 

Composite of images from a Savills video and Savills sales website.

 

It is interesting that the top image, from the video, shows that it was issued by Savills International Realty Limited, and the black letters under the Savills name in their logo appear to be in Chinese characters! Echoes of Brent’s “partnership” development at Willesden Green Library? The video showcases Wembley as a “world class location”, and most of its filming appears to have been done at Quintain’s Wembley Park development, with just a handful of CGI pictures of what “The Pages” is meant to look like when it is completed, which should be in late Summer or Autumn 2026 (not March/April 2026, as implied in the video)!

 

The opening line of Jane Austen’s novel “Pride and Prejudice”. (Image from the internet)

 

I can’t help thinking that the link between Brent Council’s development at Cecil Avenue and the Page family is ironic. The last of the wealthy Wembley Pages were four brothers, who were contemporaries of Jane Austen (the 250^th anniversary of whose birth is being celebrated by the BBC at the moment). As I showed in Part 2 of The Wembley Park Story, in 2020, they seemed to have overlooked the important truth that rich families needed to produce an heir, to pass on their wealth to. The will signed by the final Page brother left all of the family’s wealth to his solicitor (or so the solicitor claimed – he went on to live in one of their mansions in Sudbury, and became a governor of Harrow School). 

 

It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that a London Borough has thousands of people in want of an affordable home to rent. And if you look at some of the signs on the hoardings outside “The Pages” in the High Road, that is what you would think Brent Council was building there.

 

When Brent’s Cabinet made its formal decision on the WHZ development in August 2021, they knew what the borough’s housing needs were. These had been spelt out in the Brent Poverty Commission report, whose recommendations (including borrowing when interest rates were low to build more Council homes, especially those for social rent level, which was all that many local people could afford) the Cabinet had accepted less than a year before. 

So what was ‘the Wembley Housing Zone Vision’ which they were delivering? I think that the deal they signed with Wates has “swindled” many Brent residents in housing need out of a home that they could have had (and could have had by 2024, if the Council had not gone down the “developer partner” route). What do you think?

Philip Grant.

 

Regeneration at Scrutiny meeting – The truth about Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone land – two follow-up emails

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

Cllr. Tatler (front right) on the Cecil Avenue site in March 2023.
(from a Brent Council press release announcing the WHZ development contract with Wates)

 

Following my guest post on 28 April, setting out the truth about the Council’s ownership of the Wembley Housing Zone site at Cecil Avenue, I added a comment below which shared the text of an open email I had sent to Councillor Shama Tatler.

 

Martin asked whether he could publish that email as a separate post, but I said it might be better to wait until I had also sent an email to the members of the Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee, and publish both together. That is what this guest post does.

Open email to Councillor Shama Tatler, Brent’s Cabinet Member for Regeneration, on 29 May at 8.30am:

 

Subject: Incorrect statement on Wembley Housing Zone land at Scrutiny Committee on 23 April

 

This is an Open Email

 

Dear Councillor Tatler,

 

You may recall that I have been taking a close interest in the lack of genuinely affordable housing at Brent Council's Cecil Avenue development, which comes under your Wembley Housing Zone regeneration portfolio, since August 2021.

 

I was therefore interested when the subject came up when you were speaking to the Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee meeting last Tuesday (23 April) when they were considering Regeneration.

 

You stated (and I have transcribed this from the webcast of the meeting): 'With the Wembley Housing Zone, we didn't own the land. We had to purchase the land.'

 

That statement was untrue. 

 

Brent Council did own the freehold of the Cecil Avenue site (which will provide 237 of the 291 WHZ homes). That land, which for a time had passed to Copland Community School when it was a foundation school, had come back to Brent Council ownership, for nil consideration, under a land rationalisation agreed in 2014.

 

The only WHZ land which Brent Council had to purchase was Ujima House (the smaller site, providing only 54 of the 291 WHZ homes), acquired in 2016 for £4.8m, and funded out of the £8m initially provided to Brent by the GLA for the Wembley Housing Zone.

 

I'm sure that you are at least as aware of those facts as I am, and yet you appear to have chosen to mislead the Scrutiny Committee, as part of seeking to justify the impact on viability which has led to the poor number of genuinely affordable homes homes for rent to Council tenants at your Wembley Housing Zone scheme.

 

I am bringing this to your attention, and the fact that the true position is now in the public domain*, so that you can write to the Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee to correct the error in what you said above (and any other false information included in your statements to them on 23 April) and apologise for misleading them at their meeting.

 

I am copying this email to Councillor Conneely, the Committee Chair, for her information, and as it is an open email I will also include its text as a comment under the online blog post, which you can read via the "link" below. Yours sincerely,

 

Philip Grant.

 

* https://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/2024/04/regeneration-at-scrutiny-meeting-truth.html

 

[Thirty-six hours later, I have yet to receive any acknowledgement or response from Cllr. Tatler, and on past experience, I’m not sure that I will.]

 

Wembley Housing Zone location plan, with added description in key.
(Original version taken from a Report to Cabinet in August 2021)

 

As I have little confidence that Cllr. Tatler will take my advice, and bring the error I have pointed out to the attention of the Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee, my second email was addressed to them.

 

Email to Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee, on 30 May at 8.27pm:

 

Subject: Correction to information given to you on Wembley Housing Zone land at meeting on 23 April.

 

Dear Chair and members (including substitutes) of Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee, I was interested in item 6 on your 23 April agenda, Regeneration in Brent, and watched some of the meeting on the webcast.

 

You may remember that, in 2022, I was seeking to get your committee to scrutinise various aspects of the Council's delivery of affordable housing, and in particular the lamentably low proportion of genuinely affordable homes to rent which were proposed for the Cecil Avenue site of the Council's Wembley Housing Zone project. 

 

I was pleased to hear Councillor Conneely express your Committee's support for more genuinely affordable homes on Council schemes. However, I was astounded to hear what Councillor Tatler said about the Wembley Housing Zone scheme, which comes under her Regeneration portfolio. This is what I transcribed her saying, when I went back to check it on the webcast recording (with my bold type for emphasis):

 

'With the Wembley Housing Zone, we didn't own the land. We had to purchase the land. That impacts viability as well.'

 

She was claiming that the Council could not provide more genuinely affordable homes than the 88 at London Affordable Rent (out of a total of 291 homes to be built, with 150 of those for private sale by Wates) because purchasing the land reduced the viability of the project.

 

But Brent Council did not have to purchase the land for the main part of the project, the former Copland School site at Cecil Avenue, where 237 of the 291 homes will be built.

 

I double-checked that I was correct over Brent's ownership of that vacant brownfield site, before sharing the truth about this online. I also wrote to Councillor Tatler yesterday morning (29 April), and am appending the full text of that email below for your information (although I did copy the original to your Chair).

 

I am not confident that Councillor Tatler will write to correct the false statement she made to you on 23 April, so I decided to write to you as well. Please base any follow-up work you do on Regeneration, and any recommendations your Committee may make on the Wembley Housing Zone, on the true position over land ownership at Cecil Avenue. Thank you.

 

As set out in the online article which I provided a "link" to at the end of my email to Councillor Tatler below, effective scrutiny in holding the Cabinet to account relies on Cabinet members, and Council Officers, being honest in the information they provide to you. I hope that you will make that point clearly when dealing with this matter, because the work that you do is very important. 

 

Thank you. Best wishes,

 

Philip Grant.

 

Regeneration at Scrutiny meeting – The truth about Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone land

Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity-

 

The Scrutiny page on Brent Council’s website includes the following question and answer:

 

From: https://www.brent.gov.uk/the-council-and-democracy/council-meetings-and-decision-making/scrutiny#Whatisscrutiny

 

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.