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.

Democracy in Brent – are Cabinet Meetings a Charade?

 

Guest Blog (by Philip Grant in a personal capacity)

 

I watched the Live Stream recording of Brent’s Cabinet Meeting on 7 February 2022, as I have an interest in housing matters, and wanted to see how the petition from residents about the Council’s “infill” plans at Kilburn Square was dealt with. Martin published a “blog” about this, and underneath it you can see in the comments that I sent a follow-up email to the Leader of the Council.

 

My email to Cllr. Muhammed Butt linked his attitude at that meeting, and claims that building new Council homes was his top priority, to Brent’s plans to only provide 37 affordable rented homes in the 250-home development on land that it owns at Cecil Avenue in Wembley. Cllr. Butt replied, and his full response was included in my “guest blog” on 9 February.

 

At the end of his email to me, Cllr. Butt wrote: ‘I look forward to hearing that you will be watching the next Cabinet meeting; it is a fantastic thing to see more people actively involved with local democracy.’ But how much “local democracy” do we really receive through these Cabinet meetings?

 

Margaret, on behalf of the Kilburn Village Residents’ Association, was allowed to speak to the Cabinet. This was one of the democratic “improvements” which Cllr. Butt introduced after his Labour landslide win in the May 2014 local elections. He told our local newspaper soon afterwards: ‘New proposals allow the public to speak in council meetings for the first time ever is aimed at bettering how the community engages with the council and allows residents to hold us to account.’

 

But how much difference did what she said to them make? How much difference could it have made? I’m afraid that evidence I’ve recently received, under a Freedom of Information Act request, suggests that the decisions supposedly made at public meetings of Brent’s Cabinet, which people can watch and even participate in, have already been made beforehand, at meetings between Cabinet members and Senior Officers behind closed doors.

 

 

Regular readers will know that I have been trying to understand the justification for Cabinet’s decision on 16 August 2021 to allow a private developer to profit from the sale of 152 of the 250 homes on Brent’s Cecil Avenue housing scheme. This is the main site in the Council’s Wembley Housing Zone (“WHZ”). It was difficult to discover the reasoning, partly because most of the supporting documents were “exempt” (= secret), and partly because Cabinet members (and their Officers) were reluctant to provide explanations.

 

Extract from the WHZ report to Cabinet on 16 August 2021.

The statement that ‘Cabinet Members were consulted in July 2020’ was the subject of my latest FoI request, because there was nothing about that in the minutes of the Cabinet Meeting held on 20 July 2020! 

 

I asked for details and supporting evidence about that “consultation”, and the results were a surprise (to me at least). These showed that, as well as the formal public meetings of Cabinet, for which we can see the agenda and reports and watch a broadcast, there are at least two other types of regular meetings of Cabinet Members and Senior Council Officers, to which we are not invited.

 

Heading from the WHZ Report to the internal Policy Co-ordination Group meeting in July 2020.

 

The “consultation” which the 16 August 2021 Cabinet Report referred to actually happened four days before the 20 July 2020 Cabinet Meeting, at a meeting of the Policy Co-ordination Group (“PCG”), a body that I had never heard of before. In many ways, it appears to be very like a Cabinet Meeting, except that the public are not made aware of it, and are not invited! This is the “preferred delivery option” paragraph from the WHZ Report to that meeting:-

 

 

From this, it appears that the “preferred option”, to involve a private developer who would sell half the WHZ scheme homes for profit, had been on the cards since at least December 2019! It is not only the Report that looks very like one prepared for a Cabinet Meeting. The written record of this meeting, though described as ‘PCG Meeting Action Points’, looks very like the minutes of a Cabinet Meeting. I received this document in response to my FoI request, although Council Officers treated it as an Environmental Information Request, which allowed them to redact one paragraph in it.

 

 

Extract from “minutes” of the Policy Co-ordination Group meeting on 16 July 2020.

 

I understand, and accept, that there does need to be some co-ordination of policies across the different service areas of Brent Council, but does this really need a quasi-Cabinet Meeting to achieve that result?

 

My FoI request had asked for details and evidence of any other discussions of the “preferred delivery option” between July 2020 and the official decision on this at the Cabinet Meeting on 16 August 2021. The response to that produced evidence of another type of internal “Cabinet Meeting”, referred to as a Leader’s Briefing, held on 26 July 2021. This “briefing” appears to be effectively a trial run-through for the Cabinet Meeting, but held three weeks before the public meeting!

 

As well as all members of the Cabinet, the FoI response gave details of the Senior Officers attending:

 

‘16 Council Officers were invited to attend the briefing, positions below :

 

 

Chief Executive; Head of Executive & Member Services; Strategic Director Children & Young People; Personal Assistant to the Leader of the Council; Director of Finance; Head of Communications, Conference & Events; Strategic Director Community Wellbeing; Strategic Director Customer & Digital Services; Director Legal, HR, Audit & Investigation; Assistant Chief Executive; Governance Manager; Strategic Director Regeneration & Environment; Scrutiny Officer; Head of the Chief Executive Officer; Senior Administrator; Operational Director Regeneration, Growth & Employment; Head of Regeneration.’

 

 

It is interesting that the Head of Communications attends these Leader’s Briefing meetings. Could that be so that he can prepare the publicity for the Cabinet decisions, in advance of them officially being made? 

 

 

The “minutes” of the Leader’s Briefing meeting on 26 July 2021 are in the form of an email from a Governance Officer, and I will ask Martin to attach a copy of that document at the end of this article, should you wish to read them. You will note that there may, or may not, be amendments to the Reports which Cabinet members have received for the briefing, before they appear along with the agenda for the official Cabinet Meeting on 16 August. There was also mention of another PCG meeting, scheduled for September 2021.

 

 

The reports that went to the Leader’s Briefing meeting were marked “Restricted”. This may be because they might be changed, or because they should not be “leaked”, which would reveal that Cabinet members had already considered them before the official meeting. There was actually a slight change in the wording of the “preferred delivery option” paragraph 3.5.1 between the two dates. 

 

 

In the 26 July report (below), members had ‘endorsed’ Delivery Option 2 a year before. In the 16 August report (see third image above), they had ‘indicated a preference’ for it. This may only seem a small difference, but it gives the suggestion, in the first publicly available document, that no final decision had been reached before Cabinet officially considered the matter in August 2021.

 

Extract from the draft WHZ Report to the Leader’s Briefing on 26 July 2021.

 

What happened when Cabinet did consider the WHZ publicly on 16 August 2021 (having previously considered it in private several times since December 2019)? There were problems with the Live Streaming of that meeting, and the recording is only available towards the end of the WHZ item. 

 

 

We hear Cllr. McLennan speaking about the ‘really, really good news’ that WHZ includes a number of larger homes for families in housing need, and that ‘many of them will be affordable’. Cllr. Butt then starts by saying ‘this is actually great news’, and goes on for over a minute, commending how well the Council is doing with its housing programme, and delivering homes for people who need them on its waiting list.

 

 

The Council Leader speaking about WHZ at the 16 August 2021 Cabinet Meeting.

 

The Leader of the Council was actually talking about a Brent housing scheme, on Council-owned land at Cecil Avenue, where 152 of the 250 homes would be sold for profit by a private developer, 61 of the so-called “affordable” homes would be for shared ownership or Intermediate Rent, and only 37 would be available for rent to local people in housing need at London Affordable Rent level! On the other WHZ site, across the High Road, although the 54 flats would be for London Affordable Rent, only 8 of them would be family-sized.

 

 

To me, that performance was just misleading “grandstanding” – playing to the public gallery over a decision that had been made in advance of the formal Cabinet Meeting, and which he hoped no member of the public had actually read the detail of the Report (and could not read any of the details in the “exempt” Appendices to it).

 

 

I asked in the title ‘are Cabinet Meetings a charade?’ You may know “Charades” as a game involving guessing words from acted clues. I think that Brent’s Cabinet are playing a game with the borough’s residents. They are acting at their meetings as if they have considered and decided the Reports attached to their agenda, after hearing what any members of the public or backbench councillors have to say at the Cabinet Meeting.

 

 

A charade (singular) is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘an absurd pretence’. If the items on the Cabinet’s agenda have been considered and decided in advance, at a Policy Co-ordination Group meeting or Leader’s Briefing, then Cabinet Meetings are a charade.

 

 

Philip Grant.

 

Brent Council, the developer’s friend – the proof in black and white

Guest Post by Philip Grant (in a personal capacity):-

 

Extract from the “Soft Market Testing” report to Cabinet, August 2021.

 

It looks bad. It looks wrong. That’s why I will persist in shining a light on the Brent Cabinet decision to allow a developer to profit from the sale of 152 new Council homes, to be built on the former Copland School site at Cecil Avenue in Wembley, until either the Council provides a satisfactory explanation of why that is the right thing to do, or agrees it is wrong and that all 250 homes in that development should be for Brent people in housing need.

 

In an article last month, I shared the information I’d received from a Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) request about Brent’s “soft market testing” exercise, in April 2021, which was supposedly to find out whether developers would be interested in being part of the Council’s Wembley Housing Zone scheme. But some of the information I’d asked for was withheld by Brent’s Head of Regeneration, who claimed that it was excluded from disclosure because:

 

·      It contained information obtained from and related to the financial and business affairs of 5 private developers (Confidentiality - Section 41 of FOIA);

·      It would be likely to prejudice the commercial interests of any person, including the public authority holding it (Commercially Sensitive – S.43(2) FOIA); and,

·      That in applying the public interest test required by S.43(2), ‘it is considered that the balance of maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.’

 

On 12 December 2021, I sent an Internal Review request, setting out (with detailed reasons) why information prepared for Cabinet by Council Officers as a result of the exercise was not exempt information under FOIA, and why it was in the public interest that it should be disclosed. I agreed that if a report included confidential information received from developers, that could be redacted (blacked out) in the copy of the report sent to me.

 

I received the Council’s response on 15 January from Alice Lester, Operational Director (Regeneration, Growth and Employment). On a careful reading of her letter, I can’t see that she actually admitted any error in the initial refusal of my request. But her letter concluded: ‘However, I agree that a redacted copy of the report could be provided and this is attached.’ It is always worth sticking up for what you believe, if you think the Council has got it wrong!

 

In the interests of fairness to all five developers, and to show that I am keeping what they told Brent Council confidential, here is the second page of the report I was sent:-

 

Second extract from the “Soft Market Testing” report to Cabinet, August 2021.

 

I was expecting those sections of the report to be blacked out, but I was surprised to see that part of the last sentence of the “Market Commentary”, written by Officers, was also redacted:

 

The opening section of the report to Cabinet in August 2021.
[Don’t worry! The pipelines developers were talking about are forward plans to ensure they get as much work lined-up for future years as possible.]

 

The first version of the document sent to me was followed by an urgent request not to open it, as ‘it appears that the attachment wasn’t properly redacted.’ I didn’t open it, but waited for the corrected version (above). As that concealed words I believed should probably be disclosed, I did then look at the original, and although those words had also been blacked out, they weren’t securely redacted.  

 

I wrote to Ms Lester on Monday 17^th, to explain why I should be able to make the last seven words public, and on 19 January I received another ‘revised redacted document’.  The explanation was: ‘After further consultation with legal colleagues, the words to which you refer have been unredacted.’ After two challenges, I had finally been given information that I was entitled to request in the first place.

 

I can see why Brent’s senior Regeneration Officers might have wanted to keep these seven words about the developers from the public: ‘… and all stated interest in this opportunity.’ 

 

Of course all the developers were interested! The market opportunity they were offered was so “soft” that I don’t think any contractor / property developer would be likely to turn it down. Which begs the question, was that the answer that Regeneration Officers (and the Lead Member?) wanted from the “market testing”, so that they could put the idea of involving a developer as the ‘preferred delivery option’ for this scheme?

 

Normally a developer would have to find a site to build homes on, buy it (very expensive in London), get an architect’s team to design the proposed scheme for them, go through the planning process, then build the homes before it could get any return on its development, for which it would have borrowed £millions, over several years, in order to finance.

 

The key page from Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone “information pack” for developers, April 2021.

 

The opportunity Brent was offering, in its “market testing exercise”, was to pay whichever developer won the “procurement and contract structure” bid outlined above for building the Council’s housing scheme. Once built, the Council would agree to sell the developer 152 homes, for a fixed price agreed in advance. That price would have been included in the developer’s ‘bid submission’ for the contract, and none of the developers bidding would have offered ‘a guaranteed monetary consideration’ that would not give them a profit!

 

The report which included this “Confidential Appendix” went to Brent’s Cabinet in August 2021, and you can see from the minutes how enthusiastic they were about the proposals:-

 

Did none of the Cabinet members stop to think, and ask: ‘why are we handing half of the homes on this Council housing development to a private developer?’ Perhaps they were taken in by the statement in the Officer’s Report: ‘Cabinet Members were consulted in July 2020 and indicated [this] preferred delivery option for the Cecil Avenue site ….’? 

 

As I set out in my earlier article about the “soft market testing”, that consultation appears to have been “off record” and may have involved as few as two Cabinet members (the Leader and Lead Member for Regeneration). Didn’t other Cabinet members reading that think: ‘I don’t remember being consulted’, and if they did, why didn’t they question it?

 

Cabinet members apparently enthused about ‘the inclusion of London Affordable Rents as part of the offer’. Most of these would actually be the 54 homes on the Ujima House site, only 8 of which would be 3-bedroom “family homes” (with a 5sqm balcony as private outdoor space!). I had emailed the Cabinet members several days before, to highlight the problems with this Wembley Housing Zone scheme, and the need for more homes to be for genuine social rents.

 

Perhaps the Cabinet members didn’t have time to read my email before the meeting, but apart from a couple of automatic acknowledgements, none of them responded. I had to ask a public question for the Full Council meeting in November, and a follow-up question, but I still didn’t get any proper explanation for the Cabinet’s decision from Cllr. Shama Tatler.

 

Cllr. Tatler claimed that making all the Wembley Housing Zone homes affordable ‘is not financially viable’. How could it NOT be financially viable? The Council already owns the site. The Council could borrow the money to build the homes at some of the lowest ever interest rates. 

 

In answer to my straight question: ‘why is Brent Council not proposing to build all 250 of the homes at Cecil Avenue as affordable rented Council housing?’ Cllr. Tatler’s reply was: ‘the Wembley Housing Zone programme together proposes 50% affordable housing.’ 50% affordable housing is Brent, and London’s, target for all large private housing developments, even though that is rarely, if ever, achieved in the planning process.

 

Cecil Avenue is a Brent Council development, on Council owned land. The Council has paid (with public money from the GLA) to design the scheme and get it through planning consent. The Council will borrow the money to build the 250 homes. Why shouldn’t all of those homes be Council homes?

 

I make no apology for sharing again this parody of a Brent Council publicity photograph for its New Council Homes campaign. It shows exactly what Brent’s Cabinet has agreed should happen Cecil Avenue. 

 

If you want to deliver 1,000 new Council homes in Brent, why “give away” 152 of the new Council homes you are building at Cecil Avenue to a private developer? One way the Council seems to have compensated for this is to agree to buy a tower block with 155 leasehold flats from the developer of the Alperton Bus Garage site, at a cost of £48m. That guaranteed sale of one third of the homes will help the developer, Telford Homes, to obtain the finance to actually build this high-rise scheme, which was strongly opposed by local residents.

 

Why are a small number of Cabinet Members and Senior Council Officers seemingly favouring private developers like this? Why are their fellow Cabinet members not questioning why? Why are Brent’s Scrutiny Committees not asking for explanations? Why are the rest of Brent’s elected councillors not asking the Leader or Lead Member for Regeneration “Why”?

 

IT LOOKS BAD. IT LOOKS WRONG. 

 

Why is it left to an ordinary member of the public to ask WHY?

Philip Grant.