‘Tis the Season to be Sneaky! Is Brent trying to award the c£100m Wembley Housing Zone contract without scrutiny?

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

The location of the two Wembley Housing Zone sites.

 

If you’re a regular reader of “Wembley Matters”, you will be aware of Brent’s often repeated statements about the urgent need to build more Council homes for the families in temporary accommodation and on the waiting list. They are used to justify the Council’s often unpopular “infill” plans for some of its housing estates, and by Brent’s planners to justify recommending applications that breach some planning policies, and are seen by many as overdevelopment.

 

You will also be aware of Brent’s promise (and Labour Group election pledge) to build 1,000 genuinely affordable Council homes in the five year period ended 31 March 2024.

 

If you’re a regular reader, you will have seen at least some of my previous guest posts about Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone proposals. These include building 250 homes on the Council-owned brownfield site of the former Copland School building at Cecil Avenue. If they had got on and built them as soon as they had full planning permission in February 2021, that could have contributed a quarter of the 1,000 homes target. But as a result of a Cabinet decision in August 2021, 152 of those new homes are to be built for private sale at a profit by a “Developer Partner”. 

 

Title page to the Report which Cabinet approved on 16 August 2021.

 

For much of 2022, I tried to get this (what appeared to be an odd) decision properly scrutinised, but that was finally scuppered by the Chair of the Resources & Public Realm Scrutiny Committee (acting on whose instructions?) in September. Now there appears to be an attempt by those in power at Brent Council to stop any scrutiny of the actual award of the contract for the Wembley Housing Zone scheme.

 

This will be a very big contract, likely to be worth in excess of £100m. Brent advertised in April for expressions of interest from contractors for this, and they had to respond by the end of May. In November, Cabinet were informed that progress had been made, but the details were hidden away in an “exempt” appendix to the Report.

 

Extract from the November 2022 “Update on the Supply of New Affordable Homes” Report.

 

Then, in the past few days, an item appeared on the Forward Plan page, saying that the decision to award the contract, to be Brent’s Developer Partner for the Wembley Housing Zone scheme, would be made this month, under ‘urgency procedures’!

 

The Forward Plan entry from Brent Council’s website.

 

As Brent has been working towards this decision since August 2021 (in fact, long before that) and the contract procurement process has been going on for over six months, why was it urgent and what are those procedures? There are some clues from the document, dated 12 December, that was provided in a “link” from that Forward Plan, which I will ask Martin to attach a copy of at the end of this post, for general information.

 

It appears that there are various degrees of urgency. Normally, at least 28 clear days’ notice of a Key Decision has to be given. In this case, although it would be less than 28 days, it was planned to be ‘at least 5 clear days’ notice.’ The decision would be made on 19 December.

 

Extract from the Urgent Key Decision form.

 

If it had been less than five days, the Chair of a Scrutiny Committee would have ‘to agree that the decision is urgent and cannot be reasonably deferred for the reasons detailed ….’  But as it was ‘at least 5 clear days’, ‘the Scrutiny Chair is only required to note that the decision will be taken.’ In other words, there would be no scrutiny of whether or not the decision was actually urgent.

 

According to the Urgent Decision form, 28 days’ notice could not be provided because: ‘Conclusion of the contractor developer partner procurement was delayed.’ But Council Officers have been working on that procurement for months, and would have known that a decision on it would be required at some time in the near future, so notice could surely have been given earlier.

 

And the reason why it is ‘impractical to defer the decision to a later date’ is said to be ‘to meet delivery timescales and funding conditions.’ With the delays which have already occurred since Brent first entered into its Wembley Housing Zone agreement with the GLA in 2015, delivery timescales don’t seem to have been much of a priority before. As for funding conditions, the Council must have been aware of these ever since funding agreements were made (at least 15 months ago for the extra £5.5m the GLA agreed to offer).

 

As at 6.30pm on Wednesday 21 December the formal decision has not been published on the Decisions page of Brent Council’s website. Perhaps it will be published on 22 or 23 December. But why would Senior Council Officers (and the Cabinet member responsible for this project, who is the Lead Member for Regeneration, despite this being mainly a housing development) delay making the decision, and giving the intention to make it so little publicity, until just before the Christmas / New Year holiday period?

 

Why Call-in matters, from Brent’s Protocol on Call-in.

 

I’ve said before that those behind this controversial Wembley Housing Zone project want to avoid any scrutiny of it. The award of the contract is a Key Decision, so could be called-in for scrutiny. I may be wrong, but I suspect that the decision is being made now to minimise any chance of a call-in. For call-in to take effect, at least five backbench councillors (non-Cabinet members) need to request that a Key Decision is called-in, and they need to do so ‘within 5 days of the date on which the record of the decision is made publicly available.’ 

 

How many councillors, if they were not aware that this important Key Decision was about to be made (because the usual 28 days’ notice has not been given) would be looking at the Decisions page on the Brent Council website over the holiday period? And even if any of them were keeping an eye on it, what would be the chances of organising five members to complete and submit call-in request forms before the end of the fifth day?

 

That’s the main reason I’ve asked Martin to consider publishing this guest post – so that this Festive Season is not used as a cover to sneak through a Key Decision without anyone realising that has been done until it is too late!

 

Philip Grant 

 

Brent’s New Affordable Council Homes promises shredded!

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity 

 

When I shared my open email to the Council Leader on Morland Gardens in a guest post earlier this week, I drew attention to the “Update on the supply of New Affordable Homes” report, which is going to next Monday’s Cabinet meeting. Now I will highlight some points from that.

 

It’s only a month since I wrote about Brent’s Affordable Council Housing – the promises and the reality, but that reality has got a whole lot worse. Then I was writing about Social Rent, London Affordable Rent (“LAR”) and Shared Ownership (“SO”), which is neither ownership nor “affordable” housing. Now Council Officers want to include some new terms, Open Market Rent (“OMR”) and Open Market Sale (“OMS”) into Brent’s New Council Homes programme.

 

Extract from the “Update” Report for the 14 November Cabinet meeting.

 

They are saying that some (in fact, quite a lot!) of the new homes the Council builds can no longer be for social housing, which is what Council homes are meant to provide. They will have to be for rents that are not genuinely affordable, such as OMR (or Local Housing Allowance level, as it is sometimes referred to), or they will have to be for shared ownership or sold off privately, the same as any other developer would do. 

 

‘What is the point of the Council building new Council homes which are not new homes for rent to Council tenants?’ you might ask. The answer from the Corporate Director, Resident Services, is that you have to “convert” some of those homes to unaffordable homes, or homes for sale, in order to be able to afford to build other homes which are for affordable rent. But the Council, as a social housing provider, can’t offer unaffordable homes to Council tenants, so it has to pass on the OMR and SO homes it is “converting” to someone else.

 

The start of a long list of recommendations for Cabinet to agree on 14 November.

 

The Report recommends that the “conversion” will be done by ‘Officers’. Which Officers? – it doesn’t say (why is that?), but many of the other recommendations delegate the power to make decisions to the Corporate Director, Resident Services (the Officer who signed off the Report, Peter Gadsdon). 

 

As will be seen from my first extract from the Report above, the “conversion” will be ‘via the Council’s wholly owned subsidiary company i4B.’ Because i4B is a separate “legal person”, it can charge higher rents than the Council itself would be allowed to charge. The Council would build the homes to be “converted”, then sell them to i4B (who would pay for them with a loan from the London Borough of Brent), for rent to Brent residents (possibly homeless families). 

 

But as well as making these recommendations, Peter Gadsdon is also a director of i4B, which would benefit from the extra properties in its portfolio. Isn’t that a conflict of interests? And another director of i4B is Cllr. Saqib Butt, the brother of the Council Leader who will chair the Cabinet meeting considering the recommendations. I have raised these potential conflicts of interest with Brent’s Monitoring Officer, and await her response.

 

How many of the New Affordable Homes are likely to be “converted” to unaffordable ones? It could be as many as 50% of them, on the basis of this recommendation from the Report:

 

And it is not just ‘new planning permission applications’ that that are at risk of losing up to 50% of their affordable homes. Windmill Court, which has an “affordable housing” condition in its planning consent specifying that the tenure of the homes must be for no more than LAR, is one of the schemes proposed for “conversion”. The planning consent gave the reason for the LAR condition as: 'In the interests of proper planning.'

 

Extract from the Update Report, including proposals for Kilburn Square and Windmill Court.

 

Also on this particular list (there are others) for “conversion” is Rokesby Place. Regular readers may remember that I have been challenging the action by Brent’s Planning Officers in secretly changing the tenure for those two new 4-bedroom Council houses from Social Rent to the more expensive LAR. Now the Report to Cabinet wants to change things again, and either sell off one of the houses, or transfer it to i4B, to be let out at OMR! 

 

The Rokesby Place  planning application was pushed through, against the wishes of existing residents, on the grounds that the Council had to use any “spare” land on its estates to build genuinely affordable homes for local people in housing need. Now one of the two houses won’t be, despite the Report’s empty words: ‘Large family sized homes at low rent remain a priority for the Council.’

 

 
The Update Report’s section on the Council’s Wembley Housing Zone.

 

Another housing “battle” I’ve been having with Brent, for the past 15 months, is to try to get more genuinely affordable Council homes at their Cecil Avenue development. It’s a vacant, Council-owned site which has had full planning permission for 250 new homes since February 2021. The Report says that since Cabinet approved the project in August 2021, ‘officers have advanced competitive procurement of a delivery partner.’ When there are 250 homes which could be for Brent residents in urgent housing need, that’s very slow progress!

 

The delay has been even longer, because Officers carried out a “soft market testing” exercise in April 2021 (which was so soft that it guaranteed the result they wanted, to justify their recommendations to Cabinet). They could have started the project last year, when the cost of borrowing to build the homes (152 for the “developer partner” to sell for profit, 61 as intermediate housing - SO or OMR – and only 37 for LAR!) would have been much lower. What further cuts to the affordable housing in the Wembley Housing Zone are hidden in ‘(Exempt) Appendix 3’, which the public will never be allowed to see?

 

 Now, quickly, here are two more recommendations to Monday’s meeting from the Report: 

 

 

What are Modern Methods of Construction (“MMC”)? I would suggest you read a blog article on “Airspace” which Martin published in October last year. ‘A minimum of 25% of all homes’ out of the 700 the latest round of GLA funding will almost certainly include Gauntlett Court in Sudbury, and probably Campbell Court and Elvin Court in Kingsbury. Has there been any genuine consultation with residents of those Council estates yet?

 

 

 

 

The Report is recommending “conversion” of LAR homes the Council proposes to build to SO, when it has no evidence that there is any demand for them! There are already a large number of shared ownership homes built by, or in the pipeline from, private developers on big schemes in Wembley and elsewhere. Those developers are forced to provide a proportion of affordable homes as part of their plans, and they make as much of it as possible shared ownership, because that is recognised for planning purposes as “affordable housing”, even though it is unaffordable to most people in housing need in Brent.

 

There was an interesting Q&A on Council housing, and shared ownership, as part of consideration of Brent’s Draft Borough Plan 2023-2027, at the Resources and Public Realm Scrutiny Committee meeting on Tuesday, 8 November. I’ll end this post with a transcript (from the webcast recording - at around 2hrs 5mins in!) of that exchange. 

 

Cllr. Anton Georgiou (“AG”): Just for complete clarity for the committee, what does Brent Council define as a Council home? Most people define a Council home as being a property owned by the Council that is let at Social Rent.

 

Carolyn Downs, Chief Executive (“CD”): That is what we do as well.

 

AG: From documents that I’ve read, it seems that Brent have extended this to include Shared Ownership, London Affordable Rent, temporary accommodation and assisted living.  

 

CD: Absolutely not. When we talk about one thousand general new Council homes they are Council homes. It is Council housing.

 

 

AG: This isn’t Shared Ownership?

 

CD: We have not ever built a single Shared Ownership. Developers might, we the Council haven’t.

 

Shout from an unidentified person: Not genuinely affordable!

 

Cllr.Muhammed Butt, Council Leader:  Apologies. What you just said there, right, comes under the broad banner of affordable homes, right, but we do actually build Council homes.

 

Cllr. Rita Conneely, Chair: So, I’m going to draw this item to a close.

 

You can make up your own mind, from what was said at that meeting and from the Report, how committed Brent Council are to their promise of ‘genuinely affordable housing for families in Brent’. 

 

My own “Update on the supply of New Affordable Homes”? Far fewer than were promised ahead of last May’s local elections!

 

Philip Grant.

 

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.