Wembley Housing Zone – Brent’s “soft market testing” with developers including Higgins. Full and honest answers needed

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

Diagrammatic view of Brent’s proposed Cecil Avenue development.

 

It is more than four months since I first raised questions about Brent Council’s proposals for the Cecil Avenue site in its Wembley Housing Zone scheme. Brent has an urgent need for genuinely affordable Council homes. This is Council-owned land, and the Council has had full planning permission for it since February 2021. Why was it proposing that 152 of the 250 homes on this site should be for a private developer to sell for profit?

 

I got no answers from the Cabinet members or Council Officers that I asked to explain this “preferred option” (which Brent’s Cabinet approved on 16 August). In order to force them to say something on this matter, I asked a Public Question for November’s Full Council meeting. The written reply I received from Cllr. Shama Tatler before the meeting sidestepped the main points of my question.

 

A supplementary question was asked, on my behalf, at the Full Council meeting on 22 November, but the Lead Member for Regeneration was not there to answer it. I eventually received a written reply, but again the key points in it were not answered by Cllr.Tatler (or the Council Officer who composed the reply on her behalf).

 

As well as the lack of genuinely affordable housing in the Council’s scheme, I was troubled as to why Brent was involving a private developer in what should have been a solely Council housing project. In addition to preparing the supplementary question, I put in a Freedom of Information Act request for information about Brent’s “soft market testing” exercise in April 2021. I’ve now received the Council’s response, and you may well be interested to know what I have found out (and what Brent’s Officers still don’t want to disclose).

 

I learned that this “market testing” had taken place from this paragraph in the Wembley Housing Zone report to the 16 August 2021 Cabinet meeting:

 

'3.5.4 Soft market testing interviews with five developers undertaken April 2021 confirm general market appetite for new housing development opportunities, specific market appetite for Wembley as a location for private sales housing, the two planning schemes, preferred delivery approach for 50% affordable housing, procurement and contractual arrangements.'

 

But why were Brent’s Officers involving private developers in a Council scheme in the first place? An earlier paragraph in the report had said:

 

‘Cabinet Members were consulted in July 2020 and indicated a preferred delivery option for the Cecil Avenue site, namely that the Council finance construction, retain the affordable housing, and procure a developer partner to build out and take the private sales housing ….’

 

I’ve checked the minutes of the July 2020 Cabinet meeting, but I found nothing to substantiate that statement. If Cabinet members were consulted, it must have been “off record”, so who were they? Almost certainly the Lead Member for Regeneration, probably the Council Leader also, and possibly the Deputy Leader and / or Lead Member for Housing. Any of those who were not consulted are welcome to let me know.

 

Some of Cabinet’s “likely suspects” for Brent’s Cecil Avenue scheme.

 

So, what did I find out about the Council’s “soft market testing”, as part of its efforts to ‘procure a development partner’ for the Wembley Housing Zone? Here is the first question I asked, with the reply I received in red:

 

1) What were the names of the five developers who were interviewed?

 

                    Anthology, Higgins, London Square, Lovell and United Living.

 

 

Anyone who has read the Wembley Matters coverage on Granville New Homes and the Ridge Report will be as surprised as I was to see “Higgins” included on the list! They seem to crop up on a number of Brent Council schemes over recent years, almost as if they were a favoured contractor. The only excuse for them being invited to take part in this exercise is that it might have taken place a week or two before Council Officers were aware of the contents of the Ridge Report, including that:

 

 

‘Since taking handover of the buildings, from the original developer Higgins construction, problems with water ingress from the external envelope have been noted.’   and:

‘The external envelopes on these buildings have been constructed from relatively inexpensive materials and there is evidence of poor-quality workmanship.’

 

 

Higgins Homes is a client of Terrapin Communications, who have cropped up over local planning and development issues on “Wembley Matters” before. Back in 2017, Terrapin treated Cllrs Muhammed Butt and Shama Tatler to a three course dinner, where they met a number of the PR company’s developer clients. Those clients included London Square, who are building a scheme at Neasden Lane, with Clarion Housing.

 

 

Anthology are the company behind the Wembley Parade development at North End Road, Wembley Park, while one of United Living’s current schemes is with Network Homes in South Kilburn. Lovell are big nationwide housebuilders, but their only project in London at the moment is in Woolwich.

 

 

Why were these developers chosen for this “soft market testing”, and who chose them? Those were the points I raised in my next two FoI questions (with the Council’s replies in red):

 

2) What method or process was used by Brent Council to choose which developers to interview for this "soft market testing" exercise?

 

The Head of Regeneration and Regeneration Manager selected developers for the WHZ soft market testing based on their knowledge and experience of the London property market, to obtain market intelligence to inform the proposed WHZ procurement; this is a standard approach taken in public procurement.

 

3) How many Council Officers, and how many elected members of the Council, were involved in choosing these developers? What positions within Brent Council did these Officers and elected members hold?

 

The Head of Regeneration and Regeneration Manager selected developers for the WHZ soft market testing. No elected members were involved in selecting developers for the WHZ soft market testing.

 

Now we get onto what Brent’s “soft market testing” actually involved:

 

4) How were the prospective interviewee developers for this exercise contacted to take part in these interviews? Please provide copies of the email, letter or other communication sent to the developers, and a copy of any information about the proposed Wembley Housing Zone developments provided to them in advance of the interviews.

 

Developers were contacted by telephone and emailed a diary invitation and an information pack in advance of the meeting, copy of which is included in this response (names are redacted as personal information exempt under s40(2) FOIA).

 

The email, sent 19 April 2021, was brief, and I will just include its main text here, but the ‘information pack’ is very informative, and I will ask Martin to attach a copy of that at the end of this article:

 

‘Hi …(redacted)…

Please find attached information pack which would be useful to review ahead of our meeting tomorrow, as it provides you with some further information about the schemes we will be discussing.

Look forward to seeing you then! Best,
……(redacted)……

Regeneration Project Manager.’

 

Final page of Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone “information pack” for developers, April 2021.

 

From the “Scheme Design” details for the Cecil Avenue site on page 2, it is clear that Council Officers (perhaps in consultation with a Lead Member?) had decided, well in advance of submitting proposals to Cabinet for a decision, that 152 of the 250 homes to be built on the former Copland School land would be for private sale, including 20 of the 64 family-sized homes. 

 

Although said to be an exercise ‘to obtain market intelligence to inform the proposed WHZ procurement’, this was clearly a very specific piece of “market testing”. This can be seen from the way the exercise was carried out, and the Council Officers involved in it:

 

5) How were the interviews actually conducted in practice (e.g. telephone, online meeting, face-to-face meeting, written questionnaire)? How many representatives of Brent Council took part in each interview, and what positions in the Council did each one hold?

 

All WHZ soft market testing sessions were held online and attended by the Regeneration Manager and a Procurement Officer. The Head of Regeneration, a Senior Lawyer, and a Regeneration Officer also attended some sessions.

 

If a Senior Brent Council Lawyer was involved in some of the sessions, it suggests that at least some of the prospective developers were getting quite serious about the chance of becoming Brent’s “development partner” for this Wembley Housing Zone scheme!

 

That was the last of my FoI questions that Brent (through its Head of Regeneration, Jonathan Kay) were prepared to disclose information on. I had asked for copies of the notes of the five interviews, and was not surprised that these were refused, as being confidential and commercially sensitive. However, I was disappointed with the response to my final point:

 

7) If the person(s) who conducted the interviews produced a report summarising the results obtained, please let me have a copy of that report, and the position(s) at Brent Council of the person(s) to whom that report was addressed.

 

We consider the summary report from the WHZ soft market testing is confidential (s41 FOIA) and commercially sensitive (s43 FOIA) and therefore exempt from disclosure.

 

I won’t bore you with “chapter and verse” of Brent’s legal arguments over why they consider that Sections 41 and 43(2) of the Freedom of Information Act apply in this case. Nor will I bore you with my reasons why they don’t apply to much of the information in that summary report, but I have made my case and asked for an Internal Review of the refusal to supply a copy. 

 

Brent clearly doesn’t want me, or you, to know what was going on over its discussions with private developers in connection with its Cecil Avenue development. But why should those private developers be invited to make a profit from selling 152 homes on a Council scheme, that Brent residents urgently need? Will anyone at the Civic Centre give us a full and honest answer, and if not, why not?

 

Philip Grant.

 

 

Did you try the Wembley Christmas Picture Quiz? Here are the answers!

 Thank you to everyone who had a go at last weekend’s Wembley history picture quiz. It seemed to get quite a few people viewing it, and I hope you enjoyed it. 

 

Were there a few (or more?) of the pictures that you didn’t know the answers to? If that was the case, now is your chance to discover some new details about Wembley’s past. I’ve also included several “links”, that will provide more information, if you want it:-

 

 

If you were feeling competitive, you can now see how many of the twenty questions you got the right answers to.

There are no prizes, but if you want to publish your score (just to let others know how well, or badly, you did), you are welcome to add a comment below – only honest claims, please!

Philip Grant, 

Wembley History Society.

TfL funding extension secured until February 4th 2022 but long-term sustainable funding needed to avoid a managed decline in services thereafter

 Gary Nolan, Transport for London's Strategic Engagement Lead wrote to local councillors late last night to tell them that negotiations had produced a short-term extension of government funding.  This followed a major campaign by the London Mayor about the potential impact of a failure to agree funding that would include closing some underground lines and curtailing services.

We have today agreed a further short-term extension to our current funding agreement with the Government. The extension will continue to 4 February 2022 and will allow us to run services and meet all our contractual commitments until then. No new Government funding has been provided for borough funding and active travel during the extension period.

 

Funds already allocated from both the June settlement and the Government's Active Travel Fund are still available to continue the delivery of agreed projects, but we are unfortunately not able to allocate any new funding to boroughs during the extension period. I understand this is disappointing, however we are grateful for this support and, given the very short-term nature of this new funding extension, work must now continue to engage the Government in meaningful discussion on long-term sustained funding so that a hugely damaging period of managed decline can be avoided.

 

We are determined to play our full role in the next phase of pandemic and continue to support the capital as we have to date.

 

Surging Omicron rates: Sadiq Khan declares a 'Major Incident' in London

 

 From London Mayor's Office

 

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has today declared a ‘major incident’ due to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant across the capital.

 

The Mayor took the decision as the formal Chair of the London Resilience Forum following discussions with leaders from NHS London, local authorities and emergency and other essential services in the capital.

 

It comes as the number of COVID-19 cases in London has rapidly increased, with 65,525 new confirmed cases in the past seven days, and 26,418 cases reported in the last 24 hour period alone – the highest number since the start of the pandemic. In the last week, the number of COVID-19 patients in London hospitals has gone up 29 per cent.

 

The impact of rising case numbers is already being felt across the capital with staff absences in frontline services causing challenges. By declaring a major incident it will help authorities support each other to reduce service disruption and allow more time to administer booster vaccines, as we learn more about the severity of the variant and the impact it will have on the NHS.

 

A major incident is defined as an event or situation with a range of serious consequences which requires special arrangements to be implemented by one or more emergency responder agency. It is “beyond the scope of business-as-usual operations, and is likely to involve serious harm, damage, disruption or risk to human life or welfare, essential services, the environment or national security”.  In addition, “the severity of the consequences associated with a major incident are likely to constrain or complicate the ability of responders to resource and manage the incident”.

 

It means that coordination arrangements between key public services will be further stepped-up with the re-establishment of the Strategic Coordinating Group, which will have a Government representative enabling London to seek further support from government to address the pressures facing the city.

 

The Mayor previously declared a major incident on January 8 due to the rapid spread of COVID-19 and its impact on the NHS, but was able to stand it down on February 26 as case numbers fell.

 

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: 

 

The surge in cases of the Omicron variant across our capital is hugely concerning, so we are once again declaring a major incident because of the threat of COVID-19 to our city.

 

The Omicron variant has quickly become dominant with cases increasing rapidly and the number of patients in our hospitals with COVID-19 on the rise again. We are already feeling the impact across the capital and while we are still learning about this variant, it’s right that London’s key agencies work closely together to minimise the impact on our city, including helping to protect the vital vaccination programme.

 

We know that the vaccine offer our best defence against the virus. There are now more clinics in London delivering vaccines than at any point during the pandemic. I urge all Londoners to book their appointment or to go to one of the many walk-in centres across the capital as soon as you can.

 

Georgia Gould, Chair of London Councils, said: 

 

The rapid spread of Omicron across our city is of huge concern. Local councils have stepped up and played a vital role in supporting their communities through the pandemic, I know they will continue with these efforts but we cannot do this alone. Vaccines offer the best protection against the virus and now more than ever it’s important that Londoners take up the offer to get a booster as soon as possible. If you’ve not had your first and second dose yet, please do come forward and protect yourselves and others around you. Together we must do all we can to defeat this virus.

 

 

 

Ram Singh Nehra – a Wembley Indian in the 1930s – Part 3

 Philip Grant concludes his fascinating series on a pioneering Indian in Wembley

Thank you for joining me for this final part of Ram Singh Nehra’s story. If you missed Part 2, you can find it here. At the end of that episode, I asked: ‘Did Nehra stand for election to Parliament?’

 

Ram Singh Nehra in the 1930s. (Extract from a family photograph, courtesy of Tyrone Naylor)

 

I’ve not been able to find out whether Nehra was chosen as a possible Labour Party candidate for the Commons, but the records of by-elections from 1936 to 1938 make no mention of him. I wonder whether his view of British politicians would have changed, if he had been elected, from that in his report on Parliament’s consideration of the India Bill, in the autumn of 1935:

 

‘Politicians are wonderful people. Their power of speech knows no limits of any kind. They wield such magic through their words that listeners often wonder if the world is fast approaching its end or the millennium is just about to dawn. The press is usually an obedient mistress of the clever politicians. Very few English people know the real facts and circumstances in their proper prospective.’

 

There was some happy news for Nehra and his wife in June 1936, when their third child, Brian, was born (the birth again being recorded in the Hendon Registration District, which included Wembley). However, by 1938, Nehra was making the news for the wrong reasons. The headline on a report about him in January read: “SOLICITOR FINED £100” (which may not seem much now, but would be about six months’ starting salary for an ordinary local government employee then). 

 

A disciplinary committee, ‘sitting in public in the Court Room, Carey-street, London, W.C.’, had found him guilty of breaching the Solicitors’ Practice Rules. His crime? ‘That he had done or permitted in the carrying on of his practice acts and things which could reasonably be regarded as touting or advertising or as calculated to attract business unfairly.’ Solicitors were not allowed to advertise! Was this an advertisement, in his magazine: ‘If you have any just cause or grievance and have no medium of expression, write to the Editor of “The Indian”’?

 

  

Local newspaper cutting from April 1938. (Image from the internet)

 

A few months later, another newspaper report records that ‘Mr R. Nehra, of Chalk Hill Road, Wembley,’ had knocked down an elderly lady in Dartmouth Road, Willesden, with his car. I don’t know whether any action was taken against him following this accident, but by that time Nehra had other activities that he was pursuing.

 

I referred previously to Nehra writing that his hobbies were ‘building, books, journalism and social gatherings’. I’ve recently learned that he had “The Shalimar” built for him and his family on a plot of land he’d bought in Chalkhill Road, but I don’t know whether he did any other building in the Wembley area. In 1937, however, he bought a block of land on the coast near Eastbourne. Mr and Mrs Nehra became directors of Pevensey Beach Buildings Ltd, and their company began developing an estate of seaside bungalow homes on the East Sussex coast.

 

A Pevensey Beach Buildings Ltd compliments slip. (Courtesy of Tyrone Naylor)

 

The Martello Estate was on a block of land between the main coast road and the beach. Near the seaward end was a Martello Tower, one of 103 small round stone forts built along the south-east coast of England in the early 19^th century, to defend against a possible invasion by Napoleon’s French army. The company built two streets of bungalows there, between 1937 and 1939. At first, Nehra drove down from London a couple of times a week, to check on progress. Later, the family moved down to a rented home at Westham Drive, Pevensey Bay.

 

Nehra found himself in trouble again, and in December 1938 he was in court, defending his company against a prosecution brought by Hailsham Rural District Council. Hailsham Petty Sessions (the local magistrates) heard that the company had connected the drains from its estate to the local Council’s sewers. However, it had failed to notify the Council that it was doing so, or to provide plans showing what it proposed to do, so was in breach of the Public Health Act, 1936!

 

Headline from “The Sussex Agricultural Express”, 23 December 1938. (Image from the internet)

 

By 1939, the Nehra family moved to 3 Grenville Road (the street probably named after their oldest child) on the Martello Estate. In July 1939 their fourth child, Ruby, was born, and her birth was registered in the Hailsham District [although Pevensey Bay is some distance from the inland town of Hailsham itself, its Rural District stretched down to the coast]. The household, by this time, appears to have included a nanny, Emily Westgate from Hastings, and an under-nurse, Maureen Pickett from St Leonards-on-Sea.

 

Martello Estate bungalows in Grenville Road, Pevensey Bay. (Image from Google Streetview)

 

In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, Britain declared war on Germany, and the Second World War broke out. The following January, the Nehra family sailed from England for India, and their nanny, Miss Westgate, went with them. They travelled First Class, arriving in Bombay (Mumbai) the following month. Nehra had hoped that he could be reconciled with his family, who had disowned him when he married a woman who was white, and not a Hindu. But when he called on them with Myfanwy, they were not even allowed into the house.

 

Luckily, Nehra did have friends in India, and he and his family were offered the use of a wing in a palace, in the Himalayan “hill station” resort of Mussoorie, for as long as needed. Myfanwy wrote about this in a letter from Lucknow to her twin sister, Kathleen (“Kit”), in March 1940:-

 

Opening page of Myfanwy Nehra’s letter to her sister, 24 March 1940. (Courtesy of Tyrone Naylor)

 

The letter said that they would have to travel ‘the last few miles by rickshaw’. Writing again ten days later, from the Dilaram Palace in Camel’s Back Road, she told her sister: 

 

‘We are 7000 feet above sea level and 6000 of it all up one mountain. How they made the road I don't know. It's swerves round and round – the most fearful hairpin bends - just a narrow road & ravines straight down. I shut my eyes half the time - beautifully green – trees etc. - Then rice growing, other parts wild. Not a bit flat just climbing all the time, round and round. As we turned round some bends one could see all our cavalcade - about 30 coolies with trunks and boxes on their backs…. [and] five or six men pushing each rickshaw.’

 

Myfanwy, Ram, Grenville and Sheila, with Palace servants and coolies. (Courtesy of Tyrone Naylor)

 

Despite the idyllic surroundings, Myfanwy reported that she had not felt well. We’ve seen before that, in 1935, Nehra had referred to ‘my wife’s serious illness’. After just a few months in Mussoorie, the family moved to New Delhi, for better medical facilities, but on 29 September 1940 Myfanwy Nehra died from breast cancer, in the Lady Irwin Hospital.

 

His wife’s death, and the collapse of his solicitor business in London (in the hands of an employee who proved untrustworthy), left Ram depressed and without an income. Emily the nanny and his teenage son Grenville rallied round, and for the rest of the war the family ran a succession of hotels for British soldiers on leave, in various cities including Gwalior, Old Dehli and Srinigar. As soon as they could, after the Japanese surrender had brought the war in the east to an end, they returned to England, only this time sailing Third Class.

 

By October 1945, Nehra was back in England, and sold his detached house in Chalkhill Road to clear his debts. He already knew that the bungalow at 3 Grenville Road had been repossessed by the Halifax Building Society during the war, but he went down to Pevensey Bay, to sort out matters there. 

 

Not long after the Nehra’s had left for India, the beach and the tower at the edge of it, had been declared a prohibited area, and fenced off with barbed wire. Britain feared that this stretch of coast might be where a German invasion landed, with good reason. A mile to the east was Norman’s Bay, where William the Conqueror’s army landed in 1066. The Romans had built a “Saxon Shore” fort (now Pevensey Castle, with wonderfully intact walls), to protect their British province from invaders, and the Martello Tower itself was built for fear of a Napoleonic attack.

 

Aerial view of the Martello Estate, from the sea. (Image from Google maps)

 

Nehra had arranged for some friends, Mr and Mrs Wilson, who’d bought a home in Grenville Road, to look after the furniture from his bungalow, and other materials and plant belonging to his building company, which had been stored in the Martello Tower. After the war, some had been sold, but they could not account for the proceeds, or what had happened to the rest. This led to the Wilsons being prosecuted, although they were acquitted by the local magistrates.

 

Cutting from the “Eastbourne Herald”, 2 November 1946. (Image from the internet)

 

The newspaper report of the case said that Nehra lived at 3 Grenville Road, ‘and also at Preston-road Wembley’. The 1948/49 Curley’s Directory shows his address as 121 Preston Road, and I’ve now learned that this was the Nehra family’s first home in Wembley, when they arrived back from Kenya. Ram Singh Nehra had bought the recently-built semi-detached house around 1929, and named it “Mombasa”. It was rented out when they moved “upmarket” several years later, but it became their home again after the war.

 

L to R: daughter-in-law Betty, Ram and Emily, their daughter Julia and her friend Elizabeth, outside 121 Preston Road, early 1960s. (Courtesy of Tyrone Naylor)

 

This article was about ‘a Wembley Indian in the 1930s’, but Nehra’s story here continued into the 1940s and beyond. In 1947, he married his children’s former nanny, Emily Louisa Westgate, and they had a daughter, Julia, in 1949. He went back to work as a solicitor, specialising in criminal cases at the Old Bailey. He also continued his interest in causes he’d championed in the 1930s:

 

Headed notepaper of the Coloured People’s Aid Society, c.1960. (Courtesy of Tyrone Naylor)

 

121 Preston Road was Nehra’s home for the rest of his life, and he died there, ‘peacefully, after a short illness’, on 29 June 1965. This story began with a garden party at “The Shalimar”, and the home which Nehra had built for his family in the early 1930s also came to a sad end at around the same time. 43 Chalkhill Road was one of the many houses which the new Brent Council compulsorily purchased, in order to build its Chalkhill Estate (1 to 41, numbered from Blackbird Hill, were spared!). Einstein House now stands on its site.

 

Chalkhill Road demolition, c.1966, and Einstein House now. (Brent Archives / Google Streetview)

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about Ram Singh Nehra. His story not only tells us about the 1930s, through the eyes of an Indian gentleman, but also raises some thought-provoking points which are still relevant today. If you have any comments, or any further information (perhaps you knew Julia Nehra at Preston Manor School in the 1960s?), please add them below.

 

Philip Grant*, Wembley History Society, December 2021.

 

* Although I’m the one who has written this article (and any errors are mine), it would not have happened without the initial enquiry from Winston, and some excellent online research by my Wembley History Society colleagues, Christine and Malcolm, to help answer it. Further details about the family came from Myfanwy’s great-nephew, Arthur, and more recently from Ram’s grandson, Tyrone, and I’m grateful to them both for their contributions. Local history societies in Hailsham and Pevensey & Westham also kindly answered some queries from me.