Mark Twain House: Brent needs 'mental food'

Dear Secretary Hunt, Minister Vaizey and Brent Council Members, 

Good morning!  I would like to grab a moment of your time and some brief attention as you hurriedly prepare for the arrival of the Olympians this Summer.  Stateside, we are all very excited to see how you celebrate this monumental event!  There is great anticipation for the Olympics as it is a wonderful opportunity for the world to come together in the spirit of competition and excellence.  It is, of course, also an opportunity for you to showcase the assets of your great city.

One of the assets of any city, any culture or any society great is its repository of knowledge.  Mark Twain, the man we honor here at his home in Hartford, CT, USA, knew this when he said:

“A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.”

The one thing Twain might not have anticipated a library having to survive is our current economy.  Another of his wonderful quotes:

“The lack of money is the root of all evil.”

I understand, due to tight budget constraints, you have had to close or are considering closure of several libraries in the Brent borough of London.  This may seem necessary to bring shortfalls in budget in line.  Being an American, I may not know the difference between a chip and a crisp or a loo and a lift, but I do know that closing a library is an Olympian decision where everyone loses.  We all know that libraries are important, vital and essential to the livelihood of a community, especially a financially challenged one. 

In 1900, Mark Twain on a visit to Dollis Hill attended the opening and dedication of your historic Kensal Rise Library.  It is dismaying to hear of its closure, but the reason is not so surprising.  Twain, in a way, anticipated it at its opening:

“If the community is anxious to have a reading-room it would put its hand in its pocket and bring out the penny tax.  I think it a proof of the healthy, moral, financial, and mental condition of the community if it taxes itself for its mental food.”

I would heartily encourage you in your decision-making roles to reconsider the closure of libraries and find the means to reopen ones like Kensal Rise that may have already found themselves on the chopping block.  

What you are losing in a library cannot be replaced in a community.  You are leaving a legacy, much as Twain left a legacy of 5 books when he helped dedicate Kensal Rise’s library.  I pledge, on behalf of The Mark Twain House & Museum, to personally come over to Kensal Rise with another 5 books to donate at the rededication of this irreplaceable institution.  

Looking at the Brent Council website, I can see that you are all incredibly attractive.  On top of that, you are incredibly diverse.  I hope that in your diversity you can find unity of purpose to make sure that you nourish your community with, as Twain called it, “mental food.”

I wish you the best with your Olympic preparations and hope you can clear the hurdles to return your libraries to full operations.

Sincerely,

Jacques Lamarre

Director of Communications

The Mark Twain House & Museum

351 Farmington Avenue

Hartford, CT 06105

Kilburn celebrates despite the rain and tennis

Despite grey skies, sudden heavy rain showers and a tennis match on the other side of London, Kilburn came out to celebrate yesterday at the Kilburn Festival.

Tara Brady, senior reporter at the Kilburn Times (pictured), was there with colleagues, once again in solidarity with the local community. This time the paper supported people as they battled with rain and mud, rather than the usual struggles over cuts and closures.

It was good to see all ages and ethnicities coming together, epitomised by communal dancing drawn from Brent's many cultures, and sad to reflect that following cuts in the Festivals' budget there are fewer such opportunities now.

New Wembley Plan sets out future development

The new Wembley Action Plan will be discussed at the Brent Executive on Monday July 16th. The document is large and highly detailed and the key policies have been modified in the light of consultation to which Brent Green Party contributed.

The plan covers new housing, education and health facilities as well as open space. The definition of 'affordable housing' as being 80% of market rents, still puts such housing out of reach of many local people on low incomes, particularly in the light of the housing benefit cap.  The plans include a new primary school and a new community swimming pool in the area and there is a cap of 20% of total housing on the provision of student accommodation.

There is a welcome section on climate change and  open spaces. A possible pedestrian bridge over the railway line that would link Chalkhill with the Wembley regeneration area is an interesting proposal.

The full report is available on the Brent Council website but the preferred options are summarised below:

The following are a summary of the key policies in the Plan by topic. There are also a

number of major site proposals which provide further detailed guidance for developers on individual sites.

Urban Design & Placemaking

• Character & Urban Form - Development should seek to reinforce and emphasise the distinctive character of each locality

• A Legible Wembley - The council will continue to focus of the three stations as the principle gateways into the Wembley area, whilst the enhancement of nodes around key junctions will be sought

• Public Art - Contributions towards public art will be sought from development within the area, particularly at key gateways or where new open spaces are proposed

• Tall Buildings - will be acceptable only in a limited number of locations within the Wembley area. These are shown in the Plan. A number of views to the stadium will be protected

• Olympic Way - Development must be carefully designed and scaled to respect the predominance of Wembley Stadium and its arch.

Business, Industry & Waste

• Strategic Industrial Locations (SIL) - de-designation of relatively small areas of land including on South Way (temp. Stadium car park) and the Euro Car

• Wembley Stadium Business Park - area reduced in size with waste management limited to east of the area

• Offices - Purpose-built offices promoted in area close to Wembley Park station Town Centres, Shopping, Leisure And Tourism

• Town centre boundary - defined for area extending from Forty Lane to Ealing Road

• Sequential approach to development - is emphasised, with large foodstore directed to High Road location, preferably Brent House site.

• Large-scale leisure/tourism/cultural development – is appropriate east of Olympic Way

• Hot-food takeaways - No more within 400m of a school entrance and no morethan 7% in any stretch of primary or secondary frontage (currently 7% in Wembley as a whole).

• Vacant sites or buildings - promoted for occupation by temporary, creative uses.

Transport

• Improved access - for public transport, pedestrians and cyclists, particularly along the Wembley Hill Road / Forty Lane corridor.

• Improved highway access - for car travel from the North Circular by improving the Stadium Access Corridor (via Great Central Way / South Way) and the Western Access Corridor (via Fifth Way / Fulton Way). Land take required for a number of improvements.

• Buses - incrementally provide improved penetration of the masterplan area by buses as development is built out.

• Car parking - encourage car parking in locations on the edge of the town centre. Parking standards to be tighter to facilitate level of development proposed.

• Through traffic - package of measures to discourage through traffic on Wembley High Road.

• Pedestrian access – to be improved between the Masterplan area and High Road.

• Coach parking for stadium- criteria based approach for locations including within 960 metres. 

Housing

• Affordable Rent at up to 80% of market rent, including service charges and determined with regard to local incomes and house prices.

• Family Housing – at least 25% of new homes in Wembley should be family sized.

• Supported Housing – Existing supported housing protected. Extra care housing sought on sites where development is primarily residential, where residential amenity is good and where it is near to open space.

• Private Rented Sector – high quality, purpose-built, private sector rented accommodation will be encouraged through a flexible approach to the proportion of affordable housing and unit size mix.

• Student Accommodation – will form part of major mixed use development but will be capped at 20% of the projected increase in population 

Social Infrastructure

• Primary Schools - Provision of school land on the Wembley Industrial Park site

- identified in Site Specific Allocation. A further (minimum) two form entry school in the vicinity of the town centre.

• Secondary Schools - Contributions towards secondary provision will also be sought through CIL

• GP/Dentists provision - where other local capacity (e.g. Chalkhill Health Centre) is used up-long term provision as population grows

• Community Halls - provision as provided in the NW Lands (i.e. smaller areas at no rent) and use this as a basis of achieving space across the masterplan area

• Creative workspace - Cross reference to the created in NW Lands application & intention to provide more low cost creative workspace in mixed used developments across the area

• Sports and play infrastructure - Cross reference to that may sit in open space and housing chapters

• Temporary uses - reference to provision of meanwhile and temporary uses that will provide opportunities for social interaction

Climate Change

• Decentralised Energy - major developments will be expected to connect to, or contribute to, the Decentralised Energy System where feasible. Developments completed before the energy centre should be designed for future connection

• Energy from Waste - major energy from waste facilities will be allowed only east of Fourth Way. Smaller scale proposals to recover energy from waste generated locally will be supported subject to impact assessments

• Greening Wembley - development proposals must incorporate urban greening including green roofs, green walls, trees and soft landscaping

• Flooding – proposals within Flood Risk Zones must not reduce floodplain storage or increase maximum flood levels. All major proposals will be required to apply Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems

Open Space, Sports and Wildlife

• Open Space Provision - require a new park of 1.2ha adjacent to Engineers Way, orientated E-W and 3 parks of 0.4 ha. Support enhancement and improvements e.g. a new pedestrian bridge link across Met. /Jubilee lines to Chalkhill Open Space

• Food Growing - require major new residential development to provide space for food growing and encourage the use of vacant spaces for temporary food growing

• Sports Facilities - use development contributions to improve the provision of sports facilities and the council will make new or upgraded sports facilities available for community use out of school hours

• River Brent and Wealdstone Brook – adj. development sites to undertake opportunities to provide amenity space, biodiversity improvements and semi-naturalisation of Wealdstone Brook

Harlesden Area Consultative Forum Postponed

Brent Council has announced that the Harlesden Area Consultative Forum planned for Tuesday 10 July 2012, has been postponed and will be re-scheduled for a future date towards the end of July.

Harlesden is the area where the closure of Central Middlesex Hospital Accident and Emergency Department is particularly controversial.

Barclays 'a proud British institution'- Boris Johnson

Brent's unaffordable rents - have your say

Click on image to enlarge

Darren Johnson, Green Party Member of the London Assembly, has published an interactive website LINK which demonstrates the difficulty of finding a home at an affordable rent across the London boroughs.

An affordable  rent is defined as one which takes up no more than 35% of take-home pay after tax. Based on a working week of 48 hours (the maximum allowed under the Working Time Directive) spread over five days of 9.6hr shifts, you should have earned enough to pay the rent at the end of Tuesday.

In the London Borough of Brent you would have to work until the end of Wednesday on the National Minimum wage for 18-20 year olds (£4.98 an hour) to rent a room in a shared home. However, on the London Living Wage (£8.30/hr) supported by the Green Party, you could afford this by the end of Tuesday.

For an adult on the National Minimum wage needing a 2 bedroomed home, it is just not possible even if all the wages went on rent. If they were paid the London Living Wage they would not have earned enough to pay the rent until the end of Friday i.e. 'extremely unaffordable'.

Currently these unaffordable rents are topped up through housing benefit, the Local Housing Allowance, but these are now being capped and cut, making it more difficult to find affordable homes to rent when with a job and benefits.

Go to the website for more details and to feed back your views on the issue to Darren Johnson

Bank robbery

Governors feel marginalised in school improvement changes

School governors meeting to discuss the future of  Brent Council's services to schools expressed some disquiet at being left out of discussion of the Primary Headteachers' Group proposal  that, outside core statutory services,  the local authority should opt out of providing traded services. This would mean schools providing the services to each other or buying them in from the private or voluntary sector.

The local authority has proposed that it provides 'Targeted Intervention' (Option B from 3 possibilities) with a staffing of 19 posts and a budget of £1.5m..  This new core service plus would include support to schools in a Ofsted category (special measures, notice to improve etc) and those 'stuck at satisfactory' as well as providing an overview of SEN provision, quality of provision and assessment in the Early Years, 14-19 education, pre-exclusion intervention, attendance compliance and targeted intervention and data collection and analysis. This new core service would run from April 2013.

The benchmarking data on school improvement expenditure shows how this has been cut back in comparison with other local authorities, although those authorities may also be much lower next year:

Local Authority	Number of Schools	Stated spend 2012-13	Stated spend per school
Harrow	61	£1.2m	£19.7k
Camden	64	£1.0m	£15.6k
Wandsworth	81	£1.1m	£13.6k
Brent (Option B)	78	£485k	£6.2k

Although governors were concerned about the low  spend, we were told that the council was confident that this is sufficient  to maintain the service. I am still doubtful.

At the same time services funded by the Direct Schools Grant (DSG) are under review. These include support for English and Mathematics in primary schools £370k; special educational needs and inclusive education £163k; ethnic minority achievement £589k;  Travellers, refugees and asylum seekers £166k;  Early Years SEN £167k; and Early  Years quality improvement £577k. The latter two also include the voluntary, private and independent sector. These will be reviewed in October 2012 by the Schools Forum and some may be discontinued with the money reverting to schools.

Governors were concerned that all this may lead to a reduction in the quality of teaching and learning in Brent schools. Cllr Helga Gladbaun made a passionate intervention about the danger of Brent, now achieving well in terms of national comparisons, going back to the bad old days when children crossed council boundaries to seek education in neighbouring boroughs because our schools were so poor.

John Simpson, the consultant who ran the session, said that Brent Council had made their calculations on the assumption (not the expectation) that all secondary schools and half of primary schools would become academies. They could still run Option B based on this scenario and could run the minimum statutory service of Option A if all schools opted out. The local authority would still be responsible as the 'champion of parents' and pupils' interests'.

In answer to a question he said this also applied to academies and although they had funding to compensate for lost council services, the local authorty would still have to fund any intervention required if the academy was failing.

There were many concerns about the consortium school support services proposed by the primary headteachers (although the course was advertised as having a primary headteacher  as a co-tutor, they were not present at the morning session). Concern centred around the lack of quality assurance, the lack of consultation with governors, whether the expertise existed within the schools to provide the service, the contradiction between the market environment of schools where they compete with each other and the cooperative framework required, how schools with major needs would pay for the service, and the impact on the workload of  headteachers of small schools when they would have to spend time on making these support arrangements. One contributor thought it would be a mess and if schools fell apart there would be no one available to pick up the pieces.

If schools work in partnership with the local authority the Civic Centre will provide space for teacher in-service education and training. If schools are completely autonomous they will have to provide their own training and venues.

Although we were initially told that there was plenty of time to consider these issues it became clear that with the DSG services review in October 2012 and  the results announced in November 2012, and the new Core Service to be launched in April 2013 (based at the Civic Centre from July 2013), there would really be little time for governors to consider all the implications.

In the light of these changes there was some support for re-launching an Association of Brent School Governors as a way of empowering governors.  John Simpson concluded by stating that the local authority would take note of governors' concerns but this left the question hanging over how they would influence the primary headteachers' proposals.  A start will be to ask challenging questions at governing body meetings about the proposals and insist on the strategic role of governors.