What's happening with Brent's 2013-14 budget?

Brent Expenditure and Income 2012-13

The Council Budget for 2013-14 should be on the agenda for the Full Council Meeting on November 19th according to the Council's budgetary process:

There is a Full Council meeting (usually in November) where the budget is raised as an issue. All Councillors of all political groups are invited to submit ideas, plans and suggestions for inclusion in the next year's budget. These suggestions are then taken away and discussed by the Executive (usually in December).

The Executive will then issue their proposals for the budget.

At the same time Scrutiny's Budget Panel is sitting and they also come up with their proposals by February. The report is considered by the Executive and, if required, changes are made to the proposals.

Finally, the proposals go to another Full Council meeting where they are voted on, and, whatever is agreed, is implemented as the council's budget for the next year.

However, there are reports that the Council is behind with the process this year perhaps as a result of changes in the officer and councillors involved in Finance.  By the second week in November last year Cllr Ann John had issued a 'Bad News' budget report LINK.

Is is likely that we will receive an 'Even More Bad News' report from Muhammed Butt soon. There has been no word from Cllr Ruth Moher, now Lead Member for Finance and Resources who took over the post from Butt following the 'coup'.

Meanwhile the Budget Overview and Scrutiny Committee on Thursday 15th November may give us some clues. What is beyond doubt is that with government grants reduced and pressures on council spending from homelessness and social care of the elderly the situation will be dire. Apart from the potential revenue from a rise in Council Tax (a tiny proportion of the overall budget which is mainly made up of government grants) there are few options open to the Council apart from making more cuts which will impact on the vulnerable, or taking a stand against the Coalition and devising a campaigning needs led budget and a consequent deficit budget.  

This would involve a real dialogue with trades unions, voluntary organisations, community groups, campaigning groups and residents. Time is limited and such  process should begin as soon as possible.

Background is provided by the mid-year Brent Treasury Report by Mick Bowden, Deputy Director of Finance. The Director of Finance, Clive Heaphy remains suspended and there is no word on the financial settlement for Gareth Daniel, the former Chief Executive.

The Report outlines theCapital Finance Requirement (CFR) requirements for the years ahead with a significant  increase next year:
 

	31/03/12 Actual	31/03/2013 Estimate	31/03/2014 Estimate	31/03/2015 Estimate
CFR	£537m	£598m	£594m	£591m

 At the same time there is a significant  forecast reduction in 'usable' reserves:

	31/03/2012 Actual	31/03/2013 Estimate	31/03/2014 Estimate	31/03/2015 Estimate
Usable Reserves	£58m	£37m	£30m	£24m

There has been a shift from short-term to long-term borrowing which remains under the limits set out by the Department for Communities and Local Government. An additional £20m has been borrowed since April 2012 and a rise in the rate of interest:

Borrowing	Balance on 01/04/2012	Debt Repaid	New Borrowing	Balance on 30/09/2012
Short-term	£26.3m	£44.3m	£18m	0
Long-Term	£405.5m	£1.2m	£20m	£424.3
Total	£431.8m	£45.5m	£38m	£424.3
Average Rate %	4.45%			4.71%

The Report states that the Council expects to recover £4m of the £5m inested in Icelandic domiciled banks and £9m of the £10m invested in non-Iceland domiciled banks. The Council's investment income this year is estimated at only £0.1m .

The full Mid Year Report is available HERE



 

Join the Trust and help enhance Chalkhill's future

A notification from the Chalklhill Community Trust:

During the regeneration of Chalkhill Estate  over £1.4 Million was raised through land sales intended to ensure the continued development of Chalkhill. This fund has since been managed by a board of trustees, including community representatives. We are now seeking to bring 3 new trustees on board, 2 representing the local community and 1 representing local business. In this role you will be able to influence where and how this money is being invested, as well as steer the Trust’s policy on the management of the fund.

The successful applicants will receive formal trustee training, but will need some of the following attributes:

- Be committed to the Chalkhill Community Trust Fund and its objectives.
- Have the ability to remain impartial when making decisions, not allowing your personal views or prejudice to affect your conduct as a trustee.
- Have an open mind when seeking solutions.
- Be able to attend at least 4 meetings per year during office hours, as well as any additional meetings as required by the Trust.
- Either live within, or run a business local to, the area of benefit of the Chalkhill Community Trust Fund.
- Be committed and dedicated to further the aims of the charity.
- Have a strategic vision and be able to contribute to the continuance of the Chalkhill Community Trust Fund and its future success.
- Have good, independent judgement so as not to compromise the proper management of the organisation and/or adversely affect the reputation of the Chalkhill Community Trust Fund.
- Have an understanding and acceptance of the legal duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a trustee.
- Be able to demonstrate an ability to act with integrity, objectivity, openness and honesty.
- Have the ability to keep certain matters confidential.

Closing date November 20th. Application pack HERE

THE ECONOMY FOR THE 99% - SHARE IDEAS & TOOLS TO MAKE IT HAPPEN

The Million Climate Jobs is an international campaign (South Africa campaign)

The Alliance for Jobs and Climate have been working closely with Camden Green Party and the Transition Movement in Camden and are organising a great all-day event on Saturday the 24^th of November at Camden Town Hall. “THE ECONOMY FOR THE 99% - SHARE IDEAS & TOOLS TO MAKE IT HAPPEN”. Ticket sales for the event can now be booked online. The web address is http://economy-99-percent-camden.eventbrite.co.uk and you can see further details there.

Speakers include the environmentalist and green economist Charles Secrett, the new leader of the Green Party  Natalie Bennett, George Barda from the Occupy and the Shift campaign and Chris Baugh (tbc) from PCS and the Million Climate Jobs campaign. We have organised this meeting at really short notice but as it was possible, and similar meetings in other parts of the country have shown that there is a real hunger, we have decided to go for it.

PLEASE PUBLICISE  AS WIDELY AS POSSIBLE USING EVERY NETWORK THAT YOU CAN THINK OF.

If you can make it buy a ticket. We are also planning  to organise similar events elsewhere and if you are interested let us know; best to email alliance@jobsandclimate.org    


More on the South African Campaign and downloadable booklets HERE

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Kensal Rise Library sell-off 'a breach of faith' by All Souls College

The Trustees of the Friends of Kensal Rise Library  have written to the Warden and Fellows of  All Souls College LINK asking them not to proceed with the sale of the library building to property developers.

The Trustees set out in detail why they think they have been  'misled by the College, and in particular
the Bursar, Mr. Thomas Seaman', as to the College's intentions in relation to Kensal Rise Library'.

They set out the inadequacy of the proposal to charge the Friends of Kensal Rise a market rent for a much reduced space. They descibe as 'cavalier' the Bursar's statement that if FKRL did not want to run the library the College would find someone else who would.

They go on to say:

While the College is not responsible for the folly of the Brent Council officers and councillors who caused the library to be returned to the College, we had hoped for a resolution that would advance our mutual charitable purposes in a more meaningful and sustainable manner.

Moreover, we represent a larger community that sees the College’s current proposal as nothing short of a breach of faith with this relatively poor area of north-west London, from which it has already profited handsomely. Although the College donated the land, the library building from which the College and Mr Gillick (the developer) now seek to profit was not paid for by the College, but by public subscription and a donation from Andrew Carnegie, the philanthropist.

How to Fight Climate Change & Rebuild a Stricken City

This guest blog from Chris Williams puts the news from the US in a wider context:

Despite the fact that New Yorkers live on several different islands, straddling the mouth of a great tidal river, on the edge of a storm-tossed ocean, city transit workers rightly pride themselves on their ability to effectively and safely transport New York’s seven million inhabitants, 75% of whom do not own a car, day in, day out, 24/7.
 
However, personally, I’ve always maintained that the single best way to get around my adopted city is by bike.  While my two-wheeled personal chariot isn’t for everyone – and, as winter draws near, often not for me, it nevertheless offers one of the quickest, if not necessarily the safest, ways to navigate the concrete and steel canyons of New York City. 
 
When some of those canyons are newly formed waterways, obstructed by the occasional upturned house, subway stations are cavernous underground swimming pools and transit tunnels connecting the outer boroughs and Long Island to Manhattan have been converted into mile-long gigantic electro-chemical cells made from millions of gallons of sea water and ample amounts of corroding metals, getting around by bike suddenly becomes the only viable way of efficiently plotting a route through this tortured city, ripped asunder by Frankenstorm Sandy. 
 
The dislocation of this intricate web of interconnected arteries of communication and travel, along with hundreds of thousands of people still without power and thousands no longer with homes, has brought the city to its knees.  Normally crackling with energy and throbbing with life, biking through a desolate, darkened and almost deserted Downtown, where huge slices of lower Manhattan are still without power, is eerily reminiscent of the days after 9/11. 
 
The inadequacy of the city's preparedness for the kind of extreme weather events that are becoming all too common as a result of climate change-enhanced impacts can be seen from space - with satellite photos showing a large swath of lower Manhattan and other areas of the eastern seaboard still shrouded in darkness. If this is the 'best-prepared city in America’ to deal with climate change, as Mayor Bloomberg has claimed as a result of his environmental initiatives, then God help everyone else.
 
It may have taken a gargantuan storm of epic proportions, and the wiping out of large parts of the Atlantic coast of the United States, to get politicians talking about the reality of climate change, but NY Governor Cuomo did finally manage to stare reality in the face and muster enough political courage, post-storm, to say that it illustrated there “is the recognition that climate change is a reality; extreme weather is a reality; it is a reality that we are vulnerable"; while going on to admit, “Protecting this state from coastal flooding is a massive, massive undertaking. But it's a conversation I think is overdue."  Millions of New Yorkers would no doubt strongly agree.
 
In a study carried out in 2009 by Stony Brook University's Storm Surge Research Group, the cost of installing flood defenses for the city was put at $10 billion.  However, as one of the authors of the report, oceanography professor Malcolm Bowman commented after Sandy, "At the end of the day, I wouldn't be surprised if fixing the city up from this catastrophe costs more than that easily," before adding, “And it could happen again in the next year." 
 
Just two months ago engineer Douglas Hill, part of the same group at Stony Brook warned, “They lack a sense of urgency about this,” as the New York Times reported,
 
“Instead of “planning to be flooded,” as [Hill] put it, city, state and federal agencies should be investing in protection like sea gates that could close during a storm and block a surge from Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean into the East River and New York Harbor.”
 
While it is still too early to say with any assurance, rough early estimates of the cost of getting New York back on its feet are $25 billion – which doesn’t even account for putting in place new flood defense mechanisms, nor the ongoing oceans of human suffering that is a result of this year’s storm.
 
Mayor Bloomberg, despite not a whisper of the phrase during the presidential campaign, has just endorsed President Obama on the basis that he will do something more substantial about climate change than a President Romney.  
 
On the face of it, that seems hard to argue with; however, it’s also a pretty low bar, one which you’d have to be rather feeble not to be able to rise to.  When you’ve got a life-threatening fever, the difference between someone ignoring you completely, versus stopping to briefly offer some kindly words of encouragement, isn’t going to noticeably improve your chances of survival, even if you temporarily feel a bit better with the second approach.  A much more pertinent question with regard to climate change is: would Obama do enough? 
 
We can begin our examination of this question by asking it of our billionaire mayor.  Self-evidently, whatever Bloomberg thought he was prepared for, forward planning by the city to cope with a weather event like Sandy was, to put it mildly, inadequate.
 

The fact is an event like Sandy was all too predictable - and indeed predicted. Three years ago, the panel of experts that Mayor Bloomberg had convened to investigate the likely impact of climate change on New York, aptly named the New York City Panel on Climate Change, gave its initial report.  It stated that average temperatures in New York City had already increased by 2.5⁰F over the last 100 years, while sea levels had risen by a foot in the same time period. 

These facts have already caused increased health impacts and costs from heat stress as the number of days over 90 degrees has increased, along with the vulnerability of low lying coastal areas – New York has 520 miles of coastline to protect and 200,000 people live no more than four feet above high tide.  The panel predicted another 1.5-3⁰F average increase by 2020, along with another 2-5 inches of sea-level rise.  The fuel for hurricanes is warm surface ocean temperature and increased humidity and air temperature – all outcomes of global warming.  Under the sub-section titled “Sea level rise-related impacts may include”, the three year old report outlined as areas for particular concern:

• Inundation of low-lying areas & wetlands

• Increased structural damage & impaired operations
 
At the release of the report, in what is now a particularly damning quote, Bloomberg had this to say: “Planning for climate change today is less expensive than rebuilding an entire network after the catastrophe...We cannot wait until after our infrastructure has been compromised to begin to plan for the effects of climate change now”.  In the same year, an MTA report on sustainability and resilience warned that global warming posed, “a new and potentially dire challenge for which the M.T.A. system is largely unprepared.”
 
No one can say the city and the people we elect to act as our guardians weren't given a taste of what was possible.  Almost a year to the day, we received fair warning from Hurricane Irene, which forced the evacuation of 350,000 people from the flood prone areas of New York, now designated the dreaded “Zone A”.  Having occurred once and had a lucky escape, how could we imagine it might not happen again and be potentially worse?
 
In fact, as outlined above, Bloomberg's own report indicated how at risk the city was.  More recently, in September, a shocking article in light of the storm this week, the New York Times, in a piece titled, “New York Is Lagging as Seas and Risks Rise, Critics Warn”, cited Klaus H. Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia University's Earth Institute, that Irene's flood waters had come within six inches of inundating the subway system, other low-lying areas of NYC and paralyzing the city for weeks or months, exactly as has now come to pass with Sandy.
 
As an author of the state study, Jacob had this to say: “We’ve been extremely lucky...I’m disappointed that the political process hasn’t recognized that we’re playing Russian roulette.”
 
If the empty chamber was Irene, we bought the bullet with Sandy. Furthermore, many of the flooded areas that are not being talked about in the media, which is concentrating on lower Manhattan, areas around the coastline of Brooklyn and Queens that are the industrial hub of New York, where many working class and lower income people live, contain toxic sites and chemical storage areas,.  If one lays a map of the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory sites over a map of Zone A, one finds a strong correlation.  These all need to be assessed, checked for safety and their flood defenses hugely enhanced as quickly as possible.
 
Except of course, due to the dictates of capital locally, the electoral priorities of politicians, and the geostrategic interests of the US state federally, along with the power of the fossil fuel corporations and the inherent short-termism built into the structure of capitalism, there was no money for the kind of infrastructural changes that were so clearly urgently required. 
 
New York City is not preventing the conversion of more ocean-front property located on top of flood plains into ill-conceived, short-term money-spinners for realtors and land speculators, either through buying the land or implementing tougher development criteria, as some other US cities have done.  Nor did Con Edison spend the $250 million in investment the company deemed necessary to install submersible switches and move high-voltage transformers above ground level, things that may have prevented the explosion that wiped out electricity in lower Manhattan – even though the company made $1 billion in profit last year.
 
$10 billion for flood defense is less than half of Mayor Bloomberg's estimated wealth, at $25 billion.  If the mayor really wanted to go down in the history books and have generations of future New Yorkers think of him as a human being rather than an uber-rich financial parasite who managed to buy himself a third term, he could give $10 billion to the city for flood defense and still be a multi-billionaire!
 
Now that politicians have suddenly realized that New York is, in fact, a coastal city, and extreme weather events are an outcome of another very real phenomenon, climate change, we need to spend billions to make the necessary changes to city infrastructure and preparedness and replicate those changes across the country.  Sea-level in New York has already risen a foot over the last 100 years, and it's accelerating.  As sea level continues to rise if we continue not to act on the burning of fossil fuels, even relatively minor storms will begin to cause problems, let alone a repeat of something like Irene or Sandy.
 
Yet, according to an MIT report, perhaps unsurprisingly, the United States ranks among the regions of the world with the least number of cities that are making preparations for climate change, even though, as it’s also the richest, it would be the most capable of adapting and strengthening the resilience of its urban areas.  The report states: 
 
“Among 468 cities worldwide that participated in the survey, 79 percent have seen changes in temperature, rainfall, sea level or other phenomena attributable to climate change; 68 percent are pursuing plans for adapting to climate change”
 
As a result, a full 95% of cities in Latin America are taking action, yet the figure for the US is just 59%, most of them focused not on building resilience to rising sea-levels or stronger storms per se, but more on reducing carbon footprints.
 
But rather than build massive sea gates like some mediaeval fortress, let's build a city worthy of the 21st century. While those sorts of technological solutions may well be necessary in the short term, let's rebuild natural flood defenses such as the vast oyster beds which used to surround New York harbor until the water became too polluted for them to survive.
 
Instead of ripping up and paving over marshland and other wetlands with impermeable concrete to build roads, parking lots and marginal beach front developments, let's employ people to reclaim the land for natural flood defenses and water purification activities that will not only make New Yorkers much safer, give people meaningful and socially useful employment, but also hugely enhance the stability and variety of local wildlife.
 
Let's start with that and then see what else needs doing over the shorter term, which will likely include extra sea defenses, as well as lots of things that can be done to enhance the safety and security from flooding with subway tunnels, electricity sub-stations and so on.
 
New York’s antiquated and totally inadequate sewage treatment system needs a complete overhaul as almost any heavy rainstorm means that untreated sewage goes straight into the rivers and ocean as the system becomes overloaded with run-off. According to the city, only 41% of city bridges are in good repair.  The city only recycles 15% of its vast solid waste output, the rest going to landfill.  While a comprehensive set of solutions is well beyond the scope of this article, it’s obvious even from these few suggestions, that what’s preventing us from enacting these changes isn’t a technological deficiency, but a social and political one.
 
Looking further ahead, we clearly need a more robust public transit system, which would include taking the vast majority of cars out of Manhattan and replacing many of the roads with trams and bike lanes. These are just some of things that could be done while employing tens of thousands of people.  If money is required, let’s tax the rich, remove subsidies from the fossil fuel and nuclear corporations and make sure that the 2/3’s of US corporations who currently pay no income tax have their loopholes closed so they can’t offshore their profits just like they do their workers.  If we need more, let’s radically reduce the budget to the US military, which is the world’s single largest producer of greenhouse gases – not to mention violence and death.
 
Looking at this, it’s clear however, that whatever we force Bloomberg to do, and whichever representative of the 1% follows him as mayor of New York, it won’t make any difference if we can’t force change on the federal level.  A microcosm of Obama's inadequacies on dealing with climate change, Bloomberg's PlaNYC is patently not nearly enough to do the job for NYC in much the same way that Obama's plans haven't “slowed the rise of the oceans”.   
 
President and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington, D.C., Joshua Schank commented on the role of the federal government under Obama in hampering progress:
 
“The federal government has been, for the most part, denying the existence of climate change, and that has unfortunately extended to transportation funding and transportation planning processes, which do not account for adaptation to climate change…And that is part of why we saw the devastation that we saw today, because we haven't been acknowledging it and, therefore, we haven't planned to adapt to it or made changes to reduce emissions."
 
But Obama’s role in retarding progress on climate action is much worse than this. In a stunning revelation in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, it’s reported that, in an off-the-record meeting with environmental activists and administration officials, the Obama Whitehouse took a decision in 2009 – when the Democrats had super-majorities in both Houses of Congress and large amounts of political capital - to abandon the phrase “climate change” and back down on the fight.  This u-turn coming a bare 12 months after being elected in large part on promises to put taking action on climate change at the forefront of an Obama Administration.  
 
Even worse, at the meeting where this was communicated, were the leaders of some of the largest and most influential environmental organizations who all went along with what the Administration was asking them – to ditch the word climate change, along with their political principles. 
 
At the meeting were leaders of Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund and the student-oriented “protest” organization Power Shift, as well as Van Jones.  The Guardian quotes Jessy Tolkan, at that time a leader of Power Shift: “My most vivid memory of that meeting is this idea that you can't talk about climate change."  
 
Even the more radical Bill McKibben of 350.org agreed to shift his emphasis in order not to embarrass the administration and secretly acquiesce to the demand.   Presumably, in the hopelessly forlorn and deeply misguided belief that Obama, in defiance of all logic, would somehow be better able to act if he never mentioned the reason behind the necessity of making any changes in energy, transportation, housing or infrastructure spending to make it more sustainable and less carbon and energy intensive. 
 
In fact, after that sell-out, the Democrats couldn’t even pass the weakest and most ineffectual of climate bills because they were hamstrung by their decision not to talk about climate change - the whole point of the failed bipartisan Waxman-Markey Energy Bill.   A decision which has since of course opened the door to climate change being denied entirely by the ever-rightward tracking, anti-science wing of the  Republican Party, and allowed climate deniers to gain the upper hand. 
 
Therefore, those environmental leaders at that meeting with the Obama administration, must shoulder some of the blame for the fact that there was no mention of climate change in the presidential debates and that nothing meaningful on the scale required has been done to tackle it.  To the extent that hundreds of thousands of people along the east coast are now trying to live without electricity or running water because there was insufficient political pressure on politicians to act in our interests, rather than those of their corporate paymasters. 
 
Rather than sitting in plush congressional offices lobbying Democrats, if those highly influential environmental organizations had spent their time and not insignificant wealth launching a people’s campaign of uncompromising resistance to mainstream politicians and the corporations whose bidding they carry out, under the slogan popularized at the Copenhagen climate protests in 2009, “System Change not Climate Change”, where might the movement have been by now?  What could we have achieved?   As I survey a broken city, surely more than we have?
 
Because, despite this silence from the large environmental organizations and Democrats, and following a rapid decline in news about climate change in the US media from 2009 to 2011, in another sign of how dislocated politicians are from reality, according to the latest polls 70% of the American public believes that climate change is a real phenomenon that requires action.
 
As I argued in a previous piece, real answers will only come from the people - when we manage to organize and fight for the things we need through a radical change in social power - from them to us.  Because, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. from his speech “Where Do We Go From Here?”, as he tried to assess where the civil rights movement should go in 1967, having achieved legal political equality, he reasoned that we have to begin to ask more fundamental questions about ownership and economic rights that go to the heart of the system:
 
“We must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society.  There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?”  And when you ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.  When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy…And you see my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?”  You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?”  You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two third’s water?” 
 
Those are exactly the kind of questions a new movement for social and ecological justice must ask.

Chris Williams is a long-time environmental activist and author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (Haymarket, 2010). He is chair of the science dept at Packer Collegiate Institute and adjunct professor at Pace University in the Dept of Chemistry and Physical Science. His writings have appeared in Z Magazine, Green Left Weekly, ClimateandCapitalism.com, Counterpunch, The Indypendent, Dissident Voice, International Socialist Review, Truth Out, Socialist Worker, and ZNet. He reported from Fukushima in December and January and was a Lannan writer-in-residence in Marfa, Texas over the summer. 

Brent Council wants to make money from recycled materials

Brent Executive is to consider a proposal to remove the processing of dry recyclable (blue bin materials and deposit banks) from Veolia's current contract in order to reduce costs and make money from the sale of the materials. An officers' report points to Harrow's success in this area but notes:

However, Brent is unlikely to be able to achieve financial outcomes as good as Harrow, because Harrow’s local circumstances give them particular advantages. Their collections are made ‘in-house’ and the waste is transferred to their own depot and handled by their own operatives. Although they incur costs in doing this which must be offset from the income received, they do not rely on the intervention of a ‘middle-man’ as Brent must do through Veolia. Veolia’s costs of handling the collected waste at their depot must still be met. 

Veolia have previously indicated this accounts for the greater part of the present gate fee. Nevertheless, each £1 reduction in this fee this represents a betterment to the Council of between £18,000 and £21,000 before any further benefit is generated from the sale of the material.

To enable this, officers must extract the processing element of the service from Veolia, i.e.make a switch from their MRF at Southwark and reach agreement with a separate third party for the receipt and processing of the waste they collect. Veolia have previously indicated they would not resist this approach, but this must be confirmed through consultation.

The council expects to collect a minimum of 18,500 tonnes of dry recyclable waste in 2012/13, rising to around 21,000 tonnes in 2013/14. At the present level of gate fee this will cost £407,000 rising to £462,000. The objective of this procurement exercise is to reduce that cost significantly.

To enable this, officers must extract the processing element of the service from Veolia, i.e. make a switch from their MRF at Southwark and reach agreement with a separate third party for the receipt and processing of the waste they collect. Veolia have previously indicated they would not resist this approach, but this must be confirmed through new negotiation.

There has been no comment from Brent Council on the collapse of the 4 borough public realm contract which include recycling and waste management but there are clear implications for this proposal. It is interesting to note the advantages that accrue to Harrow from having the service 'in house' and that is something Barnet has also decided to do.  There is already a local MRF in Brent, Seneca/Careys based between Wembley and Neasden who attracted criticism in the summer for the Neasden stink.The demand and price of recycled material is subject to extreme fluctuations and also subject to the extent of contamination from co-mingled collections.

A photographic tour of the new Wembley

Many years ago I went to a sparsely attended exhibition at the now demolished Wembley Conference Centre about plans for the development of the area around Wembley Stadium.

When I commented that the artist's impressions made it look like Croydon a Labour councillor retorted, 'So what's wrong with Croydon'.

Recently I showed a colleague from the south of Brent around the new developments, including the Civic Centre and he was quite astonished.  He remarked that he seldom had need to come to Wembley except to visit the Town Hall so had  really little idea of the redevelopment taking place and the scale of investment involved.

There are probably many in Brent and further afield who have not registered the extent of the changes in what the Brent and Kilburn Times this week as 'glittering redevelopments transforming Wembley'.

There have been changes in Quintain's plans since those early days, not least the fact that family housing seems to have been put on the back burner despite thj shortage of such housing in Brent. Instead there are 2,500 student apartments in the pipeline and countless hotels. Perhaps the great risk is the dependence on retail with the set piece 'London Designer Outlet' at the centre of the strategy. The claim (hope) is that as the only such outlet within the M25 it will attract visitors from across London. Some big names have signed up and with the Outlet opening in Autumn 2013 we shall soon see if it successful.

Brent Council's aim is to retain visitors to the stadium so that they stay in Brent to celebrate rather than going up West but also to attract locals and visitors on non-event days.  A multi-screen cinema is planned and there is talk of an FA sponsored National Football Museum.  The Brent Civic Centre has been fully booked for hard-hat tours next Friday and Saturday but questions remain about its accessibility, including the library, on event days.

Locals have commented on the 'spoiling' of  the view of Wembley Stadium by some of the new development as well as what appears to be a muddle of new buildings and sume sunless 'canyons'  rather than the careful cityscape that was promised.

Watch the video and make up your own minds.

Sandy blows climate change on to the US election agenda

From Bloomberg's blog

The devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy has at last put climate change on the agenda of the USA Presidential election, whether it will stay on the agenda for more than a few hours remains to be seen.

This is an extract from New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg's blog LINK

The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast – in lost lives, lost homes and lost business – brought the stakes of Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief.

The floods and fires that swept through our city left a path of destruction that will require years of recovery and rebuilding work. And in the short term, our subway system remains partially shut down, and many city residents and businesses still have no power. In just 14 months, two hurricanes have forced us to evacuate neighborhoods – something our city government had never done before. If this is a trend, it is simply not sustainable.

Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be – given this week's devastation – should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.

Here in New York, our comprehensive sustainability plan – PlaNYC – has helped allow us to cut our carbon footprint by 16 percent in just five years, which is the equivalent of eliminating the carbon footprint of a city twice the size of Seattle. Through the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group – a partnership among many of the world’s largest cities – local governments are taking action where national governments are not.

Leadership Needed

But we can't do it alone. We need leadership from the White House – and over the past four years, President Barack Obama has taken major steps to reduce our carbon consumption, including setting higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. His administration also has adopted tighter controls on mercury emissions, which will help to close the dirtiest coal power plants (an effort I have supported through my philanthropy), which are estimated to kill 13,000 Americans a year.

Mitt Romney, too, has a history of tackling climate change. As governor of Massachusetts, he signed on to a regional cap-and-trade plan designed to reduce carbon emissions 10 percent below 1990 levels. "The benefits (of that plan) will be long-lasting and enormous – benefits to our health, our economy, our quality of life, our very landscape. These are actions we can and must take now, if we are to have `no regrets' when we transfer our temporary stewardship of this Earth to the next generation," he wrote at the time.

He couldn't have been more right. But since then, he has reversed course, abandoning the very cap-and-trade program he once supported. This issue is too important. We need determined leadership at the national level to move the nation and the world forward.