Brent By-election possibility lessens but...

Cllr Zaffar Van Kalwala at Stonebride Boxing Club

 The potential for the postponement of the next Full Council Meeting to catch three Labour councillors in the six month attendance rule and thus force them to resign appears to have subsided.

Cllr Ahmad Shahzad is reporting to have attendeded a Pensions Committee and Cllr John Duffy an Alcohol and Entertainment Licensing Sub-Committee.

This leaves Zaffar Van Kalwala who is on the Audit Committee which meets at 7.30pm tonight and Scrutiny which meets at 7pm on Wednesday.

That is of course as long as the meetings go ahead and are not abandoned, as Cllr Janice Long seemed to hint at Labour Group on Monday, by the Civic Centre fire alarm being set off.

If for some reason Kalwala does  not attend a by-election will be triggered in Stonebridge ward.

Cllr Zaffar Van Kalwala has been active in support of the campaign to Save Stonebridge Adventure Playground which has also been backed by Dawn Butler, Labour's General Election candidate for Brent Central.

Greens back NHS workers striking for fair pay

Caroline Lucas on the picket line in Brighton

Strking midwives outside Central middlesex Hospital today Phot: Sarah Cox)

The Green Party is supporting NHS workers on strike today alongside other activists and trade unionists.

Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion was one of many Greens who joined the picket lines this morning.

The Green Party Trade Union Group issued a solidarity message:

The Green Party Trade Union Group sends its support to NHS workers from all the unions who will be on strike today. The severe pay freezes imposed by the government are unjust and part of the unjust neo-liberal policies that punish the poor, the sick,  the vulnerable and also those who provide health care.

As if that were not enough, NHS workers are sometimes doing their utmost to keep an adequate health service running ins pite of misguided marketisation and cut backs.

We all need the work that these workers do and they need a decent wage!

Private Eye on Brent Council’s Case Again ?

Guest Blog by Audrey N. Stables

After the national expose of the Brent Council racism, discrimination and workplace bullying scandal in Private Eye’s last edition, Davani, Gilbert, Ledden, Potts and others named and shamed may well have thought they deserved a rest from the limelight.

However, it seems that Rotten Boroughs (Private Eye’s regular dodgy-local-authority section) is not the only page that  the Civic Centre chums will now want to flick straight to as they check their cuttings each fortnight. The cartoon below appears in the current edition of the Eye and, though it principally relates to similar scummy practice by some NHS managers, will surely resonate with Davani and Gilbert and Fiona Ledden (and, even more so, with some of their more honest, and therefore no-longer-employed, ex-colleagues). 

So what have cats got to do with politics? Ask the Young Greens...

Brent hospital proposals must come under intense scrutiny on Thursday

Days after NHS England announced an inquiry into why waiting times at Ealing Hospital and Northwick Park A&Es have the longest waiting times in the country, LINK, Brent's Scrutiny Committee on Thursday will be examining several important aspects of local health care.

Representatives of the North west London NHS Hospital Trust will be questioned about progress on the recommendations of the Care Quality Commission's (CQC) critical  report on Northwick Park Hospital.

The report LINK sets out the issues to be examined clearly:

CQC made specific recommendations for improvement at Northwick Park Hospital concerning A&E and related services. These are set out below:-

• Ensure that there are appropriate numbers of staff to meet the needs of patients in the A&E department, surgical areas and critical care.

• Ensure that there are systems in place to assess and monitor the quality of services provided in A&E, critical care, surgery and maternity to ensure that services are safe and benchmarked against national standards.

•Review the coping strategies within A&E during periods of excessive demand for services.

•Empower senior staff to make changes to ensure that patients are safe in A&E in maternity.

•Review discharge arrangements in A&E and critical care to avoid re-admission to these areas.

Given the significant number of areas requiring improvement in the current A&E provision at Northwick Park Hospital reassurance is sought from the senior management concerning implementation of actions and the safety of the A&E services available to Brent residents.

Another area to be examined is the proposals from Shaping a Healthier Future and Brent NHS to close maternity and other associated services at Ealing Hospital. 

The committee is recommended to question representatives of the Brent Clinical Commissioning Group on:-

•the robustness of their modelling assumptions and assurance plan;

•the timescale for their implementation; and

•what contingency plans are in place in case any of the proposals turn out not to be possible or feasible

A puzzling aspect of the report LINK is the timing. This meeting is on November 26th and it looks as if key decisions on this issue are actually to be made by the CCGs on the same day:

The next stage of reconfiguration is the changes to maternity services and the inter dependent services at Ealing Hospital. Brent Clinical Commissioning Group is due to make a decision on delegating the decision on timing to Ealing Clinical Commissioning Group, along with the other CCGs across North West London, on 26thNovember 2014. Ealing Clinical Commissioning Group is due to make a decision on the timings of changes to maternity services, and the interdependent services at Ealing Hospital on 26^th November 2014.

One can only wonder if what the Scrutiny Committee thinks will have any impact given this timetable.

The report's authors reach a soothing conclusion:

The impact on Brent residents and NHS services of changes to maternity and inter-dependent services at Ealing Hospital is not expected to be significant. Local services have the capacity to receive additional activity from Ealing without causing a negative impact on accessibility for Brent residents

The final health report to be considered is on the future use of the Central Middlesex Hospital site LINK. Current proposals are:

•An elective orthopaedic centre.

•Mental Health inpatient facility relocated from the site at Park Royal.

•A GP and primary care ‘hub’.

•A Genetics laboratory relocated from Northwick Park Hospital.

•Relocation of rehabilitation beds currently at Willesden.

This is a crowded agenda with lots of 'suits' from Brent NHS Health, the Clinical Commissioning Group abd Shaping a Healthier Future attending.  At previous meetings the chair has seemed irritated by the searching questions posed by Cllr Mary Daly and tried to hurry through proceedings with so many of the scrutinised wanting to speak.

In fact Daly's interventions seemed based on the fact that, unusually, she is a councillor who has done her homework as well as being someone passionately committed to the health of local residents.

I hope that at this meeting, however inconvenient, she gets a fair hearing. I also hope, for the sake of the public, microphones are installed to get over the acoustic problem in the committee rooms as well as the suits' mumbling.

If all that Health material is not another there is a major and very interesting report  LINK by a Task Group on the Agenda.The Task Group, chaired by Cllr Neil Nerva, looked at promoting electoral engagement following the introduction of Individual Electoral Registration and is packed with information and ideas. The most innovative of which is the involvement of the campaign group Hope Not Hate.

Once again such a crowded and complex agenda raises the issue of the wisdom of reducing Brent Council's scrutiny committee to just one. This was a hasty decision made at the beginning of the administration with no prior consultation which took many Labour councillors by surprise.

These are decisions about vital issues, at the extreme perhaps a matter of life or death, and must have proper scrutiny.

December 15th Brent Cabinet likely to produce a gloomy Christmas

The December 15th Cabinet meeting is shaping up to be the most controversial of the year and unfortunately is likely to produce some bad news just ahead of the Christmas holiday.

Among the items on the agenda LINK will be the restructuring of the council's senior management which will see some lose their jobs while other jobs will be created. This is currently tabled as 'open' so the public should get sight of the proposals a week before the meeting.


More importantly in the long run are two budget items.

One is the two year budget for 2015-2017 which will set out draft 'savings' to produce a reduction in expenditure of more than 30%.

Cllr Michael Pavey is the Lead Member for both these items.

The other is the schools budget for 2015-2016. Cllr Ruth Moher is the lead member for this item. Although reductions are unlikely to be headline grabbing there may well be changes in charges for services to schools which will affect their overall budgets.

Speaking Up For Libraries today

I filled in at the last minute as a Green Party speaker at the Speak Up for Libraries Conference in Bloomsbury today. It was inspiring to see so many people passionately committed to the survival of libraries in the teeth of local council cuts, privatisation and volunteer solutions. Barnet library campaigners were there who have a particularly hard job on their hands. LINK

I made the link between developments in libraries, education and health - all public assets being handed over to the private sector for profit.

I quoted the Green Party core value that should be the basis of  our libraries policy as well as our other polices:

The success of a society cannot be measured by narrow economic indicators, but should take account of factors affecting the quality of life for all people: personal freedom, social equity, health, happiness and human fulfilment.

I went on to  support locally accessible, professionally staffed, adequately funded, democratically accountable local libraries.

I stressed their importance as shared public spaces contributing to social cohesion in addition to their primary role.

The other people on the panel were  Helen Goodman MP (Labour, Shadow Minister for Culture, Media and Sport) and Justin Tomlinson MP (Conservative). Liberal Democrats were invited but did not send a speaker. Author and library campaigner Alan Gibbons chaired the panel.

There was a discussion about the need for clearer national standards for library provision but delegates pointed out that these were not being enforced by the current Secretary of State despite Lincolnshire campaigners win in the High Court LINK.

I said that I had no faith in Ed Vaizey intervening in the Barnet case as that council was the Tory flagship after Hammersmith went Labour at the local elections.  He would hardly interfere with a council that was the pathbreaker for other Tory councils wanting to shed services. I suggested that there was no substitute for a mass national campaign in defence of libraries.

Non-intervention reflected underlying assumptions about the library service and contrasts with Michael Gove's many interventions in education.

On national standards I agreed that broad standards were important but how they were implemented was a matter for local decision making. However, they would mean nothing if there was not adequate funding for local government and at present there were indications that many council may fail financially and be unable to deliver even core services.

This is how Speak Up for Libraries told the story of the panel on Storify:
(first slide should be 'professionally staffed')

Miss Ledden takes over from Miss Marple as she investigates Lorber's leak

Fiona Ledden, currently under pressure from Christine Gilbert and Cara Davani as they take action on the senior management restructuring in the run up to the Christmas break, has in turn, attempted (or been instructed)  to put the heat on ex Liberal Democrat Council Leader, Paul Lorber.

Ledden has written to him about an investigation she is undertaking into information 'of a sensitive nature' which appeared in a letter from Paul Lorber published in the Brent and Kilburn Times on November 8th.

The letter was about the senior management restructuring which did not go to General Purposes Committee until November 5th.

Ledden said:

In the letter...you refer to the disbanding of the Environment department. This was confidential information  and staff in the department were not aware, no consultation documentation could be available until after the meeting of General Purposes Committee.

She went on to say:

I am very concerned that this information was available to you and I an writing formally to ask you who gave you that information.

Ledden went on to offer to have a meeting with Lorber 'if that would assist'.

Ledden does not cite any authority for making such a request of someone who is now a member of the public.

Lorber replied that he was sorry that she had been asked to waste her time on the matter and wrote:

I expect that the Labour Leader must have been furious at the disclosure of his secret hatchet plan. Secret even from his own Councillors and even the newly appointed Lead Member of Environment.

He went on to say that 'in the spirit of Open Government' he would be happy to answer the question:

I worked it out for myself from the headlines of the report. My many years on the Council and my intuition led me to guess which Department was for the chop and which Lead Member was the weakest and therefore least likely to cause a fuss.

Perhaps you would now reciprocate by forwarding a copy of the General Purposes Report so that it can be properly scrutinised and debated.

Ex Executive member Cllr George Crane was appointed successor to Cllr Keith Perrin on October 21st. Perrin had  the previous month resigned for 'personal reasons'. The appointment made by Muhammed Butt and not by ballot of the Labour Group was first announced on the Wembley Observer's  Get West London website.

Wembley Matters published the outline Agenda item for the General Purposes Committee on October 30th LINK and the anonymous officers' report on Saturday November 8th LINK  which identified plans to delete Fiona Ledden's post as Director of Legal and Procurement along with the post of Assistant Chief Executive which has only been created a year or so before.  Some information was still withheld as the Council claimed details about individual staff could be identified.