Referendum on Sudbury Town Plan - details

On Monday, 27 July 2015 Brent Council's Cabinet approved for the Sudbury Town Neighbourhood Plan to progress to referendum. The referendum will take place on Thursday, 10 September 2015.

The plan has been produced by the Sudbury Town Residents' Association with involvement of the wider community. The neighbourhood plan’s overriding aim is “to create a greener, cleaner, safer Sudbury Town.” In summary, policies in the plan:

• set design criteria for shop fronts in Sudbury town centre and for the continuation of public realm works
•  seeks to protect open spaces and allow the reuse or redevelopment of buildings within Butlers Green and Barham Park, for uses which support the function of the green space
•  sets priorities for spending Neighbourhood Community Infrastructure Levy, including public realm improvements
• identifies uses which will be appropriate in Sudbury town centre and support development that strengthens Vale Farm as a regional centre for sports excellence, whilst preserving open space.

Anyone living in the neighbourhood area (see map below) who is registered to vote in a local election will be entitled to vote in the referendum. If the majority of those who vote in the referendum are in favour then the plan will be adopted as planning policy for Sudbury. The policies within the neighbourhood plan will then form part of Brent's Local Plan and will guide development in the neighbourhood area alongside other Development Plan policies.

If you have recently moved into the area or you are not currently registered to vote, you may complete an online application at www.gov.uk/register-to-vote or ask the Electoral Services office (020 8937 1372) for a paper form. The deadline to register to vote in time for the referendum is midnight on Monday 24 August 2015.

Further information and a copy of the plan is available at www.brent.gov.uk/stnp and on the Sudbury Town Residents' Association webpage http://stra.org.uk/.    

PAY OFF FOB OFF: Christine Gilbert’s “answer” to the questions about a “pay off” by Brent to Cara Davani

Guest blog by Philip Grant
 
Christine Gilbert promised me a reply by today to the two questions I had first put to her on 9 July, and repeated in my open letter to her a week later. 

I said that I would share her reply with “Wembley Matters” readers, and it came in an email to me at 5.55pm today:

‘Dear Mr Grant, 

Thank you for your various letters and emails to the Chief Executive in relation to Cara Davani, which have been passed to me for reply.

Ms Davani, then Director of HR and Administration, left the council at the end of June 2015.  The council is grateful for the significant contribution Cara made over the last three years.

The council cannot legally disclose any details of the arrangements relating to Ms Davani’s departure.  

In relation to your separate question regarding compensation, the remedies hearing in the case of Ms Clarke has not yet determined any compensation award and, as such it would not be appropriate to comment further at this stage.

Yours sincerely 

Fiona Alderman

Chief Legal Officer

The heading to Ms Alderman’s email was “Recent correspondence”. I replied to it at 8.50pm today, under the heading “Re: Recent correspondence about possible "pay off" to Cara Davani, and your failure to reply to it”, as follows:-

‘Dear Ms Gilbert and Ms Alderman,

I am replying to Ms Alderman’s email to me today at 17:55, headed “Recent correspondence”. I am also writing this to Ms Gilbert, who my correspondence was addressed to, and who must accept the responsibility for answering the two questions which I raised, as Brent’s interim Chief Executive and its Head of Paid Service, and as the person who must know the answers to those questions.

The main statement in your email of 3 August is in exactly the same words as Ms Gilbert’s email to me of 8 July:

‘The council cannot legally disclose any details of the arrangements relating to Ms Davani’s departure.’

You have not explained why you believe you 'cannot legally disclose', although that is not the main point here. The original reply in these words was to an email of 30 June in which I had made a formal request for information including details of amounts and arrangements in connection with Ms Davani’s departure from Brent Council. You are now using the same reply to my email request of 9 July, repeated in my open letter to Christine Gilbert of 16 July. That request was specifically drafted so that Ms Gilbert did not have to disclose any details of the arrangements relating to Ms Davani’s departure. That request has not been replied to, and I will set it out again here:

‘I believe it is reasonable to ask you again to reply, openly and honestly, to Council staff, elected councillors and publicly to Brent’s residents, to the two simple “yes” or “no” questions I put to you:

1. Can Brent Council confirm that there has not been, and that there will not be, any financial payment by the Council to Cara Davani in connection with her leaving the Council's employment as Director of HR and Administration, other than her normal salary payment up to 30 June 2015?   YES or NO.

2. Can Brent Council confirm that it has not agreed, and will not agree, to pay any award of compensation, damages or costs made against Cara Davani personally, as a separately named respondent from Brent Council, in any Employment Tribunal or other legal proceedings in which she and the Council are named parties?   YES or NO.’

After I first put these questions, Ms Gilbert replied on 10 July: ‘I have passed these to Ms Fiona Alderman, Chief Legal Officer, for her consideration. She will respond to you in due course.’ I now wonder whether her instruction to Ms Alderman was not ‘please reply to these questions on my behalf’, but ‘please find an excuse for not replying to these questions, and delay responding to the email for as long as possible’. 

The whole point of this correspondence, from my point of view, has been to highlight the serious concerns which many people have expressed over rumours of a “pay off” by Brent to Cara Davani, and to seek to resolve those concerns by either getting confirmation that the rumours are unfounded, or by getting those responsible for deciding on such a “pay off” to explain their reasons for agreeing it. That is what Brent’s Constitution, and the principles of conduct in public life, expect of you as senior Council officers in delivering openness and accountability. Instead you seem determined to prevaricate, and not to resolve those serious concerns, which I know that a number of elected councillors share. 

I would ask you to read again my open letter to Christine Gilbert of 16 July 2015, and the question which I included in the letter which I had published in the “Brent & Kilburn Times”:

‘What are senior officers at Brent Council trying to hide from us, and why?’

I acknowledge that Ms Alderman did refer to my second question in her email to me today, saying: 

‘In relation to your separate question regarding compensation, the remedies hearing in the case of Ms Clarke has not yet determined any compensation award and, as such it would not be appropriate to comment further at this stage.’

I accept that the remedies hearing has yet been finalised, but that does not mean that the question I asked cannot be answered now. If Brent has not agreed ‘to pay any award of compensation, damages or costs made against Cara Davani personally, as a separately named respondent from Brent Council,’ then the answer to that question should be “yes”. If the Employment Tribunal, based on all the evidence that it heard and read, and the findings of fact that it made from that evidence, decides that any compensation, damages or costs should be awarded against Ms Davani personally, as distinct from the award(s) that it will decide to make against Brent Council (on the basis of its judgement of September 2014), then Brent Council should accept the Tribunal’s decision, and its Chief Executive should commit the Council to do so. 

It might be argued that Brent Council should pay all of the compensation, damages and costs awarded to Ms Clarke, as Ms Davani, though a separately named respondent in the case, was acting as an employee of Brent Council. I dealt with this point in my first email raising concerns over this matter, of 12 June 2015 to my Fryent Ward councillors and copied to the Chief Executive, explaining why, if any award were made against Ms Davani personally, Brent should not pick up the bill:

‘At first sight, this may sound vindictive, as the case relates to actions she took while Brent's Head of HR (although she held this role up to 31 March 2013 as a self-employed interim consultant) and as interim, then formally appointed, Operational Director of HR. However, it is clear from the evidence and findings of fact in the Tribunal judgement that her actions against Ms Clarke were totally contrary to the Council's HR policy and practices, and that her victimisation of Ms Clarke was done for reasons of personal spite, as a result of Ms Clarke complaining of being bullied and harassed by Ms Davani. Her actions were therefore not in the proper performance of her duties, particularly when those duties were of Brent's most senior HR officer, who should have been leading by example.’

I would only add that, in these circumstances, any payment by Brent of any awards made against Ms Davani personally would be a misuse of Council funds.

I look forward to receiving from Christine Gilbert her honest answers to the two simple “yes” or “no” questions above by the end of this week.

I am copying this email to the councillors to whom our previous correspondence on this matter was copied, and will also make it openly available, in the public interest.

Yours sincerely,

Philip Grant.’

'Misrepresentation' and the racial discrimination Judgment against Brent Council

Guest blog by Philip Grant. This is Philip's response to Muhammed Butt's statement  LINK on the Davani issue.

Dear Councillor Butt,

Your statement (to members of the Council?) about the Rosemarie Clarke Employment Tribunal case has been published on the "Wembley Matters" blog website, and I am writing to respond to some of the points you have made, as I suspect that I am one of the main sources of the alleged 'untruths' which you have referred to. You have said:

'Much has been written and said about the Employment Tribunal of Rosemarie Clarke and Brent Council; a good deal of it has been inaccurate and unfair.  The Council’s normal policy is not to comment on the detail of individual cases and for a considerable time we have held to this line. However, the time has come where the Council needs to set out the facts in the light of continued misrepresentation of the judgement.'

I have written to you about this case on a number of occasions since May 2014 (when it was reported in a local newspaper), and on 21 September 2014 I wrote to you saying:

'I can understand you not wishing to comment on this matter publicly when you had an election to win, and when the Employment Tribunal proceedings were still in progress, but now that the judgement has been made, and is in the public domain, you as Leader of the Council need to be seen to be taking the right action to deal with it.'

Sadly, having done nothing about the case for more than ten months (other than assisting senior officers in an attempted cover-up of the facts), it is you who is now trying to misrepresent the Judgment. 

As you may not have it readily available, I will remind you of what I wrote to you on 28 September 2014, referring to comments I had made on the "Brent & Kilburn Times" website under an article reporting that Brent had announced it would appeal against the judgement in the Rosemarie Clarke case, and giving advice on how the Council could, in practice, mitigate the finding of "racial discrimination" against it by not appealing, but by telling the truth instead:

‘Brent may have obtained 'independent legal advice', but who at Brent Council assessed that advice, and who are the 'we' who decided to appeal?

  

Presumably Fiona Ledden was involved, but her judgement on this is seriously compromised by the lack of credibility of the evidence she gave (on oath?) to the tribunal over who made the decision to continue with the disciplinary proceedings against Rosemarie Clarke after she had left Brent's employment, which is at the heart of the racial discrimination finding against the Council. If Andy Potts, Brent's Senior Employment Lawyer, was involved, he appears to have a conflict of interest, as Ms Davani's partner in their private lives. The barrister or QC who gave the advice may have pointed out some weaknesses in the tribunal's judgement, but would also have a vested interest in the matter because of the large fees they could earn if Brent did appeal.

 

As I have said in the second of my comments attached, any appeal against the tribunal's decision can only be made on points of law (or 'legal errors', as your statement puts it) - the facts have been found by the tribunal, based on clear and detailed evidence, and that evidence supports their findings that Rosemarie Clarke was victimised, by Ms Davani and by Brent as her employer. Once Ms Clarke had established, on good evidence, that she had been treated differently from Clive Heaphy, the legal onus was on Brent to show why the difference in treatment was a valid one, and Brent completely failed to do that. That was why, in the circumstances, the tribunal was correct, in law, to find that racial discrimination was a factor in the victimisation and constructive dismissal of Ms Clarke.

 

You will see, from my second comment that I don't believe that racial discrimination was the main reason (if a reason at all) for the victimisation. On the evidence, Rosemarie Clarke was victimised by Cara Davani because she had the courage to complain that she was being bullied by Ms Davani, and rather than giving her the proper protection required by its procedures, Brent allowed Ms Davani to play an increasingly vicious role against Ms Clarke. It is possible that Ms Davani genuinely thought that Ms Clarke was "playing the system" (there is no evidence on this), but even if she did, as Brent's top HR Officer she should have followed the rules, and not allowed her anger at Ms Clarke to override her professional responsibilities.

 

The problem for Brent got worse after Ms Clarke made her claim to the Employment Tribunal. It was decided to fight her claim by carrying on with disciplinary proceedings against Ms Clarke, in the hope that by finding her guilty of gross misconduct they could claim that if she had not resigned, she would have been dismissed anyway. That tactic backfired, especially after Brent could not (or would not) admit who had made that decision. I referred to para. 240 of the judgement in my email of 21 September, and have included the full text of it in my second comment attached. If Fiona Ledden did not make the decision herself, as she stated in her oral evidence, she would have known who it was made by. I suspect that it was probably made by either Cara Davani or Andy Potts, but Ms Ledden would have known that if she disclosed that to the tribunal the judgement would inevitably have gone against Brent Council. 

You have announced that Brent will appeal, but hopefully that appeal has not been submitted to the High Court yet. There is a way of "clearing Brent's name" over the racial discrimination issue without wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds of funds the Council cannot afford, and which it should be spending instead on meeting the needs of local people, rather than in trying to protect Cara Davani. The way is by giving the true reason for the victimisation, and I will explain how this could be achieved. 

... The "U turn" over the appeal can be achieved by either you, or Cllr. Pavey under his review, finding that on further examination of the facts, the real reason why Rosemarie Clarke was victimised was because of the personal actions of Ms Davani, and that no racial discrimination was involved at all. The finding of racial discrimination was a 'legal technicality', resulting from errors made in preparing Brent's case for the tribunal, and this and procedural errors by other senior council officers in dealing with Ms Clarke's complaints of bullying and harassment against her by Ms Davani will be dealt with as part of Cllr. Pavey's review. As part of the announcement that Brent will not now be appealing against the tribunal's decision, you will, of course, need to be able to say that Ms Davani has resigned with immediate effect (or that she has been suspended while her alleged misconduct in this case is dealt with) and that Brent Council will ensure that Rosemarie Clarke will receive full compensation as soon as possible.

I hope you will find this email constructive and helpful. Once again, I am trying to help Brent, and help you, to do the right thing. My interference may be annoying, but if you are genuine about the need to 'allow residents to hold the Council to account' (see my email of 9 September, to which I am still awaiting your reply), you and your colleagues do need to consider the views of independent minds in the local community, especially when they put forward potentially sensible alternatives to the "in house" advice you have received.’  

I suspect that the reason you have issued your statement now may be connected with my efforts to establish whether the rumours of a "pay off" by Brent to Cara Davani, on her leaving the Council at the end of June, are true: and in the growing interest among Brent councillors to establish the justification for any such "pay off", if the interim Chief Executive or Chief Legal Officer have to confirm that there was some form of "pay off". I am copying this email to your Cabinet colleagues, and will forward a copy to my Ward councillors and to members of Brent's Scrutiny Committee, for their information. 

Yours sincerely,

Philip Grant.

Philip Grant's letter to councillors on this issue LINK

Butt on Davani case: The Council 'will not condone a witch-hunt against staff'

As you know Wembley Matters has carried a number of articles calling for Brent Council to provide details on whether the Council made a payment to Cara Davani, former Head of Human Resources on her resignation, and if so, the amount that was paid. This statement has been made by Cllr Muhammed Butt, leader of Brent Council.

Statement regarding employment tribunal of Rosemarie Clarke

 
"Much has been written and said about the Employment Tribunal of Rosemarie Clarke and Brent Council; a good deal of it has been inaccurate and unfair.

"The Council’s normal policy is not to comment on the detail of individual cases and for a considerable time we have held to this line. However, the time has come where the Council needs to set out the facts in the light of continued misrepresentation of the judgement. We do this not because of any desire to defend our reputation, but because of the corrosive affect of untruths on the morale of our workforce and our ability to move forward as an organisation.

"The tribunal found that Ms Clarke suffered ‘discrimination on the grounds of race, victimisation, and was constructively dismissed’. The case relates to events between March 2012 and August 2013. Most of the managers and officers who had any significant involvement with the case have left the council.

"The tribunal findings are complex and centre on grievances raised by Ms Clarke, Head of Learning and Development, against her manager, Ms Davani, Head of HR. Before these were heard, she was suspended by Mr Newby, Director of Strategy, Partnerships and Improvement, for another matter which, if upheld, in our view could have constituted gross misconduct. Ms Clarke resigned and left before the disciplinary and grievance matters had been fully determined.

"The council continued with both the disciplinary and grievance processes after she left. Ms Ledden, the Borough Solicitor, considered the gross misconduct case and concluded that she would have been dismissed. She also concluded that the grievance was without merit. The tribunal disagreed.

"The tribunal drew a direct comparison to another case of a white member of staff who was suspended on the grounds of gross misconduct and resigned, where the council did not continue to hear the case after he left. Fundamentally, it was this difference in the way the council acted that led to the finding of race discrimination. Different managers made the decisions in these cases, but the findings were against the council as the employer.

"Much has been made of the role of Cara Davani, in relation to the case. The fact is that the tribunal found fault in the decisions made by a number of managers and officers that collectively led to the finding against the council. We are sorry that mistakes were made, but we do not accept that all the staff concerned were therefore racist; indeed two of them were black managers. It was not what they did that led to the finding, but the difference between what they did and what other managers in the council did in similar circumstances. The Council will not condone a witch-hunt against staff, even those who make mistakes.

"The discrimination findings relied on what is known as the reverse burden of proof. If an organisation acts differently in two cases where the two employees happen to be of different race and cannot satisfactorily explain why, then it is deemed to have discriminated. The finding was against the Council as a whole.

"We are not legally allowed to discuss the terms of Cara Davani's departure. All staff are treated no more or less favourably than they are entitled to be treated in accordance with our contracts and in line with our employment procedures.

"In the three years since the start of matters in this case, Brent Council has made great strides in relation to its HR and Equalities practices. Most recently, we were judged to have reached the ‘Achieving’ level of the Equality Standard for Local Government.

"There are few councils in the country that are as proudly diverse as Brent, nor as committed to embedding equalities in our services and employment practices. We have used the failings in this case to learn, by commissioning a review of practices and through implementing an improvement plan.

"We stand on our record, as a service provider and employer, and hope that our staff and the public will judge us on this."

NOTE: The Watford Employment Tribunal Judgment can be found HERE

Owen Jones "Are you a socialist?" Caroline Lucas "Yes, definitely."

Do you know about the Kilburn Mob and the Rudies?

Lloyd Mentore

Guest blog by Bethan Mentore

Family history has always interested me.  Stories of workhouses, coal miners and war heroes are always good for sharing round the dinner table at family reunions.  When I married my husband in 2007 I knew his dad, Lloyd Mentore, was well-known in Brent.

Lloyd had coached Brent Youth football and taught Judo at Poplar Grove on Chalkhill Estate.  His legacy was plain for all to see when 600 people attended his funeral in 1998.  A few months ago I decided to see what I could find out about my father-in-law on the Internet.

 A search via Google came up with Lloyd's name in a forum about skinhead fashion.    This was the post in the forum:

The Kilburn Mob was made up of Black and White Lads, My best mate at School..a Black Lad was Lloyd Mentor,RIP, we both used to go to Judo together in the mid 60s, he was always better than me ..and went on to become a 5th Dan, Lloyd use to work in a Cloths shop on Willesden Lane.. after school and Saturdays, He got me into Skinhead cloths, Lloyd had a Cousin Lenny V, He was a wild Rudie, and about the best dressed bloke in Kilburn and feared,

When we had a fall out with the Blacks, and was at War for a few months, My mate Lloyd kept out of it..also another of my Black mates Ollie a African lad who lived next door to me, Lloyds Cousin.Lenny, also kept out of it , not that he was worried, He was just one of these individuals, who was his own man.

One night we was walking down Kilburn High Road.. Along the High Street. was a Machine Arcade, Outside was a Black Lad.. everyone steamed over to have a go at him, It was my mate Ollie, I just stood with him, He was my School mate and lived next door to me.., Some of the Lads started to turn on Me, But i was not having it. Me and Ollie just walked home.

Lloyd died of a Brain Haemorrhage aged 42.

After reading this we were not only interested to find out who Cousin Lenny V was but also wanted to know more about the Kilburn Mob and the Rudies

If you can throw any light on this please comment below or send me an email at mafran@globalnet.co.uk  and I will pass it on to Bethan

'My Kilburn' Then and Now photo competition

Jeremy Corbyn talks to Salma Yaqoob on Prevent problems and the alleged failure of multiculturalism