Should Brent Council raise Council Tax to protect key services?

That will be one of the key questions asked at Brent Scrutiny Committee tonight when they discuss the report of the Budget Scrutiny Panel. LINK

Last year a move to increase Council Tax by 2% was opposed by the Cabinet but the mood appears to have shifted since then. A 2% rise ring-fenced for Adult Social Care, as set out in the Chacellor's Autumn Statement seems inevitable. Another 2% to preserve vital services for the most vulnerable will be more controversial and debate is likely to centre around whether residents now having to pay a portion of Council tax, despite being poor, can be protected by revisions to the Council Tax Support scheme.

Much will depend on the view of Cllr Michael Pavey, deputy leader, who leads on the budget. Officers have repeatedly warned about the erosion of the Council Tax base although that has been offset to some extent by new housing coming on stream with an increased number of residents paying the tax and better collection rates.

The meeting is at 7pm tonight at the Brent Civic Centre and the public may attend.

The budgetr proposals will be discussed at Brent Connects meetings over the next few weeks:

 Brent Fightback will be holding an open meeting to discuss the options open to councils in the face of the devastating cuts they are being asked to make. It takes place at Brent Trades Hall on Wednesday January 13th at 7.30pm.

Brent consultation on Fire Brigade cuts on January 11th

A public consultation on how the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority can make £6.4m of budget savings for 2016/17 is being held between Monday, 7 December 2015 and Monday, 1 February 2016.

Members of London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority approved two proposals for consultation, both of which would ensure no fire station closures and no firefighters would be made compulsorily redundant.

What are the differences between the two options?

The main difference between the options is around the 13 fire engines that have been out of service for two years as part of Brigade's strike contingency arrangements.

If you require the document in a different format or if you would prefer a paper version of the consultation questionnaire, please email consultation@london-fire.gov.uk or call 0800 689 3489.

Public meetings

We will be holding four public meetings that are free for anyone to attend. All meetings will begin at 7pm and end no later than 9pm. This is the Brent meeting.

• 11 January 2016 - Conference Hall, Brent Civic Centre, Engineers Way, Wembley HA9 0FJ (map)

How to have your say

The consultation is a chance for Londoners to have their say on our budget proposals and how the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority can save £6.4m.  

• Open consultation questionnaire

Please return completed paper copies of the questionnaire to:
FREEPOST RRSK-TLGS-YLAK
Budget Consultation
169 Union Street
London
SE1 0LL

Navin Shah, Labour AM has urged residents to go to the meeting. He said:

 “With our fire services facing uncertain times, and response times already rising significantly in Brent, it’s important that local people have their say over the future of London’s fire service.

“The Mayor’s cuts mean that there are very tough decisions ahead. If you take fire engines out of service then of course response times could rise and lives could be put at risk. Nobody wants to see that happen. With frontline services at stake, it hugely important that local people are given the opportunity to make their views known.”

Is Brent Green Bin Tax a success?

Brent Scrutiny Committee will tonight discuss a report on the charge for Green Bin collections. In this guest blog Rik Smith considers the claims made in the report.
 

Since March 2015, Brent council introduced a £40 charge for households to have “green waste” collected regularly (ish) - before this point, most households had a green wheely bin which was collected weekly.

The Brent Scrutiny Committee agreed to review the impact of the changes to the “Garden Waste Service” (or known as the Green Bin tax by most residents) after 9 months of operation.

The green bin tax was anticipated to achieve the following outcomes:

A.    Deliver £378,000 financial savings

B.    Improve and extend the council’s recycling offer

C.    Reduce the amount of waste generated overall

D.    Better comply with the national waste hierarchy

It would be reasonable to expect cover these issues. The report can be found HERE

Overall, it’s not exactly the next PD James novel, but it does contain a significant amount of back slapping and a modest amount of retrospective learning - from the operational difficulty in dealing with ~20,000 requests to “opt in” and pay £40 for the waste collections.

In summary:

●      A) was over achieved due to greater than anticipated sign up

●      B) Brent will suggest that weekly blue bin (dry recycling) addresses this

●      C) not clear – as I will explain below.

●      D) dependent upon the outcome of C

Detail 

Deliver £378,000 financial savings

Brent estimated that 17,000  (15%) of households would sign up to the green bin tax, in reality, 20,000  (18%) signed up. This lead to the council receiving £480,000, a £3 profit for each household that signed up over and above the original target This is a modest surplus per additional household, but may also explain why the coucil are already suggesting that the green bin tax won’t increase next year - or suggest that their poor estimations led to them overcharging for the service. Another interpretation is of course that Brent is getting shafted by Veolia.

I say poor estimation because the sign up was 3,000 more than the 17,000 estimated, that’s a 17%  forecast error. It’s in the councils interest to understate the forecast for the following reasons. Low forecast leads to:

●      “higher than expected uptake” headlines, helping spin the introduction of the green bin tax in  a positive light

●      Bonus extra cash if forecast is exceeded because the cost per household is set to recover costs over a smaller number

●      Low probability of making a loss on the new scheme

Reduce the amount of waste generated overall

This is where spin on the green bin tax starts to wear a bit thin. It’s also worth remembering that at the same time as the green bin tax was introduced, we moved to weekly blue bin collections.

First a rather odd assertion, that moving from collecting the blue top bins (dry recycling) bins from every 2 weeks, to weekly would have zero impact - thoroughly implausible!

"It was also anticipated that the changes would have no significant impact on the council’s recycling rate. This was because it was predicted that the amount of dry recycling collected by the weekly service would remain the same”

I know before weekly blue bin collections i was regularly faced with an overflowing blue bin, so some residual cans or boxes went into the grey bin. If my experience is partially replicated across some of the 110,000 households then from April 2015 the council should expect grey bin (residual waste) volumes to FALL and blue bin (dry recycling) volumes to INCREASE - keep this in mind for later.

“whilst the amount of collected organic waste would reduce, it would be mainly displaced to home composting or to the council’s Recycling Centre at Abbey Road”

The rate of “organic waste” collected from households and recycling centres has fallen by 3,248 tonnes between April and October. This is equivalent to 72 kgs of organic waste for each of the 45,000 green bins that the council removed from residents. i’d estimate that to be 2, maybe 3 wheely bins FULL of grass or hedge trimmings. Composting this amount of green waste would require more than just a garden Dalek composting thing, and will soon mount up.

So what’s happening to this stuff if it’s not being collected? Yes some is probably being composted at home, but I’d argue the rest is going to landfill. However, the scrutiny report appears to ignore / gloss over this waste stream. The amount that goes to landfill is costing the council £82.60 for every tonne - this cost is glossed over and lost (and probably ignored) in the opaque mystery benefits stated earlier.

Furthermore, the report states

“... the service changes appear to have had a positive impact on the borough’s recycling rate, and have had no noticeable impact on residual waste (grey bin) tonnages”

The report appears to come to this conclusion with some very simplistic, and rather misleading graph below.

The blue bars are 2014, red bars 2015. The green Bin Tax was introduced on 31st March 2015 - so the very end of Q1.

The graph shows that Q2 2015 grey bin tonnages were more than in 2014 and that they increased by a greater amount between Q1 and Q2 in 2015 than they did in 2014. so I’d argue that there was an impact.

The GLARING omission is of course, Q3 and  Q4 2015 data. as a reminder Q2 is April to June and Q3 is July to September - arguably the time when gardeners would expect to cut the grass, prune hedges, weeding, and general maintenance in the garden during the summer. The exclusion of Q3 data in a report written to cover the 9 months from March is incompetent, but at worse it’s deliberately misleading. By the time the report was published, most of Q4 should have passed, allowing the council to make a reasonable estimate of Q4 volumes.

One data point is nowhere near enough data to draw any conclusions or make any decisions; instead more data should be presented.

Has Brent reduced the amount of waste generated overall? Probably, but only because some people will compost some of the waste themselves, even if all other green waste goes into the grey bin.

Better comply with the national waste hierarchy and does it now comply better with the national waste hierarchy?

Source LINK

Effecitvely, the idea is to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (then dump the rest) - in the process produce high quality (pure) recyclable material, and the smallest volume of landfill.

This is supported by the “landfill Tax” which is currently £82.60 and payable by councils and commercial producers of landfill waste.

The datum (singular data point) shows an increase in the amount of grey bin waste, and hides the impact in Q3 and Q4. it also hides the likely beneficial impact of the weekly blue bin collections and the likely replacement / uplift volume of green waste being diverted to landfill.

The diversion to landfill would be contrary to the national waste hierarchy, the fact these two events coincide make it very difficult to unpick the size of the impact of each on landfill waste, we can only look at the net impact.

in conclusion, there are a number of unanswered questions

1.     How much residual waste was produced in Q3 and Q4 2015 - and why wasn’t this included in this report?

2.     How much green waste did they estimate would be diverted to landfill by bin tax avoiding residents, and have they budgeted for this?

3.     How much green waste was collected in the 45,000 green bins removed from residents?

4.     Did the council intentionally under-estimate the green bin tax uptake, leading to overcharging residents?

5.     How does Brent’s performance compare to other councils in London and England that have introduced a similar Green Bin Tax?

Rally to support Heathrow 13 at Willesden Magistrates Court on January 18th

From Facebook events page hosted by No Dash for Gas

In the summer of 2015 activists staged a peaceful direct action at Heathrow Airport – less than a fortnight after the Airports Commission recommended a third runway at Heathrow. The action itself involved occupying the northern runway and erecting a tripod and fencing which the activists locked on to. The action stopped some flights, saved greenhouse gas emissions and most importantly put climate change, air and noise pollution back on the agenda.

The science tells us that deep cuts are required from existing levels of emissions to tackle climate change, but successive governments have failed to act. Direct action, therefore, is our only hope of securing a decent future for children everywhere. A new runway, and the hundreds of thousands of extra flights it would allow, would make the necessary cuts far more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. In addition, Heathrow hugely contributes to illegal levels of air and noise pollution, which have massive impacts on human health for people living near the airport.

For defending the planet and human health, the activists have been charged with aggravated trespass and being in a restricted area of the airport without permission. All 13 pleaded not guilty to all charges. If you want to show them your solidarity, please join for the first day of their trial on the morning of Monday 18th January 2015, at Willesden Magistrates’ Court.

To prevent catastrophic climate change and reverse the deadly levels of air pollution in our towns and cities we need to stop airport expansion. This is why we stand in solidarity with the 13 brave activists who occupied the runway at Heathrow, to say, No Ifs! No Buts! No More Runways!

Join us for a rally starting at 9am sharp outside Willesden Magistrates' Court

Please bring banners and come with well rested vocal cords!

The full address for the court is:

Willesden Magistrates’ Court
448 High Road
London
NW10 2DZ

(Nearest tubes: Neasden or Dollis Hill on the Jubilee  line

Greens launch Fair Fares revolution for London's tranport system

“We’ll level the playing field to make everyone’s journey to work  cost the same, removing the hidden penalties if you live in outer London, work part time, need to take two buses, or change between tube, bus and train on your way.”

On the day transport fares go up throughout the country, the Green Party today announces radical plans to flatten fares across the capital and make transport fairer for all Londoners.

The party’s three key measures are: the phased introduction of a flat fare structure, making zones a thing of the past; a daily cap for part-time workers that matches the rates paid by monthly season ticket holders; and a one-hour ‘ONE Ticket’ across all modes which will close the gaps for people who currently pay twice when changing from bus or train to the Tube as well as ensuring that people changing buses pay only once for their journey.

Sian Berry, Green Mayoral candidate said: 

It’s not fair that people in outer London pay so much more to get to work in the centre of the city - especially as it’s also easier for people in the centre of town to use even cheaper or free alternatives such as hire bikes, cycling or walking.

Sian, along with fellow City Hall candidates Caroline Russell and Shahrar Ali and veteran transport planner Dave Wetzel, the architect of Ken Livingstone’s Fares Fair policy at the GLC, will join local Green parties handing out #FairFares postcards at 50 rail and Tube stations all over London.

She said:

The focus of my fares policy is on closing the gaps where the current system is unfair. Flattening the zone structure is the most revolutionary idea for London’s fares since the introduction of the Travelcard in 1983, and I’m delighted that Dave Wetzel, who was in charge of transport in London then, is helping me launch it today.

A Green Mayor and Assembly Members will help level the playing field and make transport fairer and more equal for Londoners. It’s not fair that you have to pay more to change onto the tube from the national rail services that people in south London rely upon, or that if you need to take two buses to work you have to pay twice for your journey.

And it’s not fair that people who work part time pay more per day to get to work than people with full-time jobs – because the daily cap is much higher than what you will pay if you or your employer can afford an annual season ticket. People who work part time are often women, and more than half are paid less than the London Living Wage.

Tory Education policy: Preparing today's pupils for the past

Twitter and Facebook have been buzzing following the announcement of times table tests for 11 years to be introduced and integrated into the Key Stage 2 high stakes testing. So many interesting comments deserved a Storify slide show. Thanks to all the contributors - especially Michael Rosen and TeacherROAR

How can Brent Standards be upheld without properly apppinted 'Independent Persons?

Philip Grant has decided that he cannot continue his personal campaigning against what he sees as wrongs at Brent Council, because of the strain it has put on him and his family. In a final guest blog on the subject, he gives some thoughts on a report which will be going before Brent’s Standards Committee at its meeting on Thursday 7 January 2016.

High Standards of Conduct at Brent Council?

A press release issued by the Council on 11 December 2015 stated: ‘Brent Council is committed to the highest ethical standards in the work of its elected councillors and co-opted members, embodying the principles of selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.’ But how true is this in practice?

In her Annual Report for 2015 to Brent’s Standards Committee LINK the Monitoring Officer says that she received SIXTEEN complaints against councillors for breaches of the Members’ Code of Conduct during the year (nine from members of the public, two from Council employees and five from other councillors). One of the main purposes of the Standards Committee is to ‘hear allegations of misconduct against members’, but NONE of these complaints were actually referred to the committee in 2015, so that it could consider whether they should be investigated.

I was one of the local residents who made a complaint during the year against a leading councillor, which alleged multiple breaches (covering all seven of the conduct principles) of the Code which members are supposed to follow. My complaint must be among the EIGHT which the report claims ‘did not disclose a potential breach of the code’, as the reason why it was not brought to the attention of the Standards Committee. The Monitoring Officer has the authority not to consider a complaint, but only if it is not against a named member and/or is not ‘in relation to an alleged breach of the Code of Conduct’.

As anyone who has read my open letter of 27 November 2015 to Brent’s Chief Executive, Carolyn Downs LINK , will know, the allegations in my complaint to the Monitoring Officer against Cllr. Muhammed Butt disclosed a number of potential breaches of the Members’ Code of Conduct, which should have been referred to Standards Committee. How can Brent’s people have confidence that high standards of conduct are being maintained by the Council, when genuine complaints of misconduct are covered up in this way?

In explaining how complaints about members are dealt with, the Annual Report says (at 3.7): 

‘There are clear parameters for this and these are set out in the procedure LINK that was adopted by this Committee in January 2013’.   

If the complaint is one which should be considered, the procedure states (at 4.5):

‘The Monitoring Officer will consult with the Independent Person to determine the course of action to be taken.   This decision will normally be taken within 14 days of receipt of the complaint.’

It was only after I challenged the Monitoring Officer’s decision, made three months after my complaint had been received, not to refer my complaint to Standards Committee that a possible review by ‘the Independent Person under the Localism Act 2011’ was suggested.

Who is that Independent Person? According to the Monitoring Officer’s Annual Report (at 3.3):

‘The Council is in the process of recruiting Independent Persons to fulfil the requirements of the Localism Act 2011 …. The recruitment process will start in January 2016.’ *

The Council did appoint two Independent Persons under the Act’s transitional provisions, John Mann and Sola Afuape (who had both been independent members of Standards Committee under its old format). Those appointments ended in May 2014, and these two persons were not eligible to act as Independent Persons thereafter. Minutes of Council meetings show that there have been “vacancies” for Independent Persons for Standards purposes since then, and that NO ONE has been properly appointed to fill that role. It would appear that, for more than eighteen months, Brent Council has not had “an Independent Person under the Localism Act 2011”. In that case, how can Brent’s Standards procedures have been properly applied?

Standards Committee meets at the Civic Centre on Thursday 7 January to consider the Annual Report. The meeting starts at 7pm, and is open to the public. I hope that the committee members will ask the Monitoring Officer to explain why she is not allowing them to carry out the important work of hearing ‘allegations of misconduct against members’ which they were elected to do. Unless there is openness and accountability over standards, Brent, like Rotherham in an Inspector’s report last February, will show itself to be a council which ‘goes to some length to cover up information and to silence whistle-blowers.’

* NOTE:

Wembley Matters readers may like to consider whether they could help to improve standards of conduct at Brent Council by applying to be an Independent Person. The role should be advertised later this month, but from a previous “candidate pack” (issued by the then Monitoring Officer, Fiona Ledden, in April 2014) the main requirements are:

·      to be committed to the need for high standards in public life and be aware of the views of the local community in relation to standards;

·      to have the ability to be objective, independent and impartial;

·      to have a demonstrable interest in local issues and desire to serve the local community and uphold democracy; and,

·      to be of good standing in the community.

There is one main bar to appointment as an Independent Person:

‘A person cannot be appointed as an Independent Person if they have been a member of any political party within the last five years or are actively engaged in party political activity.’ 

Sadiq Khan exposes Mo Butt's short-sightedness

Muhammed Butt retweeted Sadiq Khan, Labour candidate for Mayor on New Year's Eve,  not realising perhaps that in his Independent article Khan advocated exactly the sort of playground that Cllr Butt had bull-dozed in Stonebridge.

Khan's position chimes with Save Stonebridge campaign's argument that the playground brought the community together, aided social cohesion and reduced crime.