Brent's Cricklewood PSPO against casual workers opposed by Brent's Independent councillor

Cllr Helen Carr (Independent, Mabesbury) has reiterated her opposition to the extension of a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) in Cricklewood. Consultation has closed on the extension which will go through to December 2017. The PSPO is aimed at workers waiting to be picked up for casual work. This has been a traditional picking up point for decades and formerly the casual workers were Irish, now they are also from Eastern and Central Europe.

Cllr Carr said,  "Shall we ban the homeless, as far right Hungarian, Victor Orban, has done?" LINK

She went on:

I oppose this extension, on the following grounds: This is a draconian measure not originally intended as a response to the complaints of, what I understand it, are a handful of people, albeit they have clocked up more than 400 complaints in a year. This does not mean people should not complain - I myself continually alert the Transport police to Romanian speaking beggars on the underground (a losing battle ..,) who when challenged in Romanian (as I am very capable of doing given my background), can become aggressive. But we need to ask who these young women are (invariably young women), where are they from, and why do they beg? Are they being coerced by a larger, nastier gang (invariably yes) observing them from the next carriage who will physically abuse them if they do not bring home a set amount of takings each day?  

The measure is not successful: at 7am, when I usually set out for work and pass through the Broadway, it did not take long for the small groups of men hoping to gain work, to resume unchallenged. The measure ensured they congregated elsewhere outside the zone, and in cafes etc. As I understand it from the Police themselves, this is an historical issue and originates long before the arrival of Romanians, who seems to be the new Irish in terms of being subject to prejudice and discrimination as the suppliers of no skill/low skilled casual labour. 

Not all residents support this move: I appreciate and agree with those who claim the police are unable to implement the measure - they have more serious issues to attend to. This, then, sets a very bad precedent. In the UK, policing is by consent. Servants not masters. In Romania, as in other new democracies of Eastern & Central Europe  I have lived and worked in which are only recently free of totalitarian rule, the police are a generally viewed as bodies to be feared. They operate by  a mixture of dazzle, bribery and intimidation: coercion not persuasion and consensus. We need to use these measures sparingly if the tolerance and co operation of our own police are not to be considered weaknesses and vulnerabilities to be exploited.

These are difficult and dangerous times. We need to protect those fleeing war, persecution, discrimination and deprivation. Not lock them up.

This was the Council's introduction to the consultation:

Brent Council is consulting to extend a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) from 21 December, 2016 until 20 December, 2017, which banned the practice of picking up workers for casual cash-in-hand labour within a specified area. Casual workers hired in this way are often exploited, earning less than the minimum wage and exposed to unsafe working environments.

The congregation of people looking for casual work has long been causing problems in the community. The individuals harass and intimidate passers-by and are responsible for other anti-social behaviour in the area. For a number of years there have been complaints from residents and businesses about groups of casual labourers congregating in Cricklewood Broadway and surrounding roads and car parks who harass, intimidate and enact other ASB. A side-effect of this labour market is increased rough sleeping in Brent’s parks, as well as additional levels of street drinking and a spike in offences such as criminal damage and burglary.

From 01/04/2016 to the 30/10/2016 there have been 170 calls – 13% of the calls were between 07:00 and 12:00 hours, this is the peak time for the direct ASB impact from the migrant labour market. We have issued many warnings to businesses advising that they can be fined for picking up workers, and this is reducing the number of people gathering in these areas in hopes of work. However, there is still a long way to go, and we need to keep reinforcing this message consistently to reduce the problem further.  The current PSPO expires on 20 December, 2016.

The consultation will consider whether the PSPO should be extended for a further 12 months until 20 December, 2017, to allow us to continue to penalise those who encourage casual labour markets in the area. The restricted area and prohibitions will remain the same.

Proposed area:

Shoot Up Hill junction with Walm Lane to Chichele Road to Anson Road to Heber Road to Larch Road to Mora Road to Cricklewood Broadway following the railway line to the iron bridge and south along Cricklewood Broadway to Shoot Up Hill junction with Walm Lane. This also includes all other roads, any public space, and communal areas within the mapped area,

The controversy  follows that over a report to the Council's Equality Committee on the Eastern European Community which it was alleged perpetuated negative stereotypes about the Romanian community in particular. LINK LINK

Dicing with death to recycle in Brent

Entrance

Dangerous bend

Bend on exiting

I took some small redundant electrical items to the Brent Re-use and Recycling Centre this morning, the sort of job you can catch up on in the dead days between Christmas and the New Year. Such items cannot be put in the blue bins or general waste.

Little did I realise that by doing so I was taking my life in my hands. The entrance to the depot is along along a bendy road with no footway for 200 yards.  The road is used by large trucks and vans as well as cars, and pedestrians are at risk, particularly on an icy morning as it was today.

If West London Waste Authority and Brent Council are serious about encouraging recycling then a safe pedestrian entrance for residents arriving by public transport is surely essential.  The Centre is easily accessible from Stonebridge Park station or the 112 bus.

As I left the entrance road, a couple with several bags of recycling arrived, hesitated, and then decided not to risk the trip to the Centre.

I wonder how many others have done that?

FA bids to increase the number of full-capacity events at Wembley Stadium

High rise developments around Wembley Stadium today

The Football Association is bidding to increase the number of full-capacity events at Wembley Stadium.  At present the cap is 20 per year and the FA wants to increase this by 20 to 57 per year - more than one a week.

The FA will be making a presentation at the next Brent Connects Wembley as part of the consultation process.  They have left little time for a public response as Brent Council expect the formal application to be made around January 20th 2017. There will be just 30 minutes allocated to the presentation by the FA and questions from the public.

Meanwhile little further has been heard about the FA's opposition to Quintain's  housing developments close to the stadium which they felt pose a danger to fans. LINK

Other weighty issues will also be on the agenda for the meeting including consultation on the 2017-17 council budget and  on how the Community Infrastructure Levy (CiL) should be spent.  The CiL is the contribution made by developers towards improvements in local infrastructure (roads, nurseries. schools, health facilities etc) and is subject to some controversy.  Some feel it should be spent in the immediate area of developments like South Kilburn, Wembley and Alperton while others feel its benefits should be distributed across the borough. Negotiations over the amount of CiL between the Council and developers are an issue that could benefit from deeper scrutiny.

Brent Connects is 7pm-9pm  on Wednesday January 11th at Patidar House, 22 London Road, off Wembley High Road, HA9 7EX

Click on image to enlarge

Are our public parks in peril?

The above report by Katy Layton Jones calmly sets out the crisis that may soon engulf our public parks as local authorities budgets are stripped to the minimum and cash hungry councils are tempted to sell land off to developers. The Report merits much wider discussion

The extracts below set out the case and the full report can be viewed HERE

--> Money for the day-to-day business of maintaining public parks in decent condition has always been tight. Even during the good years described above, parks managers’ budgets were being nibbled away. But since 2010 the scale of the cuts to local authority budgets along with continuing restrictions on local authorities’ ability to raise council tax levels has had an impact on 
a different order of magnitude.
In some instances, councils have
stated explicitly that there will be no
budget for public parks from 2017 onwards. Their lack of asset value in terms of hard cash has made public parks effectively invisible in the Government’s calculation of council budgets. It is therefore unsurprising that a financial black hole has emerged which again risks consuming the cherished green spaces of countless communities around the UK.  

To some extent the impact of recent cuts has been disguised by twenty years of signifcant investment from the National Lottery. Much of the most egregious decay and dereliction was repaired, although HLF’s insistence on the need for ongoing maintenance was not always heeded. For national government, it provided a comforting sense that the matter was in
hand, complemented by a number of actions, such as the Urban White Paper (2000), its policy document Cleaner Safer Greener (2003) and the setting up of CABESpace in 2003. At a local level also, Lottery investment had created a positive mood about parks, resulting in the development of green space strategies and growth in user groups. 

However, these funds were never designed as a substitute for local authority funding, nor for national leadership, and today the provision
of even modest levels of partnership funding is beyond many local authorities. For many park managers, the time-consuming process of compiling grant applications, or
even applying for Green Flag status,
is no longer practicable. Baseline services are at risk of being withdrawn altogether, with the threat that our historic parks will once again become dirty and dangerous, and as users become discouraged, a spiral of decline will once again begin. 

The threat to public parks posed by austerity and the current political direction extends beyond direct budget cuts. Since 2010, the Government has abdicated its role in providing leadership. There has been a complete absence of strategic responsibility at Government level since the closure of CABESpace in 2011. The Design Council, which was charged with taking over CABE’s responsibilities, ignored the remit of CABESpace. The closure of CABESpace was followed in 2013 by the loss of Green Space, the charity which represented parks interests, largely due to a lack of Government support. 

Compounding the absence of national leadership, there are now question marks hanging over the future of individual local authorities. The reorganisation and merger of local authorities is currently the subject of numerous consultations across the country. Dorset is one such example, where nine authorities may be replaced by just two. While advocates of the proposal champion the potential savings to be made by combining departments and reducing personnel, such a radical reformation of management poses very real risks for public parks including the loss of local personnel; the loss of long-term management experience of specific sites; interruption to and potential loss of existing local authority funding streams; instability and disjunction in
the implementation of management strategies; and obscuring of accountability as authorities become physically distant from widely-dispersed parks and community groups. If reorganisation is designed to save costs, it is likely that non-statutory services such as parks will bear the brunt of so-called  efficiencies.

Recommendations 

 

The current status quo is unsustainable and the undoing of all that has been achieved in the past twenty years should be unthinkable. Yet parks are already entering a spiral of decline and this time there will be no miraculous multi-million pound bail-out by the Lottery. We must take decisive action now to save our public parks. 

.        Make the maintenance of public parks a statutory duty for local authorities. 

.        Identify and publish baseline funding requirements for all parks. 

.        Enable local authorities to employ taxation as a mechanism for funding parks. 

.        Establish and fund a national champion body for urban parks and green space. 

.        Strengthen protection in the planning system afforded to parks as ‘Non-designated heritage assets’ or Assets of Community Value. 

.        Acknowledge the success of local authorities in managing public parks for over a century and recognise that for most parks there is no viable alternative 

.        Fund a comprehensive green space mapping project to record the extent, distribution and quality of public parks across Britain. 


Poignant end for the blasted oak of Barn Hill

I came across this rather sad sight on Barn Hill today and a couple stopped to talk about what used to be the 'Hollow Tree' or 'Blasted Oak' well known to locals and walkers.

The oak, hollowed out by a lightning stroke with a sooty interior where children could stand, has been hanging on to life for years, but must have been deemed unsafe. The couple's children had played in and around the tree as had many primary classes I take to the park in my work with Brent School Without Walls. The tree had a fairy story quality that immediately attracted children and stimulated many speculative questions and comments.

The sight of the felled remains of the tree was strangely moving, the end of a venerable oak that had been there for well over 100 years, and a marker of the passage of time and final, inevitable, decay.

Note: The oak was beside the footpath at the Beverly Gardens end of Barn Hill.  There is another on the other side of Fryent Country Park at Beane Hill.

Another battle between Harrow School and locals comes to a head next month

I have reported the battle between local people in Harrow and Harrow School over the school's plans to build on Metropolitan Open Land and spoil views of the Hill LINK but the school and locals are enaged in another battle, which started in 2003, and is due to come to a head next month.

There is to be three day Harrow School Footpaths Diversion Inquiry at Harrow Civic Centre from January 17th to January 19th 2016 by the Planning Inspectorate where evidence from the public and the school will be heard.

The conflict was reported by The Guardian in 2011 LINK and this extract summarises the issue quite well:

The extraordinary row, which threatens to end in court, stems from a multimillion-pound development of the school's facilities eight years ago when, next to a running track and an extended sports centre, two all-weather pitches were built. At the time, it was agreed by the Ramblers Association – erroneously, it now claims – that the pitches could be put on top of the old pathway as long as an alternative route was created.

But the alternative path, known as a permissive path because its continued existence is at the whim of the school, has now been deemed unacceptable by local walkers. Legally, because it does not follow the route of the old path, the right for people to walk on the new path could be summarily removed with six months' notice, it says.

And because the path circumvents the school's pitches, it has extended what was a gentle stroll across the grounds into a trek. "The permissive path probably pretty well doubles the distance of when you enter the playing fields to when you leave the playing fields," said Graham Wright, the Ramblers Association's local footpath secretary. "These people actually want to get to Harrow, they don't want to walk that extra bit and in some ways they are not having the beauty of Harrow Hill.

"The proper path has the views of St Mary's church and Harrow Hill as you walk, whereas when you do the permissive path you are looking towards Northwick Park hospital and Watford Road. It's not quite the same."

The Ramblers Association says that a small path between the two all-weather pitches should be opened up to the public to resurrect the old path. But the school, which charges up to £30,000 a year per pupil in fees, is not budging, prompting accusations of "arrogance" from some quarters.

The school's application, which includes allegations of dog excrement on the fields and the public wandering off the path can be found HERE

Good news for Preston Library but long-term arrangements still to be agreed

The video above shows, as background to the talk,  how Preston Library campaigners have created a professional looking community library in the building that Brent Council closed down. They are now looking forward to discussing the long-term future of the library with councillors and officers after their licence to use the building was extended until at least the end of July 2017. One area of uncertainty is whether the Council will keep their promise of making the premises rent-free. Without that undertaking the future of the library is in doubt.

The lead member for Stronger Communities, which covers libraries, is now Cllr Tom Miller.

There is an extra film show at the library tomorrow at 2pm (doors open 1.45pm). The film is a U certificate with a Christmas theme. 

After this the library takes a break re-opening on Wednesday January 4th.

Last chance for truly unique opportunity to give political advice to Brent Labour Group

There is just over a week left to apply for the challenging job of Political Assistant to the Brent Labour Group.  The post is recommended to any person able to ride several horses, galloping in several different directions, at once.

POLITICAL ASSISTANT TO THE LABOUR GROUP LINK

Salary range: £33,660 - £36,558 p.a. inc.

Contract: Fixed term (Contracted until May 2018, with the possibility to extend)

Hours of work: 36 hours per week

Location: Civic Centre and other locations from time to time

This is an exciting, high profile opportunity to work at the cutting edge of local government for an innovative local authority.  

Brent is a tremendously vibrant London borough where the iconic arch of Wembley Stadium dominates the skyline. Spanning both inner and outer London, it is a borough of huge contrasts in terms of its economic, environmental, ethnic and social make up. Brent’s diversity is evident to all who visit our borough and our long history of ethnic and cultural diversity has created a place that is truly unique and valued by those who live and work here.

The council is pursuing a far-reaching transformation agenda that better meets the needs of our community so it is an exciting time to join us.

The Post

The Labour Group is looking for experience in working – paid or unpaid – in a political environment, a professional approach with the organisational skills to deal with shifting priorities. You will need to demonstrate your awareness of new legislation and political developments (local, regional and national) with particular reference to the Labour Party.

This post is politically restricted* and will be offered in line with current legislation governing Political Assistant Posts. This is a temporary role to May 2018.

As the Group’s Political Assistant you will be carrying out a range of interesting duties including:

• undertaking political research in Council matters
• assisting with the composition and issuing of press releases
• attending Labour Group meetings to provide information and advice to Council Members
• liaising with Members of Parliament and Officers of the Council

The Person

Ideally, you will be a member of the Labour Party and have:

• research/administrative experience
• experience of dealing with public bodies or political organisations
• a good knowledge of Council political structure and public affairs
• good interpersonal skills and organisational skills
• good computer skills including word processing, spread sheets, database and desk top publishing
• the ability to work under pressure as part of a team as well as use your own initiative

Closing Date: 2 January 2016 (23:59)

Assessment & Interview Date: w/c 9 January 2016

*Although the advertisement says the post is politically restricted this appears on the job description LINK:

DBS Status	Not Required
Politically Restricted	No