Brent Cabinet 'thrilled' by land deal with off-shore companies

A Cabinet meeting tonight, which devoted about 3 minutes to each item on the agenda, approved the Council's controversial Stonebridge-Bridge Park land deal with off-shore companies.  The Lead Member for the issue is Muhammed Butt, Leader of the Council, who now appears to be leading on Regeneration, and he spoke glowingly of the project, the removal of the 'eye sore' Unisys and the opportunities it offered to the Council.

In a rushed but stumbling speech Cllr Butt claimed that the off-shore risk was mitigated by  the creation of a UK subsidiary company by the off-shore GMH with off-shore Harborough Invest acting as the second guarantor.

The issue was covered by the Kilburn Times LINK today as well as by Wembley Matters LINK a week ago but this stimulated no questionning by any members of the Cabinet and Deputy Leader Margaret McLennan outdid her leader in euphoria declaring that she was 'thrilled' by the deal. No questions were asked and no discussion took place before the proposal was rubber-stamped.

For 'those who have eyes to see' there were plenty of between the lines reservations in the report from Officers and I have heard the Cabinet's decision described as 'ill-advised rather than illegal'.

All other business went through without any discussion apart from expressions of mutual admiration from  Cabinet members.

The Scrutiny recommendations on the controversial Sustainability and Transformation Plan (a cover for cuts or a brave new integrated world) were about process rather than content and were approved:

1. An update be provided to the committee on the OnePublic Estate, including an update on the Central Middlesex and Willesden Hubs.

2. Efforts be made to engage with health scrutiny across north-west London with regard to the Sustainability and Transformation Plan.

3. Consideration be given to collaborative work with Healthwatch groups to support engagement around the Sustainability and Transformation Plan.

4. A regular progress report on the Sustainability and Transformation Plan be provided to the committee, the first of these to be provided six months from the date of the current meeting.

There was no discussion on the One Public Estate Plan where the position of voluntary organisations being charged market rents for use of NHS Estate's property has caused much consternation in the sector. Muhammed Butt is also the Lead Member on this issue.

The Budget Task Group's recommendations would be 'taken into consideration' and Cllr Southwood promised dialogue but made no promise on the Task Group's opposition to bulk collection charges.

Cllr Mitchell-Murray, lead member for Children and Families sent her apologies to the meeting LINK. Muhammed Butt took over her role in December with the Council stating that she hoped to retrun in January 2017.

New lead member for Regeneration, Cllr Shama Tatler was present and seemed extremely happy to be at the top table but made only a very minor contribution. The demarcation between her role and that of Muhammed Butt, which led to the conflict between Butt and Cllr Mashari, still seems unclear.

Will Brent be paying interpreters enough under the new contract?

Brent Cabinet will tonight award a new interpretating service contract to DA Languages Ltd. Although the report does not mention the rate the company pays to interpreters, and the information is not readily available on their website. However, I have ascertained they pay at the lower end of such provision, at £12 for the first hour and £10 per hour after that, paid at 15 minute intervals. If you take off costs of travel and travel time the rate is much lower.

The Council will also try and move the service to telephone rather than face to face, to save money, although it does not evaluate this in terms of the client's interests:

Whilst demand can be managed in some areas, for example by encouraging customers to be accompanied by family members who are able to interpret, there are many situations where this can’t be done, particularly in CYPS where an independent professional interpreter is needed. In this area, there is demand for interpreters for:

• Social work safeguarding assessments
• Family Court proceedings
• No Recourse to Public Funds assessments
• Assessments of Unaccompanied Asylum seekers

It is clear that this is skilled work where any errors could have a profound impact on clients' lives. The question is will the rates DA Languages pay be sufficient to attract the most highly skilled interpreters.

The Cabinet report states:

 Based on the volumes from September 2015 to August 2016, the annual cost of the new contract will be £224k, which represents a 6% saving of £14k. The cost of the contract over three years would therefore be £671k. This is less than the Council’s target procurement savings of 10% per contract. 


Spend through the contract can be reduced by encouraging use of the telephone interpreting service, which has no minimum charges, and no late cancellation charges. An interpreting appointment of less than 45 minutes will always cost less if telephone interpreting is used instead. 


Based on historic usage, 50% of spoken face to face appointments of 1 hour or less actually take 45 minutes or less. Moving these to telephone interpreting would save a further £6k. This would allow the Council to broadly meet its 10% procurement savings target on this contract. 


For comparison these are the fees paid by the Government from their website. LINK Note the much higher fee for the first hour and the travel expenses:  

Monday to Friday

First hour: £48 then:

• 8.01am to 6pm: £16 per hour
• 6.01pm to 8pm: £20 per hour
•  

Saturday

First hour: £72 then £26 per hour

Sundays and bank holidays

First hour: £72 then: £32 per hour

Minimum payment is for three hours. (You will only receive one minimum payment and one first hour enhanced payment in any 24 hour period.)

Telephone interpreting rates:

£10 for every 30 minutes 8.01am to 11.59pm

£20 for every 30 minutes midnight to 8am

Travel expenses

Car: more than 50 miles (one way): 23.8 a mile (for each mile in excess of 50 miles).

Actual car parking costs in all cases if most economical route has been taken to the office (to a maximum of £13 if short-stay car parking).

There are exceptions to the maximum car parking fee, for example airport car parking when air transport is a requirement.

We do not reimburse travel costs for interpreters whose travel from home to work and back falls within zones 1 to 6, as the cost of a return journey using an oyster card will be under £13.00 each day. (Interpreters are paid an enhanced first hour each day to cover the costs of any additional expenses incurred during your booking.)

Public transport: actual fare refunded in full if:

• tickets or receipts are provided; and
• most economical route taken; and
• fare (or season ticket if advanced bookings made in same period mean this is more cost effective) over £13.

Camden kids demand clear air

"I want a limousine. But an electric one" Short clip from our reportage on #London's fight for #cleanair. Replay via https://t.co/wIlmCiGPB7 pic.twitter.com/PJghhxp4D2

— Avenue de l'Europe (@avenuedeleurope) January 16, 2017

More questions than answers at Brent Council on school expansions and Bridge Park

I drew attention recently to the blackout on the apparent problems with some current Brent school expansion projects that the public have not been allowed to hear about. LINK

Information was withheld at the Cabinet meeting and the decision made in private session and now councillors have been told that the public will have to be excluded if the issue is raised at Full Council on January 23rd.

The issue is possibly about three current expansion projects at Byron Court Primary,  Stonebridge Primary and Elsley Primary schools. It is likely that the price agreed on the projects with contractors has not been viable and the Council is either left with having to pay out more or downgrading the designs.

The accountability issue is whether there was any fault by either side on the procurement of these works and at what financial or quality cost.

Item 9 is about decisions taken by the Leader and/or Cabinet because of their urgency before before Full Council.

Apart from the IT items clearly the Bridge Park Conditional Land Sale Agreement is important.  This involves Brent Council working with development companies registered in off-shore as covered on Wembley Matters LINK.

It is not entirely clear whether Full Council will be able to discuss this as the note above states, 'The matters before the Council are merely for reporting by the Leader of the Council.' Will the public me excluded from any discussion on this as well?

Lorraine King announces her departure from the Brent and Kilburn Times

Lorraine King

Lorraine King announced on Twitter over the weekend that she will be leaving the Brent and Kilburn Times at the end of this month:

Sad to say I'll be leaving the @bktimes on January 31 after many, many years. I'm really sad to go but as they  say onwards and upwards

Lorraine has been reporter, news editor and digital editor at the Kilburn Times and will be moving elsewhere in Archant.  Her tweet immediately drew tributes from Brent residents' associations, councillors and many  Kilburn Times readers.

Fans will still be able to hear her DJing on Colourful Radio on Saturday mornings. http://www.colourfulradio.com/

Lorraine's strength as a reporter and editor is that she is a Brent local with strong roots in the community and cares deeply about  what goes on in the area.

There have been times when her passion to fight for the community through campaigning articles has not made her popular with the local council (of whatever political hue) but the role of a local newspaper is to help hold politicians to account and that she did well.

These are difficult times for local newspapers and Archant is going through a second round of  restructuring and has reduced reporting staff with more pooled stories and a move towards 'digital first'.  The Brent and Kilburn Times has become thinner and distribution is sometimes patchy but I believe that it is essential that it survives for the sake of local democracy and part of the glue that holds a community together.

Here are some memorable front pages fom the Kilburn Times:

PS Lorraine, I resisted mentioning the shoes.

Oliver Goldsmith will be open as usual tomorrow

The replacement part (from Twitter)

Oliver Goldsmith Primary School, Kingsbury, has announced that it will be open as usual tomorrow, Monday  January 16th, following a repair to its boiler.

The school had to close on Friday 13th when the boiler broke down and the school was without heating or hot water.

Congratulations to all concerned for a speedy repair.

Cllr Miller sets out Brent Council's gang strategy ahead of Tuesday's meeting

Ahead of Tuesday's 'It's time to talk about gangs' at the Roundwood Centre (5.30-8.30pm) LINK I though it worth blogging this question and response on gangs from the next Council Meeting agenda LINK:

Question from Cllr J Mitchell Murray to Cllr Miller, Lead Member for Stronger Communities:

Can the Cabinet Member explain: what is being done in Brent to protect children and young people from being drawn into or exploited by gangs; what we are doing to better understand what draws young people towards gangs; what can be done to help those who want to escape; and, what more we can do to pursue, catch and prosecute those who are wilfully engaged in gang-related crime? 

Response: 

Based on the Metropolitan Polices gangs matrix there are currently 21 gangs in Brent. Gangs and gang related offending continues to remain a concern and a priority for Brent, with links between Child Sexual Exploitation and County Lines emerging. There are estimated to be over 1,000 individuals involved with gang criminality in Brent, whilst the current Metropolitan Police Gangs matrix for Brent has 282 identified gang members. The Brent gangs’ cohort is over 90% male, 80% black, and has an average age of 24 years old. The long standing gang issues in Brent have created a cohort which is older than most London boroughs. Currently only 6% of the cohort are 17 years old or under, compared to the London average of 20%. 

The current rise in knife injury victims (under 25 year’s old - non domestic abuse), with 16 year old victims and 23 year old victims overrepresented, suggests gangs are a continuing issue in Brent’s youth population. The figures contradict the below average number of youths on the gangs matrix. Multi agency Work is currently being developed to better identify our youth gang associates, including our enhanced partnership intelligence meetings and focused deterrence forums. Police operations continue to enforce ongoing gang activity, with Dedicated Ward Officers still very much having focus on any gang hotspot areas and targeted intelligence gathering to aid enforcement. Other partners also feed into this intelligence gathering exercise. 

Such partnership interventions are coordinated by the council Community Protection service, to focus on certain gang hotspot areas, as well as certain gang associates including Young People on the fringes of gang activity in terms of preventative and deterrent interventions; as well as any possible links to child exploitation. All partnership interventions link in with missing and child sexual exploitation panels to ensure all intelligence links to create a clear valid picture of the issues we face. 

Unfortunately there has not been the same amount of resources made available across London to aid this prevention work as previous years have seen, therefore the partnership have been working with what resources they have to make the biggest difference possible. Our focused work is largely set by progressive analytical capabilities through detailed analytical work to ensure wider focused work, via our Focused Gang Deterrent Group meetings and the fortnightly partnership gang intelligence meetings. All partners feed into this analysis, including Police, children’s services, Youth offending, family solutions, specialist CSE workers and voluntary sector organisations. 

The community protection service commission external voluntary sector organisations to complete gang mentoring schemes, and many referrals for this mentoring come from Brent Social workers, Police Safer School Officers and other education placements. We advocate, through our partnership forums, that information sharing is key to help prevent gang recruitment, as well as ensuring we make an offer of support and exit options for anyone wishing to exit gang life. We have also utilised some MOPAC grant funding to fund a specialist gang mentor within the Youth Offending Service to offer more immediate focused support for those young people a little more entrenched in offending and gang life. In the first six months of 2015/16, 31 young people assessed as being significantly less gang affected after engaging with this specific intervention. 

Other interventions which we offer to young people identified as having possible gang affiliation include mentoring through sports interventions and music programmes, all of which are commissioned by the council with resources available. The Safer Neighbourhood Board have also commissioned some specific mentoring and education programmes to aid better awareness of gang issues in Brent for individuals in our PRUs. Police are key to these interventions and forums and information sharing between all statutory and non-statutory partners to ensure focused intervention takes place for any young person identified or refereed. 

Moving forward, we know that we need to continue our focused work, and especially more so on identifying young people associated with gang activity. Current partnership structures will aid this and although we don’t currently have a deployable resource available for emergency cases or enough resource to tackle the current scale of the issue we fact, thankfully the MOPAC London Crime Prevention Fund reallocated funds for Brent 2017-2019 projects, which resulted in a slight uplift of allocated funds. In December 2016 we put a proposal forward requesting to utilise some of these additional funds to help us better respond to our gang issue in Brent. 

The proposal included two gang mentors, one mentor will be a specialist young person’s mentor. Each mentor will support 20-30 gang affected people in Brent through targeted referral routes, as well as linking in with the wider partnership offender management programme proposed which will commission further sports mentoring and housing support. A third gang mentor will also be located within the Civic Centre with specialist onsite support for Youth Offending Service, Children’s Social Care including Early Help. As part of this new approach, we hope these posts will better align itself with those teams supporting Brent’s wider gang nominals, and work across all age groups in order to secure the best possible outcomes for young people. The programme will also provide a minimum of five education projects throughout the year in targeted schools, totalling to 10 as well as look to provide peer training for those who have engaged significantly. 

Aims for the new proposed programmes include:

1. Target number of referrals per quarter (specific number set for each programme). 2. 70% of those referrals that engaged will take positive action to address primary pathway/need.
3. 15% reduction in re-offending committed by the cohort in 6 months following engagement with programme, in comparison to offending rate 6 months prior to the programme.
4. 70% of those referrals that engaged will significantly be less gang affected (Gang programmes)
5. 70% Improved understanding and awareness of the impact of gangs and gang offending (education sessions). 

We also see the huge importance of involving our communities to help tackle these community based issues facing our young people of Brent. Last year we had a community led conference to ensure we involved as many partners from all sectors, as well as community members, as possible. We have seen however that community members including young people are sometimes reluctant to come forward and speak out against gangs. 

We have scheduled a further community event with our Partnership colleagues in January 2017  Janiary 17th Roundwood Centre) as a follow up platform, namely the ‘It’s Time to Talk about Gangs’ event. The event will take the form of 'Question Time' where all members of Brent's community are invited to come along and take part in a panel discussion followed by workshops to develop real, community-led solutions to the issues raised. 

Brent Youth Offending Service (YOS) also provides a range of specific support and interventions which I have provided some examples of below: 

• The Youth Support Programme is a Brent Youth Offending Service intervention programme that works with gang affected young people. Since its establishment in 2013 the 1.0 FTE Youth Support Worker has supported young people to exit gangs, develop greater empathy, access mentoring provision and diversionary activities, and obtain formally accredited achievements. Twenty one gang affected young people were referred to the programme from the Youth Offending Service, and a further 15 accessed services from multi-agency panels and the community between July and September 2016. In the first six months of 2015/16, 31 young people were assessed as being significantly less gang affected.
• Young people subject to court orders supervised by the YOS, who have been assessed using the YOS statutory Asset Plus assessment as being at risk of gang affectedness, are offered support and advice during supervision sessions, and are where appropriate required to attend interventions that will help them to desist from gang related activities. This includes attending the YOS delivered Weapons Awareness group work programme.
• Young people are also referred to other statutory and community services including Family Solutions, Plias mentoring, business mentoring, Safer London Pan London Gangs Provision, and the St. Giles Trust.
• As a regular contributor, Brent YOS shares and acts upon information gathered at the Brent Gangs Intelligence Hub. This includes the provision of information such as Court Order details and conditions, compliance, and gang associations.

Call for independent review of Brent planning decisions after 'damning' PcW report

Following on the revelations of 'fraud and errors risks'  in Brent Council Planning Department's processes LINK the Brent Conservative Group have submitted a motion calling for an independent review of planning application decisions made in the Price Waterhouse Cooper's report period:

PLANNING SHAMBLES 

“This Council notes the damning report by Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) into the workings of the Brent planning department......the report highlighted:

1. "Significant weaknesses in the planning application review and assessment process."
   
2. "The Council may not be able to demonstrate that it has taken steps to prevent bribery resulting in non- compliance with the Bribery Act 2010."
   
3. "Anti - bribery awareness training has not been provided to planning staff."
   
4. "Audit trail is susceptible to manipulation .This could result in planning applications being approved inappropriately due to fraud or error."
   
5. "No code of conduct for officers. No requirement for officers to make formal declaration of interest."
   

PWC concluded that it could only give the Brent planning service "limited assurance." 

This Council believes that only "limited assurance” is simply unacceptable, and believes that it is essential that all our residents have confidence in the integrity of the planning process. 

In the light of the PWC report, this Council instructs the Chief Executive to initiate an independent review into planning applications submitted in the report period - 01/01/16 to 31/07/16 - and to report back to Full Council with the results of her findings.”

The motion will be heard at the Full Council meeting at Brent Civic Centre on January 23rd LINK