NHS workers warn of the dangers of premature full re-opening of schools

NHS workers are circulating an open letter to Matt Hancock regarding the dangers of the complete re-opening of schools too early.  NHS workers can add their names HERE

NHS staff support school workers

PLEASE READ AND SIGN THE OPEN LETTER BELOW

Dear Matt Hancock,

As NHS workers with children currently attending school, we are worried about recent speculation that schools could be wholly reopened soon.

The risks of working at the current time should not need explaining to the government. Your own working patterns have resulted in widespread, high profile infection among the ministers and professionals we see on TV every day. The Prime Minister required intensive care treatment, which, in his own words ‘could have gone either way’. We too have seen the impact of this virus at work in essential jobs - although those of us who have had it, may never know because we have not been tested and no antibody test is on the horizon.

The systematic review in the Lancet recently (see below) concluded that evidence regarding the impact of school closures is ‘equivocal’. What is not equivocal, however, is that social distancing works and that school closures ‘flatten the curve’ for other infectious respiratory diseases - such as influenza. The reason findings are equivocal about school closures, per se, for coronavirus specifically is because nobody has kept schools open while maintaining the other measures. What does that tell you? Do not make us the global guinea pigs. It is self-evidently unwise to force hundreds of people into small rooms in small buildings during a pandemic.

Many of us go into small primary school playgrounds of inner-city schools along with the families of the 120 other children for each year group. We are part of a workforce that receives media attention when workers die from this virus. Our risk is higher because of inadequate PPE and exposure to a larger viral load, but other workers are not separated out or counted in the data. We each reflect on the uncounted care workers, transport workers and shop workers who are losing their lives. Their deaths do not make the front pages, but nor do they work in environments that are deep cleaned as often.

There is no cure for coronavirus and there is no vaccine. It is not fair to increase teachers’ risks while not knowing how many people are losing their lives because of work, because a teacher's work means sharing rooms and equipment with many people, from many households, again and again. Some teachers have already tragically died from the virus, and we do not want to risk any more. The conditions of strict widespread testing for suspected Covid-19, rigorous contact tracing and scrupulous adherence to quarantining must be met before a return to schools - for the enduring safety of teachers and the wider community.

Until we know more about the transmission of this virus and the risk factors for severe illness. Until we know that staff can access PPE, virus tests and accommodation if they live with vulnerable people. Until we know that children will not learn that their teacher has died because of an infection caught in their class, we should remain sensible and wait.

The economic harm of keeping schools closed is significant - but is known. This means the government can act and intervene to mitigate this harm. We do not know about the harms of reopening schools yet. The example that is set by opening schools earlier than is known to be safe runs counter to all the messages you are sending - that the recent slowing of hospital admissions should not be taken as a premature signal that we are safe.

Iain Wilson, NHS nurse

References:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(20)30095-X/fulltext
https://www.tes.com/news/coronavirus-stop-speculation-about-schools-reopening?fbclid=IwAR25fXV31JAr0vX5EHqMd9Qhi-B3boJVn2CC0yMUDx3V-5b2-Uk7Ja5uAno

Green Party must stand shoulder to shoulder with workers during Covid-19 crisis

The Committees of Green Left and Green Party Trade Union  Group (both Green Party organisations) have issued the following statement:

Green Left and Green Party Trade Union Group (GPTU) call on all Green Party of England and Wales’ publicly elected representatives, MP, Assembly Members and Councillors, to seek out and work with trade unions and local and national authorities to ensure that:

· all essential workers are provided with adequate protective equipment, sanitary measures and testing during the CV19 crisis. We note that this should not only include health and caring workers but also cleaners, food and pharmaceutical distribution and preparation workers, transport workers and security workers. 

· no threats of dismissal, pay cuts or other means of coercion are used to compel workers to work when they are in danger of transmitting or contracting CV19. 

· workers who take industrial action due to the unsafe attitude of some employers and government, are supported, so that they do not suffer financial and/or disciplinary sanctions for taking such actions 

· attempts to organise non-unionised workers are supported.

*The Green Party of England & Wales (GPEW) is a significant political presence at local authority level with over 300 Councillors many organised in the Association of Green Councillors (AGC). 

They and other public representatives can play a positive role in defending workers rights at a local level. 

We would also ask local Green Parties to stand shoulder to shoulder with workers over this issue at this very important time.

https://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/2020/04/brent-council-found-no-cause-for.html

http://greentulondon.blogspot.com/2020/04/london-bus-drivers-must-be-provided.html

https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/nurses-told-to-refuse-to-treat-coronavirus-patients-if-they-cannot-get-protective-equipment-as-criticism-of-government-mounts

https://www.rcn.org.uk/covid-19/rcn-position

Brent pays local businesses more than £12m in COVID-19 grants - apply now if you haven't done so yet

From Brent Council

Local business have received more £12million from Brent Council in grant payments aimed at supporting them through the COVID-19 crisis.

Since opening for applications two weeks ago, Brent Council has in the past fortnight paid out a total of £12.3million to 875 businesses through the Small Business Grant Scheme and the Retail, Leisure and Hospitality grant scheme.

Through the Small Business Grant Scheme, a one-off grant of £10,000 is available to businesses currently eligible for small business rate relief, rural rate relief or tapered relief to help them meet ongoing business costs, whereas the Retail, Leisure and Hospitality grant provides a payment of either £10,000 or £25,000 to eligible businesses to help meet ongoing costs.

Cllr Shama Tatler, Brent Council’s Cabinet Member responsible for business said:

I’m glad that so many have come forward to access this support which could be a lifeline for many businesses and for people’s jobs in the borough.

These are unprecedented times and we want to ensure that each and every business that’s eligible for this support receives the help they are entitled to as quickly as possible.
 
As 875 businesses will be able tell you, all we need is a few details to get the payment made.

The sooner we receive these details the sooner we can get the grants paid, so get your forms in and help us spread the word.

NEU calls for clarity on Government's school re-opening plans - Letter to Boris Johnson

From the National Education Union

Letter to Prime Minister calling for end to unhelpful speculation on school and colleges reopening.

In the light of unhelpful speculation on the further opening of schools and colleges the joint General Secretaries of the National Education Union are calling on the Prime minister for clarity on how Government will make such a decision.

Given that a full return to the school population will increase risks to our members and the children in their care the NEU is asking for the modelling, evidence and plans that will form the basis of any decisions made by the Prime Minister and his Government to be shared.

Dear Prime Minister,

We are writing to you on behalf of the members of the National Education Union. First, let us say that we wish you all the best in your personal recovery from the virus.

Our members are hard at work, supporting the children of key workers and vulnerable children who are still attending schools. They are helping efforts to support vulnerable children at home. They are doing their best to support children’s learning in these unusual circumstances.

We are pleased that you, other ministers and Chief Nursing Officer have acknowledged their efforts in helping NHS staff to be at work.

Our members are disturbed, however, by increasing media speculation that schools will soon be re-opened. We consider this speculation to be most unhelpful: it may undermine people’s resolve to stick to social isolation. We are disturbed that it is seemingly being stimulated by unnamed Government ministers.

Given that an early return to full school populations will mean an increased risk to our members and the children in their care, we are writing to ask you to share your modelling, evidence and plans.
As a matter of urgency, and certainly well before any proposal to re-open schools is published, please can you share with our members:

· your modelling of the increased number of cases and mortalities among children, their parents, carers and extended families, and their teachers and support staff, as a result of the re-opening of schools.
· whether such modelling is based on some notion that social distancing could be implemented in schools. (We ask this because our members think it would be a foolhardy assumption.)
· whether your modelling would be based on concrete plans to establish regular testing of children and staff, availability of appropriate PPE and enhanced levels of cleaning - with all of which we are currently experiencing severe difficulties.
· whether your modelling would include plans for children and staff who are in vulnerable health categories, or who are living with people in vulnerable health categories, not to be in attendance at school or college?
· your latest evidence concerning the groups of people who are most vulnerable to death or life-changing consequences as a result of the virus, for example the evidence of the impact on those who live in crowded accommodation, those with different comorbidities, those from different ethnic groups and of different ages and sexes.
· whether the Scottish Parliament, the devolved assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland and our neighbours in the government of the Republic of Ireland agree with your plans.

Further, given that in re-opening schools and colleges, you would be asking our members to take an increased risk, we believe they have a right to understand fully how any such proposal belongs within an overall Government strategy to defeat the virus.

In this context, please could you give the firmest of indications:

· whether you are developing plans for extensive testing, contact tracing and quarantine in society as a whole? Our members see that countries successfully implementing such strategies have many fewer cases and many, many fewer mortalities than we do in the UK.
· if you are developing such plans, how long it will take to put them in place and how low the number of virus cases needs to be before such a strategy can be successful?
· whether you intend these plans be in place well before schools are re-opened. (This seems essential to us.)
· if you are not developing such plans, what is your overall approach and is it dependent on an assumption that those who have had the virus are subsequently immune?
· of your assessment of the strategies in place in South Korea, where there is a clear policy of testing, contact tracing and continued school closures?

We have written to you as representatives of staff who in the event of schools re-opening would be asked to accept an increased risk for themselves and the children they teach.

You will appreciate that our attitude to the issue of reopening is dependent on the answers to the questions above.

Again, we wish you well in your recovery and in your efforts to bring our country through this crisis.

We restate our willingness to work with you on finding solutions to the problems posed by the current situation.

We look forward to your urgent reply.


Yours sincerely

Mary Bousted Kevin Courtney
Joint General Secretaries

Joint General Secretary

Brent Trades Council opposes lifting coronavirus restrictions too early

BRENT TRADES COUNCIL OPPOSES LIFTING CORONAVIRUS RESTRICTIONS TOO EARLY.

THIS COULD SPARK A RESURGENCE ACROSS THE GLOBE WHICH COULD BE AS CATASTROPHIC AS THE CURRENT ONE.

Workers and trade unionists must publicise the WHO 6 key demands to be included in any exit strategy:

1) Transmission under control;
2) Health services able to cope;
3) Risks in care homes minimised;
4) Preventative measures introduced in workplaces and schools;
5) Virus importation risks managed;
6) Communities able to reduce future transmissions.

STAY AT HOME, SAVE LIVES, STAY SAFE

Spring in Old St Andrew's Churchyard

I often walk through Old St Andrew's Churchyard, Kingsbury, on one of my government authorised exercise routes.  I experience a  heightened awareness that nature is carrying on in its bustling way in blissful ignorance of the crisis hitting human beings. Kingsbury has been here before when the Black Death wiped out the original settlement - nature carried on then, too. 

A time to reflect.

These pictures were taken on a sunny afternoon recently when the trees were full of birdsong and the daily coronavirus death toll in hospital was nearing a thousand.

The Fryent Country Park Story – Part 3

 The third in a series of guest posts by local historian Philip Grant

If you have already read the first two parts of this history of our local country park, welcome back. If not, you can find them by “clicking” on Part 1 and Part 2.

1. The pond on Barn Hill.

We left the story in the late 18^th century, when most of the fields on what would become the country park had been turned over to growing hay. Some of the local landowners, though, did not need to rely on this seasonal crop for their income. 

The Page family had been farmers in the Wembley area since at least 1534, when John Page rented land from Archbishop Cranmer (and later purchased some of it, after King Henry VIII had taken it from the Church in 1545). They had become wealthier over the centuries, and when Richard Page inherited another fortune from a spinster aunt in 1792, he wanted to show off his estate in the most fashionable way.

Page hired the famous landscape architect, Humphry Repton, to create beautiful grounds for his home, which he planned to rebuild into a mansion. As well as his fields to the south of Forty Lane, he also included the Barn Hill section of his Uxendon lands. Repton drew up a planting scheme that would frame the hill with a line of oak trees, which have been a feature of the landscape ever since, with many still there.

2. Humphry Repton's sketch of what the view of Wembley Park from Barn Hill would look like.

Repton believed that having grazing cattle would ‘enliven the scene’ when viewed from the Wembley Park mansion, as hay meadows lacked interest. He also built a ‘prospect tower’ on top of Barn Hill, from which Mr Page’s visitors could enjoy the view across his estate, ‘as well as forming a dwelling house for those who should have the care of the prospect rooms, and the dairy’. It is likely that he also had the pond created on top of the hill, close to the tower and dairy, so that the cattle had plenty of water to drink.

The 1793 plans for Wembley Park were never fully completed, after Richard Page fell out with Repton over his designs for the mansion. The history of the Page family does not end well, but that’s another story!

The Pages were exceptions to the rule, and with small farms let on short leases and a single basic crop, the hay farmers of Kingsbury did not become rich men in the 19^th century. They hired casual labour to help with the haymaking, and in years when the weather was bad at harvest time, they often went into debt. It didn’t help that, at times of agricultural depression, the local parish rates were higher, to provide relief for the poor.

 

3. A modern view of the Kingsbury meadows at haymaking time.

One unfortunate farmer was William Nicholls of Bush Farm. He had been declared bankrupt, and his belongings were sold to help pay his debts. An advertisement in March 1842 lists his farm equipment. This included ‘two capital road waggons, nearly new’, twelve hay, dung and other carts, hay making machines, a heavy pasture roller, a large number of rick cloths, two stack scaffolds, plus ladders, hay racks and forks.

By the late 1840s, many haymaking labourers were itinerant Irishmen, who had left their homes because of the potato famine. Bishop (later Cardinal) Wiseman was head of the recently restored Catholic church in London, and in 1849 he asked the Passionist religious order to send over priests from Dublin, to minister to these agricultural workers. They rented a barn at Hyde House Farm in Kingsbury (where the writer, Oliver Goldsmith, had lodged from 1771-74), before moving to a house in Wood Lane three years later.

When the Ordnance Survey published a booklet in 1865, giving details of all the land shown on their 1:2500 map of Kingsbury, all but two of the 200 fields in the parish were meadows. Almost every farm had a plot of land, generally of between a half and one acre, specifically described as “stackyard and sheds”.

Some of the meadows were put to other uses as well. John Elmore, who farmed at Uxendon in the mid-19^th century, held popular steeplechase races across his land. The Wealdstone Brook ran through his fields, and provided a ‘sensational water jump’. Even after Elmore’s death, this course was used occasionally as part of long-distance horse races from the Old Welsh Harp tavern, until an Act of Parliament in 1879 banned unlicensed race courses within ten miles of the centre of London.

While Kingsbury was still a rural backwater, it was beginning to be recognized as a place for recreation. From 1870, people in the crowded Metropolis could take a train to Hendon, and an 1880s book, “Our Lanes and Meadowpaths”, encouraged them to enjoy Saturday afternoon walks in nearby countryside, after their 5½ days of labour. It’s author, H J Foley included several routes through Kingsbury.

 

4. Haymaking near Kenton c.1880. (An illustration from H J Foley’s “Our Lanes and Meadowpaths”)

For one walk he tells his readers to ‘… make for Piper’s Barn just beyond the Green Man.’ From there, he describes a footpath to Harrow, which for nearly four miles ‘simply threads its way through one meadow after another, round the base of a big green hill.’ That was Barn Hill, and the path can still be followed today, from alongside St Robert Southwell School in Slough Lane. This “meadowpath” is all across fields, until the bridge over the Jubilee Line leading to Shakespeare Drive, apart from where you cross Fryent Way, near the end of Valley Drive.

When Wembley Park Station was opened on the Metropolitan Railway in 1894, it did more than just bring visitors to the new Pleasure Grounds there. By the following year, the Wembley Golf Club’s course had been laid out on the Barn Hill section of Repton’s century-old landscape. The second of the 18 holes on the 4,500-yard golf course had the tee on one side of the hilltop pond, and the green on the other!

At the start of the 20^th century, Kingsbury had become an Urban District, but hardly deserved that description. Its total population at the 1901 census was just 757 people, and many of these were still involved in agriculture. At Little Bush Farm, for example, the two adult males living there were listed as a “carter” and a “hay loader”.

The last entry on the census return gives the address as ‘Encampment at Salmon Street’, and lists three “households”. One was headed by Miss L. Sanders, a licensed hawker and pedlar, aged 41. She had two sons, aged 5 and 3, born at Uxbridge and Hampstead, and a male “boarder”, aged 22, whose occupation was ‘clothes peg maker’. Both of the other family groups included pedlar/hawkers, and all had been born at various locations around London.

 

5. A gipsy camp at Alperton, early 1900s. (Photo by Bertram Wickison, from “Kingsbury & Kenton News”, 1952)

I can remember, as a child in the 1950s, when gipsy women would sometimes visit our estate, and go door-to-door selling clothes pegs, and sprigs of “lucky” white heather. That was probably what this group were doing, camping for a time on a piece of common land beside Salmon Street, and getting the wood for their peg-making from the local hedgerows. By chance, a local newspaper’s reminiscences feature in 1952 included a photograph, taken at Alperton in the early 1900s, which may well show Miss Sanders!

By around 1900, Most of Uxendon Farm’s fields had been taken over by Preston Farm, and the remaining part was used as a shooting school. When the Olympic Games came to London for the first time in 1908, the farm became the venue for the clay pigeon shooting competition. Because Uxendon was hard to get to along untarmacked lanes, the Metropolitan Railway was persuaded to open a new “halt” for its trains at Preston Road.

6. Uxendon Farm, in a 1908 Olympics photo (“Evening Standard”), and on the 1920 edition O.S. map.

The map above, surveyed just before the First World War, shows fields, farms and the edge of Repton’s belt of trees around Barn Hill (also visible in the photograph). It also shows a small new development of houses on Preston Road, the start of a period of major change which will continue in the next part of the Fryent Country Park Story. Look out for it next weekend.

Philip Grant.

LINKS TO OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES

 

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 1

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 2

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 3

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 4

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 5

History of Fryent Country Park – Part 6

History of Fryent Country Park – Bunker Special

Keep parks open this holiday weekend

The Green Party has pressed the UK Government to help local authorities keep parks open this Easter bank holiday weekend. 

The party is calling on the government to deploy local authority staff in non-essential roles to ensure social distancing is maintained. It has also suggested that if over-crowding within these parks poses a risk to public health, then more green spaces such as 300,000 acres of golf courses should be opened. 

After Brockwell Park was closed in London last weekend by Lambeth Council after people were seen sunbathing there and Health Secretary Matt Hancock highlighted possible banning of outdoor exercise, concern has arisen over whether parks will remain open during the bank holiday. 

Co-leader of the Green Party Jonathan Bartley considers that it would be a discriminatory decision to close parks to those who do not have a private garden in which to access green space, stating:

Where are people with no gardens supposed to go for their exercise?"

Considering the importance of outdoor spaces for the British public Bartley commented: 

Bank holiday weekend is coming up and it is absolutely vital that people continue to follow the public health advice on social distancing. However, it is also crucial that people have access to green spaces to go for their daily exercise.

Many of these parks serve people who don’t have any other access to an outdoor space. It is outrageous that government and local councils would discriminate against people who don’t have any other choice than using their publicly owned park.

There is an inherent inequality in the fact that people who do not have gardens are being told they can no longer even go to their parks to exercise over this Easter bank holiday weekend. Where are people with no gardens supposed to go for their exercise in urban areas where they cannot easily or safely socially distance on the streets?

Government should be working with councils to help them do everything they can to monitor parks and ensure people are keeping to the social distancing rules. This way, we can be sure to keep the parks open and protect people’s health from coronavirus.