WEMBLEY MATTERS News and views on local politics, the environment, climate change, culture and local history
Lyon Park Primary strike action has been suspended because the cCuncil stepped in and agreed to fund all the voluntary redundancies applied for and has agreed to facilitate talks, starting tomorrow, to resolve all the other issues.
The NEU will go ahead with the dates of strike action next week if these talks do not resolve the outstanding matters.
Cllr Neil Nerva, Brent Cabinet Member for Public Health and Adult Social Care
Brent Council opened consultation on changes in Adult Social Care charges on Thursday that propose a reduction in the minimum income guarantee support and increased charges for service users. This will reduce Brent Council spending on Adult Social Care overall. Adult Social Care is the biggest area of Council spending.
Attempting to put a positive gloss on the proposals, Councillor Neil Nerva, Cabinet Member for Public Health & Adult Social Care, said:
These proposals for the charging policy are essential to ensure that we can continue to deliver a high-quality Adult Social Care service for years to come. If adopted Brent’s Adult Social Care charging policy would still be one of the most generous in London but it would be more consistent and sustainable for future years.
The Council said:
The proposed changes to the charging policy are essential to ensure the council can continue to provide the Adult Social Care services thousands of residents rely on in a sustainable way for years to come.
The proposals include:
In only the second proposal are residents given the opportunity to reject it outright. Public consultation meetings will be arranged to discuss the proposals.
More information is available on the Consultation website LINK . This includes a Powerpoint presentation from which I have extracted some case studies below:
The Council seek to reassure service users:
Share your thoughts on the consultation by Sunday 17 December. The council will then review all feedback and present the final proposals to Brent’s Cabinet in January. The earliest that any changes will take effect is April 2024.
Brent Council was recently warned by its finance officers about the financial pressures on the Council and the need to make further ‘savings’ that will impact on services. The warning comes in the wake of a substantial increase in the Council’s housing costs as a result of the soaring numbers of homeless people, higher rents in the private sector when placing such families in temporary accommodation, and the shortage of private rented accommodation. There are also pressures on the Adult Social Care budget (higher charges are in the pipeline) and some local authority schools are running deficit budgets.
Faced with that situation the leader of Brent Council, Muhammed Butt, has signed a letter along with 118 other council leaders to the Chancellor calling on him to address the homelessness and temporary accommodation crisis that threatens local government’s financial sustainability and the services upon which England’s most vulnerable people rely.
The letter is signed by councils from across the country led by Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, the Green Party and Independents. It follows an emergency summit held last week (Tuesday, 31 October), co-hosted by Eastbourne Borough Council and the District Councils’ Network.
According to the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the cost of temporary accommodation to councils reached £1.7bn last year and it is increasing rapidly.
The signatories included 108 district councils – two-thirds of the total. In many parts of the country, district councils are the tier of principal government closest to communities and they oversee services including housing, leisure centres and waste collection. The rising cost of temporary accommodation hits district councils particularly hard due to a large proportion of their budgets being devoted to housing.
The Councils are calling for a
meeting with the Chancellor ahead of his Autumn Statement to consider their demands:
This is the letter:
Dear Jeremy,
The unprecedented pressure on temporary accommodation services
An unprecedented number of people are turning to councils as the last option for support when they face homelessness. As councils, we are proud of the help we give to people when they need it, but our situation is becoming untenable. We have had no option but to rapidly escalate our use of temporary accommodation, which is threatening to overwhelm our budgets.
The level of concern was demonstrated when 158 councils attended an emergency summit on 31st October, organised by the District Councils’ Network (DCN) and Eastbourne Borough Council. The scale of the problem was also shown by a recent DCN survey in which 96% of our member councils reported an increase in use of temporary accommodation – four-fifths of them describing this as ‘significant’.
The ensuing increase in costs is a critical risk to the financial sustainability of many local authorities and we urge you to act swiftly to ensure we can continue our vital work. The pressure is particularly acute for district councils because housing costs constitute a far bigger proportion of our overall expenditure.
Without urgent intervention, the existence of our safety net is under threat. The danger is that we have no option but to start withdrawing services which currently help so many families to avoid hitting crisis point. There will also be a knock-on impact on other cherished council services, which councils could also have to scale back, and on other parts of the public sector – such as the NHS – which will be left to pick up the pieces.
Councils and our partner organisations in health, policing and education, as well as the voluntary sector, have had considerable success in recent years in moving the whole local system towards preventing homelessness, rather than just dealing with the consequences.
However, the supply of permanent, affordable housing has fallen in many places while the impact of the rising cost of living is making housing too costly for many people. This impacts on the health and wellbeing of households affected. Some areas also experience added pressure due to the placement of asylum seekers in local hotels and other temporary accommodation.
We do believe there is a way forward, as DCN set out to you in our Autumn Statement submission on 13 October. We are urgently calling on the Government to:
· Raise Local Housing Allowance rates to a level that will cover at least 30% of local market rent and commit to annual uprating.
· Provide £100m additional funding for Discretionary Housing Payments in 2023-24 and an additional £200m in 2024-25.
· Provide a £150m top-up to the Homelessness Prevention Grant for 2024-25.
· Review the cap for housing benefit subsidy rate for local authority homelessness placements.
· Develop policy to stimulate retention and supply in the privately rented sector.
· Give councils the long-term funding, flexibility and certainty needed to increase the supply of social housing.
Considering the urgency and scale of these matters, we would welcome a meeting with you ahead of the Autumn Statement.
We firmly believe that action on these issues will ensure that all councils can continue to provide an effective homelessness safety net. We also believe that these measures will be cost effective by ensuring homelessness is prevented, reducing public expenditure in future.
The human cost of homelessness is immense. With your help we can prevent it worsening.
In total, 119 council leaders from across England have signed this letter.
WEMBLEY TRIANGLE TONIGHT
A resident reported: No engineer in sight but no leak either. From Wembley Hill Road the road is closed to the left if you wished to go down Harrow Road. From Harrow Road coming into Wembley there is no right turn into Wembley Hill Road.
Thames Water has reported to Brent Council that a 'big crack' opened up overnight on the road at Wembley Triangle. Sewage escaped from the main sewer about 3 metres below ground and cascaded into roadside gullies.
Thames have classified this as pollution as it leads into the Wembley Brook (of recent fame). At the time of informing Brent Council. Thames said there had been no real impact on the brook at present but further work would be done today to investigate further and survey the pipe. This will establish the reapirs need to return the sewer to normal service and prevent any further flooding or pollution.
Wembley Matters has asked the Thames Water officer responsible for an update on the situation after today's investigation.
The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) emphasises the importance of involving communities in the decision-making process. The aim of this is to increase design quality and place benefit. Whilst no specific mechanism on how to do this is set out in the NPPF, community review panels are becoming increasingly popular amongst local authorities for enabling greater participation in the planning process.
The council is looking to recruit local people to a new Brent Community Review Panel (CRP). This aims to give a voice to local people on new developments in their area.
The panel will help the council to better understand the needs of the local community by playing an independent advisory role in the planning process through discussion of issues around housing, transport, public and green spaces, and the environment. This will help ensure that new developments are of the highest design quality, and meet the needs of people living in, working in, studying in and visiting Brent in the future.
Frame Projects, who manage the Brent Quality Review Panel on behalf of the council, is responsible for recruiting and managing the panel, ensuring that it is independent, well-briefed, and able to effectively communicate its views. Frame Projects will provide panel members with the support needed for their role through free training sessions.
The panel is aimed at residents, workers, students and regular visitors within the Brent community who are at least 16 years old. We are keenly looking for candidates who do not already have a strong voice or position of influence in their area. Councillors and Brent Council employees are not eligible to apply.
Panel members will receive a £25 voucher for each two-hour review meeting they attend, with reasonable expenses for travel and other necessary costs also covered.
You can email Frame Projects at brent@frame-projects.co.uk or call 020 8164 9980 to find out more and request an application form.
Application forms must be submitted by 5:30pm on Monday 4 December 2023.
If shortlisted, you will be invited to a selection workshop in January 2024 (exact date to be confirmed) with other candidates, from 6.30pm to 8.30pm.
Daisy is a community engagement strategist, design critic and educator with over 20 years’ experience of devising tools and processes that allow communities to meaningfully contribute to built environment decision-making. She has particular expertise in enabling diverse groups to find common ground in situations where policy constraints or low budgets pose challenges, specialising in brokering productive communication between professionals and non-professionals. Daisy sits on a number of design review and advisory panels across London, including serving as the Chair of the Ealing Community Review Panel.
From Brent Branch of the Natioaal Education Union (NEU)
NEU members at Lyon Park Primary School are to strike in a fight to save support staff jobs which are proposed to go in a huge restructure. PICKET LINE OUTSIDE THE SCHOOL TUESDAY 7TH NOVEMBER 7.30-10am!
Staff at Lyon Park Primary School will be on strike to save the jobs and pay of their hardworking support staff. Many of these long-serving staff served the school’s community throughout the pandemic and face their jobs either being axed or a situation of “fire and rehire” to drop their pay. Teachers face a loss of support in the classroom and children will lose out on the vital support they need. The school has cited budget difficulties as the reason for the cuts. Ironically the school now has an expensive Executive Headteacher, who has not appeared at any of the restructure meetings to date and has not attempted any talks with unions.
100% OF NEU MEMBERS WHO VOTED IN THE BALLOT FOR STRIKE ACTION AT THE SCHOOL VOTED TO STRIKE OVER MULTIPLE DATES THIS MONTH.
Staff and their supporters will protest at a picket line outside the school from 7.30am Tuesday and will continue to try to negotiate with the governors in a bid to reach an agreement. Staff have shown willingness to accept voluntary redundancies but after a call for applications, the school have now said they cannot accept the applications.
Jenny Cooper of the NEU National Executive stated:
These striking members are the people who were on the Brent frontline in the pandemic; these are key workers, supporting vulnerable families and working daily with children from the Wembley and Alperton communities. They undertake difficult jobs every day and have expertise and knowledge that should be valued in our schools. If we can afford big sums for executive school leaders, we can afford to retain the pay of our frontline staff, and to fund those that request voluntary redundancy. The NEU will NOT accept fire and rehire and we remain hopeful the school will reach an agreement with us to resolve this dispute in which case the action could be suspended
From Brent Council
This Islamophobia Awareness Month, get involved in listening to people’s ‘Muslim stories’ to raise awareness of Islamophobia.
Islamophobia Awareness Month takes place annually during the month of November to celebrate the positive contributions of Muslims to British society and raise awareness of Islamophobia, with the hope of creating a society free from hate.
This year’s theme is ‘Muslim stories’, aiming to build connections among individuals from diverse backgrounds using the transformative power of storytelling to help raise awareness of all forms of discrimination and hatred.
All residents are invited to join an in-person event on 21 November from 6 to 8pm at Brent Civic Centre, Training Centre (First Floor), to discover the rich tapestry of Muslim Stories through engaging discussions, presentations, and thought-provoking narratives.
Our esteemed speakers will share their personal experiences, shedding light on the impact of Islamophobia and the importance of fostering understanding and tolerance. Through these powerful narratives, we hope to inspire change and combat misconceptions.
There will also be an exhibition to raise awareness of Islamophobia in society. The exhibition will be up at Wembley Library, from 15 to 17 November during opening hours, with stock displays at Wembley and Willesden Green Libraries every day throughout the month.
Councillor Fleur Donnelly-Jackson, Cabinet Member for Community Engagement, Equalities and Culture, said:
Brent is a place where people of all faiths and backgrounds live and work side-by-side.
Islamophobia Awareness Month aims to bring people together in solidarity to stand against discrimination and hate crime in all its forms. We will always strive to make Brent an inclusive and accepting place for people of all backgrounds.
I hope many of you will join our in-person event to celebrate diversity, challenge stereotypes, and bring greater awareness across the borough. You’ll hear personal experiences from our guest speakers, shedding light on the impact of Islamophobia and the importance of fostering understanding and tolerance.
If you’ve been affected by Islamophobia or any other hate crime, report it online or contact Crimestoppers to report anonymously.
Book your place on Eventbrite.
Readers may be interested in a publication by the Brent-based An-Nisa Society titled 'Islamophobia: from Denial to Action'. LINK
Writen during Islamophobia Awareness Month 2022 it was launched on UN International Islamophobia Day March 15th 2023.
The report rejects the definition that sees ‘Islamophobia as a form of racism’ and suggests 'a better way forward'.
An-Nisa write:
We believe the biggest obstacle to addressing anti-Muslim discrimination is classifying it as a ‘form of racism.’ We recognised this approach was not working for Muslims in the mid-1980’s and campaigned for faith discrimination to be made illegal on its own terms. We argued for a multi- ethnic British Muslim identity and faith-based needs for Muslims.
When the Equality Act 2010 came into force, finally making religious discrimination unlawful, we were hopeful this would be a game changer to positively changing theconditions of British Muslims. But this was not to be. We remain bogged down in arguments about the word ‘Islamophobia’ and what it means; freedom of speech about the criticism of Islam and denial that it even exists.
Prior to the Equalities Act 2010, which has nine protected areas, including for the first time “religion or belief’, there had not been any legal protection for Muslims against anti-Muslim discrimination. One of the critical issues An-Nisa Society found in the mid-1980’s was that the Race Relations Act 1976 recommendations, policies and services that come from it did not work for Muslims. It only extended protection to ‘racial’ groups and Muslims are not one racial group. It did not recognise religious discrimination. Our realisation is not a denial of racism or that it can also impact Muslims, who in this country are mainly people of colour. The problem was the framework of tackling racism institutionally and in the delivery of race-based services which was bypassing the Muslim experience.
