Monday 15 May 2017

Brent Cabinet to discuss Northwick Park One Public Estate Memorandum

Controversial 'One Public Estate' plans LINK for Northwick Park will be discussed at the Cabinet on May 22nd (at the earlier time of 6pm) in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding between the four partners: London Borough of Brent, London NW Healthcare NHS Trust, University of Westminster and Network Homes.

Consultation revealed resident fears over impact on transport, existing infrastructure including schools, flood and drainage and the need to consult with Harrow Council. I would also add the potential impact on public open space as being a concern.

The Memorandum of Understanding stresses improvements for all the partners but also has an underlying theme of reducing costs and maximising receipts and land values:

The Key Objectives

The aim of the Project in general terms is to work together to rationalise services and resources between the Partners and Associate Partners and unlock development land to facilitate hospital redevelopment, new homes and improved services for the community.

Common visions for partners;

· Place making  

· Central hub(s)  

· Improved infrastructure (road network and Highways, cycle ways etc.), and transport connections, (Underground, overground rail and buses), and private  

· Utility and boundary review.  

· Energy strategy  

· Shared facilities and services.

 The specific aim of Project is to:

· to generate capital receipts.  

· to reduce running costs  

· to create jobs,  

· to create homes,  

· to integrate services  These aims are referenced in Brent’s July 2016 Phase Four OPE MOU  

Key objectives for Brent are;  

· More affordable homes  

· More school places  

· Growth  

· Increased revenue from homes and businesses  

· Employment and skills opportunities within the Borough.

 Key objectives for London Northwest Healthcare NHS Trust  

· Maximise income for the Trust in order to support its deficit and sustainability plans

· Ensure accommodation requirements are met  

· Improve access to the hospital  

· Protect existing clinical services from distribution or delay (e.g. Blue light  vehicles, clinical activity)  

· Improve civic values of the development  

· Address requirement to re-provide services currently on the land, whilst  ensuring continuity  

Key objectives for The University of Westminster  

· Maintain and increase student satisfaction levels  

· Upgrade teaching spaces  

· Increase critical mass and create a sense of place  

· Create additional student accommodation  

· Maximise value of landholding  

· Create staff accommodation.  

Key Objectives for Network Homes Ltd.  

· Phased redevelopment of Northwick Park working collaboratively with other  land holders to maximise the potential opportunity  

· Delivery of new affordable and mixed tenure housing as well as commercial  uses  

· High quality design and place making, including the main gateway into the  site from NWP tube station, serving all land holdings  

· Improved infrastructure and transport connections to help ensure a  sustainable future for Northwick Park residents, service providers and hospital patients  

This is project outline as first published in One Public estate (Local Government Association/Cabinet office) February 2017 (click on image to enlarge)

Local hospitals hit by cyber attack: advice from Health Trust

Statement from NW London NHS Trust

Since Friday's cyber attack, staff across the Trust have been working tirelessly to ensure patients are cared for safely.

We identified the virus at 12.45pm on Friday (12 May) in three PCs and two servers. As soon as the virus was identified we took immediate action to protect our systems from any data loss and further corruption.

As a precaution we shut down a number of IT systems and some services are currently using paper-based systems. It is the precautionary measures we have taken that have caused most disruption, not the virus itself.

We continue to work with NHS Digital and will begin to switch our IT systems back on when we feel it is safe to do so.

In the meantime we are asking the public to help our staff and visit our emergency departments for serious and life-threatening injuries and conditions only. Please consider the alternatives, such as visiting your local walk-in centre, pharmacy or calling 111 for minor injuries and advice. This will help relieve pressure on our services.

Advice for patients

Patients are asked to attend their appointment or operation as planned over the coming days, unless they have been contacted and told not to attend. If patients or their loved ones need to get in touch about their appointment or operation, please call (instead of email) our main hospital switchboards:

Central Middlesex Hospital: 0208 965 5733
Ealing Hospital: 0208 967 5000
Northwick Park and St. Mark's hospitals: 0208 864 3232

We apologise for any delays and cancellations that patients will experience and we thank you for your continued patience and cooperation as we work to resolve these issues.

MORE

Since Friday's cyber attack, staff across the Trust have been working tirelessly to ensure patients are cared for safely.
We identified the virus at 12.45pm on Friday (12 May) in three PCs and two servers. As soon as the virus was identified we took immediate action to protect our systems from any data loss and further corruption.
As a precaution we shut down a number of IT systems and some services are currently using paper-based systems. It is the precautionary measures we have taken that have caused most disruption, not the virus itself.
We continue to work with NHS Digital and will begin to switch our IT systems back on when we feel it is safe to do so.
In the meantime we are asking the public to help our staff and visit our emergency departments for serious and life-threatening injuries and conditions only. Please consider the alternatives, such as visiting your local walk-in centre, pharmacy or calling 111 for minor injuries and advice. This will help relieve pressure on our services.
Advice for patients
Patients are asked to attend their appointment or operation as planned over the coming days, unless they have been contacted and told not to attend. If patients or their loved ones need to get in touch about their appointment or operation, please call (instead of email) our main hospital switchboards:

Central Middlesex Hospital: 0208 965 5733
Ealing Hospital: 0208 967 5000
Northwick Park and St. Mark's hospitals: 0208 864 3232

We apologise for any delays and cancellations that patients will experience and we thank you for your continued patience and cooperation as we work to resolve these issues.
- See more at: http://www.lnwh.nhs.uk/about-us/news-and-media/latest-news/cyber-attack-information-for-patients/#sthash.fVPMmwLk.dpuf

Central Middlesex Hospital: 0208 965 5733
Ealing Hospital: 0208 967 5000
Northwick Park and St. Mark's hospitals: 0208 864 3232

Central Middlesex Hospital: 0208 965 5733
Ealing Hospital: 0208 967 5000
Northwick Park and St. Mark's hospitals: 0208 864 3232

Three key pledges from the Greens to create an inspiring education system

Kenmont primary school pupils, many from Brent, demonstrate against education cuts

Vix Lowthian, Green Party Education Spokesperson announced three key pledges this morning to create an inspiring education system:

Invest £7bn to fill funding gap
Abolish SATs
End academies programme and bring existing academies under local authority system

The Green Party want to create an inspiring education system that transforms lives and transforms Britain.

But that can’t happen without the very basic foundations being in place and this Government has been removing those foundations brick by brick.

Since 2015 £2.2bn has been taken out of the education system and between now and 2020 the Government plans to take out a further £3bn. That’s over £200,000 for every school or £1000 for every pupil. The academies programme has taken schools out of the hands of local authorities and parents and given them over to private businesses. That means that if a school isn’t performing a commercial interest, it can be shut down at will by the owners, leaving pupils without a school to go to.

At the same time as schools are getting less resources, more is being asked of teachers and pupils. Children are now being tested from age 7 onwards, with their results affecting the classes they are put in and their chances of getting into a decent secondary school. Asking children of that age to learn, revise, and test their knowledge has sapped all the fun, creativity, and inspiration out of going to school. The fact that teachers too are assessed on how well they drill their pupils for these exams - with the shadow of Ofsted hanging over them - means they have no time to do the thing they are meant to be at school for: teaching.

We believe in creating an inspiring education system. First and foremost we must make up for the enormous shortfall, the massive neglect, in our education system. Greens will ensure the education spending deficit of £7bn is plugged, laying the foundations for a transformative education system. We will scrap SATs so that pupils are no longer subjected to pointless, pressurised testing. And we will put an end to the academies programme and bring existing academies back under local authority control so that our children’s education is in the hands of teachers and parents, not businesses.

Sunday 14 May 2017

Objections to Brent’s 2015/16 accounts – lawfulness of Cara Davani “pay-off” still to be resolved

Guest blog by Philip Grant

It appears that I was being optimistic when I gave an update on this subject in January LINK referring to “progress” in dealing with the objections by five local electors to Brent Council’s accounts for 2015/16. I am writing this article to keep interested “Wembley Matters” readers informed about the current situation.

Four months ago, the objectors were waiting to receive some Brent Council documents from the Auditor, so that we could make further comments in support of our objections, and in reply to the Council’s response of 14 December 2016 to our objections. We are still waiting!

Progress on investigating the objections has not been helped by a change in the person at Messrs KPMG who is acting as Auditor. We were informed of the change at the same time this was disclosed in a report by KPMG to Brent’s Audit Committee on 20 March:

‘We would like to inform the Audit Committee that Andrew Sayers, a partner based in our London office, is replacing Philip Johnstone as the engagement lead on the audit. Andrew has already met with Carolyn Downs, Althea Loderick and Conrad Hall to help ensure a smooth handover from Philip. Andrew has a wide experience of audit and is currently the engagement lead at five other London boroughs as well as KPMG’s national Lead Partner for Public Sector audit.’

Mr Sayers did confirm, when first writing to the objectors, that he would share with us all the documents which he considered to be material to his decision on our objections, although he made clear that these might not include those ‘subject to professional legal privilege’. I made the following comments in my reply:

‘That legal advice, the circumstances around and timing of when it was given, and who it was given to, are all key factors in determining whether the payment to Ms Davani was lawful, as the Council claim, or unlawful. Why are Brent's senior officers afraid to allow the objectors to see the evidence of that legal advice, in confidence and purely for the purposes of your investigation, as auditor, into our objections? If they are confident that this "legal advice" document will stand up to scrutiny, they should consent to you sharing it with us; I am copying this email to Carolyn Downs and Conrad Hall, in the hope that they will now give that consent.’

I wrote to Brent’s Chief Executive on 23 March, asking if she would, on behalf of Brent Council, ‘now consent to the auditor sharing with myself and the other objectors (subject to safeguards over confidentiality, and solely for use in respect of his investigation into our objections) the legal advice on which the Council's justification for the £157,610 payment we are objecting to is based.’

I hoped that the answer would be “yes”, but if it was “no”, I asked for some further information about the meeting at which the “legal advice” had been given, and the notes of that meeting (which appear to be the only documentary record of what that advice was). I hoped that this information would be provided ‘as a matter of course, in assisting with a proper resolution of the auditor's enquiries’, but asked Ms Downs to treat it as an FoI request if that was not the case.

The reply I received (not from Ms Downs, but from a Senior Officer on behalf of the Council) was very abrasive, but did provide the information I had requested. The “legal advice” had been given in May 2015 by Counsel to Christine Gilbert, then interim Chief Executive, who was accompanied by one other Senior Officer (but, surprisingly, not the Chief Legal Officer or any member of her legal team) who prepared the notes. The reply also referred to a decision notice, issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office on 22 March 2017, using this to justify why the legal advice should not be disclosed to the objectors.

That decision by the ICO was to reject a complaint by Cllr. John Warren against Brent Council’s refusal to disclose the “legal advice” used to justify the payment of £157,610 to Cara Davani, under an FoI request which he made in July 2016. Cllr. Warren had claimed that, although this was covered by “legal privilege”, it should be disclosed ‘in the public interest’. However, the ICO did refer to the Auditor’s investigation into the objections against the £157k payment, and made clear that this was a separate statutory process, so that Brent is wrong to claim that the FoI decision also precludes disclosure (in confidence) by Mr Sayers to the objectors.

The ICO report included a summary of the types of information which Brent has, and which would have been disclosed if Cllr. Warren’s FoI request or complaint had been upheld, saying:

‘The council stated that the withheld information comprises of email correspondence between council officers and the council's barrister relating to the termination of a, now, former employee's contract of employment and associated file notes.’

I have pointed out to the Council, and the Auditor, that this includes more documents than the objectors were led to believe (in November and December 2016) existed, and that all of these documents should be made available to the Auditor, if they had not already been provided to him. (Hopefully, they may still be shared with the objectors!).

I understand that the Auditor also asked Brent, in mid-March, to provide some further information and documentation (even though KPMG had asked them last November to provide all of the documents relevant to our objections). I do not know whether that is part of the reason for the continuing delay.

When nothing further had been heard from the Auditor by early May, I wrote to ask when the objectors could expect to have the documents shared with us. Mr Sayers has replied that he anticipates sharing the documents material to his decision with us by the end of June, but has not indicated why it should take so long.

The end of June 2017 will mark two years since Brent’s disgraced Director of HR walked away with £157,610 of Council Tax-payers’ money (as well as having her share of the Employment Tribunal settlement and legal costs in the Rosemarie Clarke case paid by Brent on her behalf). The objectors are having to be patient, but we will see this through. The sad thing is that key figures at Brent Council still seem determined to cover-up the details of what went wrong (and who was responsible for it), even though they finally admitted last year that ‘this had been a very unhappy episode’.

Philip Grant