Pull out the stops on Wednesday to Save the Corrib for the community

Outside the Corrib Rest in Salusbury Road, Queens Park

From Save the Corrib Campaign

There has been a fantastic response to Save the Corrib Campaign. Many thanks for the support - 1471 people believe in the community rooms - which is high for a local pub. Pity the Brent planners don’t see it that way.    The planing officers feel that luxury flats will be more important than community need

Now the Planning hearing is set. We urge you ALL to do one more thing to help Save the Corrib.

Attend the planning meeting on Wednesday 28^th June at 7pm. At Brent Civic Centre. The more attendees we have will help to sway the planning committee who may have a more sensible attitude to community needs than the council planning officers.  

Brent Civic Centre is in Engineers Way a short walk from Wembley Park Tube towards and near the Stadium or a train to Wembley Central then bus 83, 92 or 182 to Wembley Arena 5 stops (stop G) and short walk down Engineers Way.

The more support we can get at the meeting the more it helps the case for keeping the Community Rooms.  Please if can at all attend the meeting to support the objection.  Don't let them kill the community rooms.

Summary of the Developer's plan.

To turn the community rooms on the first floor, into 9 luxury flats and make around £4M profit. CAMRA say these are Trojan Horse applications where the pub and small community room will be unviable and are then converted to offices or flats

As a sop they offer a function room in the pub, which will allow some community use for a few evenings a week, making for a massive reduced and commerciallydead pub. Of course if the pub fails, more flats. Planning Officers feel they have secured a great deal by increasing this by 13 hours under a regime that's deeply flawed in favour of the developer.  Yet we lose over 70% of the space in one hit and restricted to half the time.

This scheme means the loss of 530m2 of community space, space that was originally brought with public money and protected by both an ACV order and by a Section 106 covenant. The 106 is a council owned legal restriction that prevents the owner building flats on the first floor. We urge Brent NOT to break this 106 covenant but to honour and cherish it for the people of the locality.

The sad thing is Brent are advertising what to do with the money they collect from the developments and the priority in Kilburn is to use this to create community facilities.

To read the planning application in full, go to LINK

The documents you should read are: 

1) 9 March Planning statement

2) 10 Feb 170109 Draft s106 agreement 56767850001.pdf

NB: The Sir Richard Steele in Chalk Farm is a similar pub with function room and Camden and the Planning Inspector both turned down this conversion to flats so we say that Brent should do the same here. LINK

Thank you again for signing the petition Save the Corrib Pubs Community Rooms, can you help spread the word by forwarding the link below to your friends?  And do try to attend the planning meting Wednesday 28th June 7pm Brent Civic Centre

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-the-corrib-pubs-community-rooms

Thanks

Kevin Barrett and Lloyd Fothergill - Save the Corrib Campaign

Carolyn Downs intervenes on request for special post-Grenfell Brent Council meeting.

In the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster one of the major lessons must surely be that councils should listen to their residents and their actions should be transparent.

The Council's Chief Executive Officer, Carolyn Downs,  has intervened in Cllr Duffy's attempt to have a Special Full Council Meeting on July 3rd on  the issue of fire safety in Brent's high-rise blocks.

She has written to the Mayor, who makes decisions on Special Meetings, to give her advice:

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Dear Mr Mayor

I am writing to give you my advice regarding the request for an extraordinary/special council meeting.

Firstly the request was made last night by Cllr Duffy and to date I and other officers have seen confirmation by email from Councillors Warren, Stopp and Pavey. This as it stands is not enough. 

According to the legal and constitutional rules, a special meeting can be called by the Mayor.  Alternatively, a requisition signed by 5 councillors can be presented to the Mayor. If a special meeting is not called by the Mayor within 7 days, the requisition itself will trigger a extraordinary meeting. A requisition need not be sent to the mayor personally. It can be sent to Tom Cattermole, the Head of Executive and Member Services. 

The constitution further requires that any requisition must be accompanied by notice of the motion or motions to be debated at the meeting. We have received a motion from Cllr Duffy. 

This means that even if a valid requisition is received today then the mayor has 7 days to decide whether to call the meeting. If you took seven days then the earliest possible date for a special meeting of the council would be 13/7/17.

If you were to agree today then 5 clear working days will be needed before the meeting can be held and so the earliest it could be held is 4/7/17. Our next scheduled Council meeting is 10/7/17.

The reason we held a member drop in session last week was to enable members to answer road by road and block by block questions with the relevant officers present as this is a very technical matter. 11 members attended of which 2 were Cabinet members. Cabinet were briefed additionally and Cllr Shahzad arranged a separate briefing for himself. 

We will need to ensure that a discussion at a full council meeting is managed to ensure that it does not cause additional anxiety for residents in the Borough. We need to ensure that we retain the calm and professional environment in which the council, the fire brigade and other registered providers are managing this situation. We also need to ensure that information is shared in a way in which the public can understand it. Last week's member briefing and our web site give relevant information.   I believe that our council has responded well locally alongside putting c30 officers into the response to Grenfell Tower.

This is a very important topic and all members will no doubt wish to be present at the Council meeting that discusses it and for the sake of 3 working days it is surely appropriate to have the discussion on a date that has been in all members‘ diaries for some time.

My suggestion to you is that we hold another drop in session for councillors followed by a collective discussion of a less technical and more tactical and policy nature. I also suggest that officers write all of this up and make it publicly available as a part of the papers for the full council meeting. We can do this later this week or on 3/7/17 when I know a lot of Councillors have a group meeting arranged anyway. 

We can then have a major discussion at our programmed full council meeting based on the facts and a report circulated in advance.  We have, in the past, had back bench sponsored debates and we could, with the agreement of members, suspend the rules around those to enable a fuller and longer discussion, have a panel of technical officers available for any questions and also ensure that Councillors are able to take a full part in the discussion for as long as is necessary. I would ensure relevant officer and also seek Fire Brigade attendance. 

Clearly the decision to have the meeting before the 10/07/17  is your decision but I thought it transparent to share with all Councillors my advice to you.  I hope no-one will see this advice as being unhelpful and obstructive. It is intended to be quite the opposite. 

If you do agree to an earlier and special council meeting with the revised motion proposed by Cllr Duffy I still think it important that officers prepare a full report in advance, that we invite the fire brigade and technical officers and that we hold another drop in session to give members the opportunity to ask detailed and technical questions in advance. 

Yours ever

Carolyn

PR blitz to enable drilling for gas in Harlesden

Eschewing the use of the word 'fracking' London Local Energy LINK have launched a public relations blitz to persuade people that it will be fine to look for oil and gas in the Harlesden NW10 area. They claim to focus on the product, not the process, thereby ignoring issues around fracking or other extraction methods.

They state, without giving any evidence for the claim:

We start by correcting two key errors: Gas development is not surface intensive, and nor is local natural gas best left in the ground to fight carbon emissions and climate change.

We don’t want public acceptance or acquiescence. We want to create public enthusiasm. We ask for the media and the public to abandon outdated concepts and join us in an informed debate involving the many, not the few.

They outline their plan:

The White Heather Laundry at  what is now Artesian Close London NW10 8RW (see map),  was an extremely successful commercial laundry business that drilled a well for water in 1910.

According to contemporary records in the public and private domain, the White Heather Laundry found over 250 feet of oil shows below 1500 feet. That is a very significant amount, and there are many discoveries which produce from 50 feet thick shows -or less.  Equally, there are wells which tried to prove up oil fields from far thinner strata and were unsuccessful. LLE may fail too. But why should we not look?

From the laundry’s perspective, it wasn’t the water they needed, or at least it was too salty, bubbly and oily to be of any us to a laundry. 

The Willesden well didn’t find oil, but it did show indications of gas. LLE’s geological analysis is the intellectual property of London Local Energy Limited and we will not release this publicly at this time.

Returning to today,  London Local Energy wants to drill and analyse the cores from the NW10 area to a greater depth, with an eye on using today’s non-intrusive yet potentially highly productive methods. We can drill under the old wells from any number of locations from up to five miles away, although a gas fired power station* sounds a reasonable enough location and the owners of the power station are aware of our efforts.

*The power station behind the Leopold Primary School Annex in Brentfield Road (Previously the Brent Teachers' Centre)

LLE  conclude: 

We don’t see LLE’s resources as being game changers. We’re the wildcatters of Willesden, but we don’t look good in cowboy hats. This may not be an especially productive  gas field on a global scale, but it will be one that could make a significant contribution to both London’s energy security and carbon footprint. Let’s look!

After any license approval, we anticipate a two to three year process of exploration and analysis to assess if the geology supports a movement toward the next phase. That would be the appropriate time to have a debate over production.
 

London Local Energy’s 3 Step Plan:

1.     Oil and Gas Authority to open 15^th Onshore Licensing Round as soon as possible

2.     On license award,  revisit proven hydrocarbon discoveries in London NW10

3.     If resources allow produce local onshore natural gas with minimal surface impact  and maximum CO2 reductions.