Showing posts with label Cecil Avenue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cecil Avenue. Show all posts

Tuesday 9 January 2024

Wembley Housing Zone – Brent’s Cecil Avenue development downsized!

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

Revised East and South elevation drawings for Brent’s Cecil Avenue development.

 

It may not look any smaller, but as disclosed in the Affordable Housing Supply Update report to December’s Brent Cabinet meeting, the number of homes to be built on the Council’s Cecil Avenue development has been reduced. The reason is the need for second staircases, because of new fire regulations introduced as a result of the Grenfell Tower tragedy.

 

I mentioned this in a guest post last month, Brent’s Affordable Council Housing – open and transparent?, when I wrote: ‘the report does not say how many of the new figure of 237 homes will be for private sale, and how many of those left for the Council will now be for “genuinely affordable” rent, rather than shared ownership. A lack of openness, which I will try to remedy!’ 

 

I’ve now received a reply to a Freedom of Information request, and can provide the answer. Cecil Avenue is part of a wider Wembley Housing Zone (“WHZ”) project, together with Ujima House, on the opposite side of the High Road. Brent Council’s contract with Wates in March 2023, said each would have half (152 out of 304) of the WHZ homes. However, all of the Wates homes, for private sale, would be on the more desirable Cecil Avenue site. 

 

The revised split of the Cecil Avenue homes, from Brent’s 8 January FoI response.

 

These figures show that although there will now be thirteen fewer homes on the Cecil Avenue development, those going to Wates will only be 2 less, while Brent Council loses 11. This is partly compensated for by the revised proportion of family-sized homes going in Brent’s favour. The Council will now have 71.4% of the family-sized homes, rather than 68.75%, but the total number of family-sized homes at Cecil Avenue has been reduced from 64 to 42, as part of rearranging the unit sizes to fit in the staircases.

 

Surely these changes would need planning permission? They did! An application was submitted on 21 August 2023, but Brent’s planners treated it as “non-material” amendments to the original consent given in February 2021, so that it was not publicised or consulted on. The application was approved by the Delegated Team Manager on 30 October 2023.

 

The heading to the Delegated Planning report, October 2023.

 

The report on this application (23/2774) makes clear that despite the WHZ involving two sites and a combined building contract, for planning purposes the Cecil Avenue application must be looked at on its own. Brent’s planning policies require that large housing schemes, such as this one, should provide 50% affordable housing. These revised proposals only provide 36.7% (and only 48.5% if the whole WHZ scheme is taken together). If it had been 50% at Cecil Avenue, there should have been at least 118 affordable homes on the site, not just 87 out of 237.

 

Brent’s affordable housing planning policies require a tenure split of at least 70% of the affordable housing to be “genuinely affordable”. The 56 homes at London Affordable Rent (“LAR”) out of 87 “affordable” Council homes is only 64.4% (62.4% over the WHZ scheme as a whole). Despite not meeting either of Brent’s planning policy percentages for affordable homes, the amended application was accepted. 

 

The only “good news” this time is that 21 of the 28 family-sized homes for Council tenants at LAR (down from 35 family-sized, on the figures supplied to me last July) will be 4-bedroom homes, with private gardens. There is currently a desperate need for these large family homes for affordable rent in the borough. It is unfortunate that, because of more than two years delay by Brent Council, in going down the “developer partner” route, it will be nearly three years before these homes are actually available! And LAR rent figures exclude service charges, which could bring the total bill up to as much as 80% of local open market rent level.

 

Extract from the approved documents for the amended application 23/2774.

 

35.6% of the “affordable” Council homes at Cecil Avenue will be what is known as Intermediate homes. This is a summary of what these 31 homes comprise:

 

Extract from the approved documents for the amended application 23/2774.

 

As shown in the information provided to me above, 28 of these homes will be for shared ownership (despite there being a surplus of these in the borough, it not being affordable to most people in housing need – a household income of £60k a year required to afford a 1-bedroom flat - and shared ownership being a “scam”!). What about the 3 “other affordable” homes? The planning application documents show that these Brent Council homes are intended to be sold, by Wates, as Discount Market Sale (”DMS”) homes.

 

The DMS homes must be ‘offered to Eligible Purchasers for sale at a price that is no more than 80 (eighty) per cent of Open Market Value, with the Council retaining and holding the remaining equity under an equitable charge’. To be an eligible purchaser for one of these 1 or 2-bedroom flats you would (on current figures) need to have an annual household income of no more than £90k. Affordable?

 

It is not just the number of homes (and affordable homes) which has been downsized in the amended plans for the Cecil Avenue development. In his reply to an email I had sent him about the Council’s Cecil Avenue development in February 2022 (that’s nearly 2 years ago!), Cllr. Muhammed Butt spoke proudly of ‘a new publicly accessible open space during this latest development. A positive outcome for the residents of Brent.’

 

My guest post including his reply did concede that: ‘The approved plans for the Cecil Avenue site include a courtyard garden square. This would mainly be for the benefit of residents, but there would be public access to it, through an archway from Wembley High Road.’ All of the tower block developments, existing and planned, along this stretch of the High Road, will bring thousands of extra residents within a short walk of this ‘publicly accessible open space.’ However, that too has been downsized:

 

Paragraph from the Delegated Planning Report on application 23/2774.

 

The amended external amenity space may just ‘exceed the minimum requirement’ for play space needed by the reduced number of future occupants at Cecil Avenue, but there will be little to spare for the other ‘residents of Brent’. 

 

Delay and downsizing. What more can go wrong for a Brent Council housing scheme, on Council-owned land, which received full planning consent on 5 February 2021? If only Brent had got on and borrowed the funds to build it, at the very low interest rates at then, and hired a contractor straight away, they could have had 250 (or at least 237) affordable Council homes at Cecil Avenue available in 2024, rather than 87 in late 2026.

 


Philip Grant.

Wednesday 26 July 2023

LETTER: The loss (theft?) of Wembley Central's greens spaces and trees

 Dear Editor, 

Brent Council have long since chopped down the mature trees along the High Road,Wembley, and replaced with twiglets. 

 

The remaining tree at the corner of High Road and Cecil Avenue (Pic Google Streetview)

 

The only remaining large tree stands at the corner of High Road and Cecil Avenue it has a Tree Preservation Order on it, and at present remains outside of the hoarding in Public Realm, for how long remains to be seen, as I recall seeing some documents some years ago from Planning that it was intended for removal as it will interfere with the Copland site development, despite numerous objections. 

 

All the beautiful trees that stood outside Brent House were removed, and all the trees on Coplands School and Fields were removed with no consideration for the wildlife.

 


The Copland site top left of centre. Copland fields now enclosed is the large green space. Public access is limited to the alley way between fences seen as grey line.

 

Brent Council care nothing about the environment. Coplands Fields (approx 20+ acres) to the rear of Ark Elvin School was Public Land and used by locals for over 70 years. Brent thought nothing of holding a public consultation before disposing of it and leasing it to Ark Elvin School, who do not use it at all, only St Josephs RC School and Elsley Primary use it under  ancient covenants. 

 

It is now surrounded by 3 metre high fences and locked gates, the grass is mowed regularly and the area kept very clean, however it cannot be accessed by local residents, not by anyone, least of all the residents of the 115 Flats in Elizabeth House, nor 250 flats at Wembley Place (former Brent House) and I doubt any of the 304 flats still to be built at Cecil Avenue, the old Copland School site which lies within a 150 metres of this once green Open Space. 

 

The eventual residents of those flats will probably have some reduced amenity space by way of a tiny balcony and a tiny bit of grass and they'll call it a Pocket Park or such like. Only 500 metres from Wembley Stadium the home of English Football, the kids round here are finding it increasingly difficult to find somewhere to kick a ball about, andwe wonder why 25% of Brent 10 year olds are considered obese!

 

Jaine Lunn


Editor's note. This was first received as a comment so with the writer's permission I edited it as a letter for a wider audience.

Saturday 22 July 2023

Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone – 'Some' Good News! (But what is Brent Council's policy now on unaffordable Shared Ownership?)

Guest Post in a personal capacity by Philip Grant 

 

Architect’s view of Brent’s 250 home Cecil Avenue development.

 

On 14 March this year, Martin’s post “Wembley Housing Zone: Never mind the gloss – what are the details?” shared with us a Brent Council press release, about its deal with Wates to finally build the 250 homes at Cecil Avenue, which it had received full planning consent for in February 2021. The blog included “links” to several of the guest posts I’d written since August 2021, urging the Council to include more genuinely affordable homes for rent in the project, especially homes at Social Rent level which the 2020 Brent Poverty Commission said should be the priority.

 


My “parody” Brent Council Homes publicity photograph (from November 2021).

 

Since 2021, Brent’s plans had been to allow its “developer partner” to sell 152 of the homes on the former Copland School site privately, with only 37 of the 250 for London Affordable Rent, and the other 61 as “intermediate” Council housing (either shared ownership or Intermediate Rent level). 

 

You would have thought that when they arranged additional funding from the GLA, to allow for more affordable homes to be delivered as part of this Wembley Housing Zone project, Brent would have celebrated with another press release, telling us about this “good news” story. Instead, I only discovered it when I spotted an item on the Forward Plan page of the Council’s website, as I was checking whether another item had been included there. It was about a Key Decision made by the Corporate Director, Communities and Regeneration, in April 2023:-

 



There was a “Officer Key Decision Report” on the website, but (true to form) the appendices to it were both “exempt”, so that the press and public were not allowed to find out ‘information relating to the financial or business affairs of any particular person (including the authority holding that information)’. The Report did, however, give an outline of what the amended agreement with the GLA involved:-

 


 

My various attempts, since August 2021, to get Brent to include more genuinely affordable homes at Cecil Avenue, using additional GLA funding where possible, have been ignored, dodged or blocked. I was told that anything other than what the Council already planned would be impossible, because the scheme would not be viable. Now they had an extra c.£10.5m, how many extra affordable homes would they be able to provide? 

 

I had to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to find out, but “Wembley Matters” can (at last) share the Good News!

·      Instead of only 37 of the Cecil Avenue homes for London Affordable Rent, there will now be 59. 35 of these will be family-sized (3 or 4-bed) homes.

·      36 of the Cecil Avenue Council homes will be for Shared Ownership (of which 9 will be family-sized).

·      3 of the Cecil Avenue Council homes will be “Other” affordable homes. (Does that mean at Intermediate Rent?)

·      As before, 152 of the homes being built by Brent Council at Cecil Avenue will be for private sale by Wates (including 20 family-sized).

My title does say ‘Some Good News’. The other part of the Wembley Housing Zone project, across the road at Ujima House, was meant to have ALL of its 54 flats for London Affordable Rent to Council tenants. The revised figures for this block are now:

·      32 for London Affordable Rent (including all 8 family-sized flats).

·      22 for Shared Ownership.

So, the original proposed number of Wembley Housing Zone London Affordable Rent homes was 91 (37 + 54), and the revised number is 91 (59 + 32). Perhaps that is why Brent did not want to draw attention to the extra funding they’d negotiated from the GLA!

The only improvement from the extra GLA funding, and that is genuinely to be welcomed, is that more of them will be family-sized homes for affordable rent, and more will be delivered earlier (Ujima House still only has the outline planning permission approved in February 2021).

Of the original proposed 61 “intermediate affordable homes”, 58 have now been positively identified as being for shared ownership. But didn’t Brent’s Cabinet, just last week, decide to sell off the 23 shared ownership homes it had acquired at the Grand Union development,  because the Council does not have 'the knowledge, experience and the capacity to effectively sell and manage' shared ownership homes?

 

Placard from a demonstration against Shared Ownership.

 

The Report to the 17 July Cabinet meeting clearly showed that shared ownership is well above the affordability level of most families in Brent, and admitted:

 

‘… the market and demand for Shared Ownership, particularly in the latter quarter of 2022 was and has remained turbulent. This is both in terms of too many shared ownership homes available in the market and appetite and demand for these homes reducing.’

 

In a November 2022 guest post, I set out the reality of Brent’s Affordable Council Housing programme, and why they should not include any shared ownership homes. But the decision makers at the Civic Centre are still pressing on with their flawed policies!

 


Cllr. Shama Tatler fronting a publicity photo at the Cecil Avenue site in March 2023.

 

Brent’s March 2023 press release about its Wembley Housing Zone deal with Wates began by claiming: ‘More much-needed housing will soon be a reality following an agreement to build 304 new homes in Wembley.’ From the hard hats and “high-vis” jackets in the photograph that came with it, you might believe that heavy machinery was already at work on the Council-owned Cecil Avenue site, which has been vacant for at least three years.

 

 

The Cecil Avenue site from the top deck of a bus, 26 June 2023.

 

In the extract from the April 2023 Key Decision Report above, it says that ‘start on site [was] recorded on 27 March 2023’. When I went past on the last Monday in June, there was no machinery, no workers and no progress on the Cecil Avenue site, just two portacabins. My recent guest post, 1 Morland Gardens – an Open Letter to the Mayor of London, explains what is required for a “start on site” for GLA funding, and it appears this has not yet happened.

 

It appears that the ‘will soon be a reality’ actually means ‘by 31 December 2026’. Some eventual good news, but I still believe that Brent could have done so much better than 59 “genuinely affordable” homes for rent to Council tenants as part of its 250 home Cecil Avenue development.

 


Philip Grant.

Friday 13 January 2023

Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone contract award – still too many secrets!

 


Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

In a guest post last month (‘Tis the Season to be Sneaky!) I suggested that Brent Council might be trying to use its “urgency procedures” to get the decision to award a major contract for its Wembley Housing Zone (“WHZ”) development slipped through over the Christmas / New Year period, in the hope of avoiding it being called-in for scrutiny.

 

Although the decision was scheduled to be made on 19 December, it wasn’t officially made, by Brent’s Chief Executive, until 10 January, and published on the Council’s website the following afternoon. Normally, 28 days clear notice of a Key Decision has to be given, but the Urgent Key Decision Form sent to a Scrutiny Committee Chair on 12 December said that was not possible. Yet the decision was made 29 days after “urgency” was claimed!

 

Part of the Evaluation Process section from the Officer Key Decision Report.

 

In fact, notice of a Key Decision for this contract could have been given at least several months before 12 December. The Officer Report (undated), on which the decision to award the contract was based, says that the tender process started on 30 April 2022, when the Council advertised for initial expressions of interest from contractors. Eight had provided the necessary responses by the closing date of 31 May. The four short-listed contractors were invited, on 3 July, to submit tenders, and three had submitted valid tenders by the closing date of 18 October.

 

The Recommendation from the Officer Key Decision Report.

 

After all of the evaluation of the tenders by Council Officers, the recommendation which Brent’s Chief Executive accepted was to award the “developer partner” contract to Wates Construction Ltd, for a price of £121,862,500. That is a lot of money! In fact, the report shows that it could be even more than that, perhaps as much as £133m (and that is after an estimated £4m already having been spent on architects’ fees).

 

Extract from the Financial section of the Officer Key Decision Report.

 

It appears that the £126.5m will be the cost of building 304 homes on two sites which Brent Council already owns. That is a building cost of around £416,000 per unit. As para. 4.2 in the Report extract above states, part of this will be funded through capital receipts from the sale of private homes. When Cabinet agreed this scheme in August 2021, it included allowing the development partner to have half the homes (152, and all on the more favourable Cecil Avenue site, which will be completed first) to sell privately, for profit. How much will Wates be paying Brent for those homes as part of the contract deal? We don’t know – it’s a secret!

 

Part of the funding will also come from the ‘capital receipts from … intermediate homes’. In plain English that means the sale of percentages in shared ownership flats within the 152 homes that the Council will own. In August 2021, Cabinet agreed that 61 of the 98 homes which Brent would retain on the Cecil Avenue site should be “intermediate”, with only 37 of them for London Affordable Rent. Following the November 2022 Cabinet meeting, will the figure of shared ownership be increased?  We don’t know – it’s a secret!

 

Wembley Housing Zone extract from the “Affordable Housing” report to Cabinet, 14 November 2022.

 

Martin published a guest blog I had written about that Affordable Housing report to the November 2022 Cabinet meeting, and another which I wrote following the Council Leader’s response to questions which Cllr. Anton Georgiou had asked at that meeting. I showed that there is already a surplus in shared ownership homes on offer in Brent, which is likely to continue and increase, and that shared ownership is not really affordable to most people in housing need in Brent. So why is the Council planning to make many of the WHZ homes shared ownership, which won’t help the people its affordable homes policy is meant to house?

 

Outline of the contract from the Officer Key Decision Report.

 

The contract, as shown by the extract above, is in several parts. This is because although both WHZ sites were given planning permission in February 2021, Ujima House only has outline permission. Because of the long delay in getting to the contract award stage (which has greatly increased the cost of the project), the “developer partner” has to prepare, submit and get approval for the actual Ujima House plans. That’s why there is a completion date of 31 December 2026 (nearly 4 years away!), with a possible extension, for those homes to be delivered.

 

The former office block at Ujima House still has some “meanwhile” occupants, including the thriving Stonebridge Boxing Club, a vital resource for the local community. They have still to find an alternative home. Despite the long lead time before any work at Ujima House can begin (apart from its possible demolition, leaving an empty site, like that of the former Copland School buildings, where work on the Cecil Avenue homes could start straight away), Brent Council wants to ‘seek to assist them in finding suitable alternative premises’ (evict them a.s.a.p.). 

 

Extract from the Equality Implications section of the Officer Key Decision Report.

 

The Report’s determination ‘to ensure a start on site by the end of March 2023’ must mean that the extra £5m funding the Council has obtained from the GLA comes from its 2016-2021 (but extended to 2023) Affordable Housing Programme. There is probably some “spare” money in that pot because Brent will fail to start some of its other New Council Homes projects before the 31 March deadline! The £5m looks like the grant for 50 London Affordable Rent homes, at £100k per home. The Cabinet’s August 2021 decision (possibly since watered down) was for all 54 homes at Ujima House to be for LAR, but only 37 at the Cecil Avenue site, so at least some of the latest GLA agreement must relate to Ujima House.

 

One final point. The documents published with the decision notice include the Council’s Tender Evaluation Grid, where Wates appear as contractor “C” (the identities of “A” and “B” are secret). Although “C” scored highest overall, because their Financial score was much better than the other two (meaning their price was lowest), they were only second in the Quality section. Their Quality score was 68.6 out of 100 (contractor “B” was best with 72.0). Brent has had problems over poor quality housing developments in recent memory.

 

The Quality section of the WHZ contract Tender Evaluation Grid.

 

Non-Cabinet councillors have five working days to call-in the Key Decision for scrutiny, if they consider there are reasonable grounds to do so. As it was published on 11 January, at least five members would need to call-in the decision by 5pm on Wednesday 18 January for the award of the contract to be put on hold, so that (probably) Community and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee could consider it. It will be interesting to see whether that happens!

 


Philip Grant.

 


Thursday 22 December 2022

‘Tis the Season to be Sneaky! Is Brent trying to award the c£100m Wembley Housing Zone contract without scrutiny?

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

The location of the two Wembley Housing Zone sites.

 

If you’re a regular reader of “Wembley Matters”, you will be aware of Brent’s often repeated statements about the urgent need to build more Council homes for the families in temporary accommodation and on the waiting list. They are used to justify the Council’s often unpopular “infill” plans for some of its housing estates, and by Brent’s planners to justify recommending applications that breach some planning policies, and are seen by many as overdevelopment.

 

You will also be aware of Brent’s promise (and Labour Group election pledge) to build 1,000 genuinely affordable Council homes in the five year period ended 31 March 2024.

 

If you’re a regular reader, you will have seen at least some of my previous guest posts about Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone proposals. These include building 250 homes on the Council-owned brownfield site of the former Copland School building at Cecil Avenue. If they had got on and built them as soon as they had full planning permission in February 2021, that could have contributed a quarter of the 1,000 homes target. But as a result of a Cabinet decision in August 2021, 152 of those new homes are to be built for private sale at a profit by a “Developer Partner”. 

 

Title page to the Report which Cabinet approved on 16 August 2021.

 

For much of 2022, I tried to get this (what appeared to be an odd) decision properly scrutinised, but that was finally scuppered by the Chair of the Resources & Public Realm Scrutiny Committee (acting on whose instructions?) in September. Now there appears to be an attempt by those in power at Brent Council to stop any scrutiny of the actual award of the contract for the Wembley Housing Zone scheme.

 

This will be a very big contract, likely to be worth in excess of £100m. Brent advertised in April for expressions of interest from contractors for this, and they had to respond by the end of May. In November, Cabinet were informed that progress had been made, but the details were hidden away in an “exempt” appendix to the Report.

 

Extract from the November 2022 “Update on the Supply of New Affordable Homes” Report.

 

Then, in the past few days, an item appeared on the Forward Plan page, saying that the decision to award the contract, to be Brent’s Developer Partner for the Wembley Housing Zone scheme, would be made this month, under ‘urgency procedures’!

 

The Forward Plan entry from Brent Council’s website.

 

As Brent has been working towards this decision since August 2021 (in fact, long before that) and the contract procurement process has been going on for over six months, why was it urgent and what are those procedures? There are some clues from the document, dated 12 December, that was provided in a “link” from that Forward Plan, which I will ask Martin to attach a copy of at the end of this post, for general information.

 

It appears that there are various degrees of urgency. Normally, at least 28 clear days’ notice of a Key Decision has to be given. In this case, although it would be less than 28 days, it was planned to be ‘at least 5 clear days’ notice.’ The decision would be made on 19 December.

 

Extract from the Urgent Key Decision form.

 

If it had been less than five days, the Chair of a Scrutiny Committee would have ‘to agree that the decision is urgent and cannot be reasonably deferred for the reasons detailed ….’  But as it was ‘at least 5 clear days’, ‘the Scrutiny Chair is only required to note that the decision will be taken.’ In other words, there would be no scrutiny of whether or not the decision was actually urgent.

 

According to the Urgent Decision form, 28 days’ notice could not be provided because: ‘Conclusion of the contractor developer partner procurement was delayed.’ But Council Officers have been working on that procurement for months, and would have known that a decision on it would be required at some time in the near future, so notice could surely have been given earlier.

 

And the reason why it is ‘impractical to defer the decision to a later date’ is said to be ‘to meet delivery timescales and funding conditions.’ With the delays which have already occurred since Brent first entered into its Wembley Housing Zone agreement with the GLA in 2015, delivery timescales don’t seem to have been much of a priority before. As for funding conditions, the Council must have been aware of these ever since funding agreements were made (at least 15 months ago for the extra £5.5m the GLA agreed to offer).

 

As at 6.30pm on Wednesday 21 December the formal decision has not been published on the Decisions page of Brent Council’s website. Perhaps it will be published on 22 or 23 December. But why would Senior Council Officers (and the Cabinet member responsible for this project, who is the Lead Member for Regeneration, despite this being mainly a housing development) delay making the decision, and giving the intention to make it so little publicity, until just before the Christmas / New Year holiday period?

 

Why Call-in matters, from Brent’s Protocol on Call-in.

 

I’ve said before that those behind this controversial Wembley Housing Zone project want to avoid any scrutiny of it. The award of the contract is a Key Decision, so could be called-in for scrutiny. I may be wrong, but I suspect that the decision is being made now to minimise any chance of a call-in. For call-in to take effect, at least five backbench councillors (non-Cabinet members) need to request that a Key Decision is called-in, and they need to do so ‘within 5 days of the date on which the record of the decision is made publicly available.’ 

 

How many councillors, if they were not aware that this important Key Decision was about to be made (because the usual 28 days’ notice has not been given) would be looking at the Decisions page on the Brent Council website over the holiday period? And even if any of them were keeping an eye on it, what would be the chances of organising five members to complete and submit call-in request forms before the end of the fifth day?

 

That’s the main reason I’ve asked Martin to consider publishing this guest post – so that this Festive Season is not used as a cover to sneak through a Key Decision without anyone realising that has been done until it is too late!

 

Philip Grant