Showing posts with label affordable housing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label affordable housing. 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.

Thursday 7 December 2023

Brent’s Affordable Council Housing – open and transparent?

Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 


I’ve already written about the Morland Gardens parts of the Affordable Housing Supply Update report to next week’s (11 December 2023) Cabinet meeting, and Martin has also posted a blog about the temporary accommodation proposals in its South Kilburn section. In this article I will cover some of the other points that caught my eye from that report.

 

I am not seeking to underestimate the “challenges” which the Council faces over meeting current housing needs, particularly over the shortage of Central Government funding, rising construction costs and higher interest rates since the disastrous mini-budget during the short-lived Truss premiership. Brent has aimed to do more over housing than many other London Councils, and the recommendations in this report include to ‘approve the use of usable Capital reserves to fund’ the New Council Homes Programme (“NCHP”), and to provide extra resources to tackle the current temporary accommodation crisis. 

 

A recent feature of such reports is a “Cabinet Member Foreword” (though whether these are written by the Lead Members, or for them by a Council Officer, is unclear). I was struck by these words from this Foreword’s para. 3.5: ‘this report emphasises the importance of being open and transparent with all ….’ I agree that openness and transparency are very important, but does this report deliver on those words?

 


In the report, are the Council being honest about what they have achieved so far? The Cabinet Member for Housing says: ‘we are on track to meet our target of 5,000 homes by 2028’. When the NCHP target was first launched five years ago, the aim was 5,000 affordable homes built in the borough between April 2019 and March 2024 inclusive. As part of that aim, the Council set itself ‘a strategic target of delivering 1,000 new council homes at genuinely affordable rent by 31 March 2024.’ So, they’ve missed that target, and replaced it with another!

 

 

Table 1 in the report (above), which should be accurate because the “numbers” have been “cleansed”, shows that 3,901 affordable homes will have been finished in the borough in the five years to March 2024 (although the “by tenure” column totals 3,943! - see my corrections in red). 812 of those are shown as delivered by Brent Council. But only 560 (those described as “General Needs”) of the new Council homes will be “genuinely affordable”, and of those 235 were for existing Council tenants being moved from older blocks due to be demolished. 

 

The affordable homes provided by RPs (Registered Providers of social housing, such as Housing Associations) make up 3,089 of the 3,901 total, but only 940 of those homes appear to be “genuinely affordable”. That is just over 30% of the total, with the rest being “intermediate” homes, such as shared ownership. Although most of these will have received planning consent before Brent’s Local Plan came into force in February 2022, that is the opposite of the tenure split for affordable housing which is now supposed to apply: 70% genuinely affordable and no more than 30% “intermediate” affordable housing.

 

More details about the types of “affordable housing” can be found in an article, Brent’s Affordable Council Housing – figuring out Cllr. Butt’s reply, which I wrote after a previous Cabinet update in November 2022.

 

The report has a section headed “Schemes on site and in main works contract”, and there are two schemes in particular from this that I would draw attention to. The first of these is Watling Gardens, the Council’s positive publicity over the start of work on which was mentioned in another article on Brent’s Council housing in October.

 


 

While the report says that this scheme ‘is currently on track’, it would cost more than the £38.5m which Brent’s Cabinet approved as the contract award price in June 2022. Brent’s answer is to issue an instruction that the project must be “value engineered”. What does that mean? It means that it will still have to built as planned, but using some materials which are less expensive than those originally intended. Previous examples of “value engineering” which come to mind are the use of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) in some public buildings during cost saving measures in the 1960s to 1980s, and the £300k “saved” by using cheaper cladding when Grenfell Tower was being refurbished!

 

The stage and TV drama, where all the words were taken directly from Inquiry transcripts!

 

I’m not trying to suggest that the cost saving at Watling Gardens would result in anything as life-threatening as Grenfell Tower, but in the interests of transparency the public, and particularly future residents of the development (including those whose homes were demolished with the promise of a replacement there), deserve to be told what cheaper materials will be used as part of this “value engineering”.

 

I have written about Brent’s Wembley Housing Zone project on a number of occasions, including about the extra GLA funding it received, and about the 152 out of 250 homes on the former Copland School site at Cecil Avenue which Brent’s “developer partner” will get for private sale, rather than being Council homes for Brent people in housing need. The report now says there will be less than 250 homes, because of the need for extra staircases, as a result of fire safety changes following the Grenfell Tower Inquiry.

 


 

I’m pleased to see that Brent appears to have learned one lesson from Morland Gardens (the need to begin work before planning consent expires), but why has it taken nearly three years to get to this stage? However, 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!

 

You need to read to the end of the report, on page 21, to find out what it means by ‘the importance of being open and transparent’, which I quoted near the start of this article. It appears that, to Brent Council and its Cabinet, this is more to do with the messages it gives out, rather than a commitment to being genuinely open and transparent about everything:

 


 

In other words, it is the usual “spin” that Brent Council puts out, either only sharing “good news” stories (usually with the Leader and/or one of his Cabinet colleagues getting the credit for something positive) or giving the reasons (excuses?) for why they can’t do what they had originally promised to deliver.


Philip Grant

 

Monday 13 November 2023

Kilburn Square – Brent planners seek to reduce Affordable Housing by stealth

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity




The recent guest post by the Chair of Kilburn Village Residents’ Association, Kilburn Square – Decision time (Chapter One) is finally here this Wednesday, ends with a reference to a future decision which will have to be made if planning permission for Brent Council’s proposed scheme is approved. But if Planning Officers get their way, there will be no Chapter Two.

 

Martin’s earlier blog about the various Brent infill housing applications on the agenda for Wednesday evening’s Planning Committee meeting, Say after me, 'The benefits of the scheme outweigh the harm/impact/conflict with policy', showed how Brent’s Planning Officers are using claimed “public benefits” to justify ignoring any objection points against the applications they are recommending should be accepted.

 

The main “public benefit” which they say would ‘far outweigh any harm’ on the Kilburn Square application (despite the many valid objection points set out in the KVRA Chair’s recent article) is that the proposed 139 new homes would all be affordable housing. That is what the application’s Affordable Housing Statement (Final) says, despite Brent’s Cabinet giving the green light to some of them being "converted" to shared ownership or even outright sale at its meeting in November 2022.

 

The rent details from the application’s Affordable Housing Statement (Final)

 

The affordable housing proposed in the Kilburn Square application is 99 "general needs" homes at the genuinely affordable London Affordable Rent ("LAR") level, and 40 New Accommodation for Independent Living ("NAIL") flats at the "intermediate" Local Housing Allowance rent level.

 

Other local Brent housing estate applications (Watling Gardens and Windmill Court) approved in 2022, under the current Brent Local Plan policies, also showed that all of their new homes would be for genuinely affordable housing (LAR, or Social Rent level for returning existing tenants). The affordable housing condition (Condition 3) in their planning consent letters made clear that 100% of the homes would be affordable housing, as set out in those applications. The reason given for this condition was: 'In the interests of proper planning.'

 

There have been no changes in planning policy or law since those consents were issued in April 2022, so the position should be the same for Kilburn Square.

 

However, if you look closely at the proposed Condition 3 in the draft decision notice, tucked away at the end of the Planning Officers’ Committee Report for Kilburn Square, it says:

 

'The development hereby approved shall contain 139 residential dwellings. A minimum of 50 % of those dwellings (measured by habitable room or number of homes) shall be provided as Affordable housing ....'

 

I submitted an objection to this proposed condition, and I will ask Martin to attach a copy of the pdf version of it (which I submitted online, and emailed to the three key Planning Officers - Head of Planning, Development Management Manager and Case Officer – on Sunday evening) at the foot of this article, for anyone to read if they are interested. 

 

I also objected to a weird Condition 4 in the draft decision notice, also concerning affordable housing, for which there was no mention or explanation of in the body of the Committee Report:

 

The opening part of the proposed Condition 4 from the draft decision notice.

 

If the application is approved on Wednesday, as recommended by Planning Officers, allowing affordable housing Condition 3 to stand would totally undermine the "public benefits" which the application is meant to provide. 

 

A minimum of 50% of the proposed new homes would be 70, leaving 69 which Brent's New Council Homes team could "convert" away from genuinely affordable LAR rent to local people in housing need. They could even be “converted” from affordable housing to private sale, leaving as few as 30 of the 99 “general needs” homes at LAR rent level, promised by the application, actually delivered by Brent Council’s Kilburn Square project.

 

What is equally as bad is that Planning Officers are trying to do this "by the back door". When Brent wanted to "convert" some of the Watling Gardens LAR homes to shared ownership, they had to make a fresh planning application to change Condition 3 in the 100% affordable housing consent they'd received for the scheme.

 

My objection is seeking to have Condition 3 of the planning consent, if Planning Committee approve the plans, require that 100% of the 139 homes should be affordable housing, as set out in the application itself. 

 

I am also seeking that the Condition(s) should include a requirement that any change the applicant (Brent Council!) wishes to make to that affordable housing condition should be made by way of a “material change” application under Section 73, Town and Country Planning Act 1990. That type of application requires public consultation (so the chance to object), and detailed consideration of the reasons and evidence given for seeking a change.

 

I had drawn attention to the discrepancy between what the Kilburn Square application promised for affordable housing and the November 2022 Cabinet decision on “conversion” of units from LAR last February (Kilburn Square – Brent must come clean on affordable housing!). When Brent’s planning agent did not submit revised affordable housing details, Brent’s Head of Planning promised that the application would be ‘considered as submitted’. 

 

This should have meant that the affordable housing condition would specify 100% affordable housing. To change that, by stealth, to ‘a minimum of 50% affordable housing’ feels like a dirty trick, which Brent’s Planning Officers should be ashamed of!


 

Philip Grant

 

 

 


Tuesday 12 September 2023

Exhibitions this week on Ujima House plans

 

Wates are putting on an exhibition aiming to improve the Ujima House outline planning consent at St John's the Evangelist Community Centre at 1 Crawford Avenuen, Wembley, on Thursday from 4pm to 8pm and Saturday 10am to 1pm.

For background see Philip Grant's guest post HERE

The '100% affordable housing' (which Brent's Cabinet agreed in August 2021 would be all London Affordable Rent) has now been amended to 32 flats at London Affordable Rent, and 22 "Intermediate" flats (either shared ownership or Intermediate rent, suitable for people / households with an annual income of around £60k).Brent Council has recently itself admitted that shared ownership is not affordable for most Brent residents.

After exhibition see ujimahouse.co.uk

Wednesday 3 May 2023

The Green Party's Right Homes, Right Place, Right Price Charter - applicable to Brent?

 We don't have council elections in Brent until 2025 but given the housing crisis and the debate over affordability I thought readers may be interested in Green Party policy on this issue which was publicised in the context of tomorro'w local elections eleswhere in the country.

Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay said:

We need councillors and national government to work together to deliver the homes people need and can afford to rent and buy, where people need them. 

Today, speculators and developers are allowed to chase the biggest profits and ignore local needs. Too many villages and towns have seen large-scale developments take place without the community infrastructure expanded alongside, such as GP surgeries, bus services, cycling and walking networks and nurseries and schools.

What we need is local councils supported to build quality, affordable housing in the right places where people live and work, with the right supporting infrastructure and local facilities.

Our Right Homes, Right Place, Right Price Charter will simultaneously protect valuable green space for communities, reduce climate emissions, tackle fuel poverty and provide genuinely affordable housing.

We’ve seen how Green councillors have made a difference in Mid Suffolk, where developers are now expected to provide EV points, not connect to the gas grid and provide heat pumps as standard.

The villages of Suffolk and Norfolk are facing the same problems as much of the rest of the country - developers being allowed to build houses local people often can’t afford and failing to ensure local services like buses and GP surgeries get the investment they need.

Developers are being allowed to ride roughshod over the needs of communities and the environment and this has got to stop.”

Co-leader Carla Denyer, who is a serving councillor and Parliamentary candidate in Bristol, said:

Up and down the country, people are experiencing the same problems as people here in Stowmarket - homes that are unaffordable to buy, unaffordable to rent and unaffordable to heat. There is a generation of people who are trapped in the private rental market by spiralling rents that bear no relationship to incomes.

To address this, in the short term, we would introduce an immediate rent freeze and eviction ban to prevent people being made homeless in the middle of this cost of living crisis, as the Scottish Greens have already done as part of the Scottish Government. 

In the longer term, we would give councils the power to bring in rent controls in areas where the housing market is overheated. We would also place much stricter controls on the type of new homes bein

Everyone deserves a place that they can call home. That is why our Right Homes, Right Place, Right Price Charter will deliver the change we want to see across the housing sector and create fairer, greener communities.

The Greens’ Right Homes, Right Place, Right Price Charter would:

  • End the housing crisis by creating enough affordable homes – including 100,000 new council homes a year built to the Passivhaus or equivalent standard

  • Empower local authorities to bring empty homes back into use

  • Transform the planning system to:

    • Incentivise renovation and improvement of existing buildings to reduce the environmental impact of new construction

    • Incentivise local authorities to spread small developments across their areas, where appropriate, rather than building huge new estates

    • Protect valuable green space for communities

    • Require new developments to be accompanied by the extra investment needed in local services, such as providing extra school and GP places and better bus services

  • Transform building regulations to ensure: 

    • all new private and public sector housing meets Passivhaus or equivalent standards

    • house builders include solar panels and heat pumps on all new homes.

  • Ensure all new developments will be located and designed to ensure that residents do not need cars to live a full life

  • Introduce rent controls 

  • End no-fault evictions

Thursday 16 February 2023

Kilburn Square – Would you believe it?

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

Extract from the Affordable Housing Update Report to Brent’s Cabinet, 14 November 2022.

 

In a guest post last week, Kilburn Square – Brent must come clean on affordable housing!, I let “Wembley Matters” readers know about the Council’s failure to update Brent’s Planners about the change from London Affordable Rent (“LAR”) homes to shared ownership in its Kilburn Square planning application, 22/3669.

 

It appeared that they were trying to get their application approved (probably at Planning Committee on 15 March) on the basis that all 99 of the proposed “general needs” homes would be for LAR. A Brent Cabinet decision on 14 November 2022 made it likely that around 40 of those homes would be “converted” to shared ownership. On those “true” figures, the application would be likely to fail Brent’s Local Plan affordable housing policy BH5.

 

In comments below that article, I kept readers up to date with correspondence between myself and Head of Affordable Housing and Brent’s Lead Member for Housing. However, Martin has agreed that the latest exchange of emails is sufficiently important to deserve a guest post of its own.

 

I have previously drawn the attention of Ms Baines and Cllr. Knight to a letter I had published in the “Brent & Kilburn Times” on 19 January, calling on the Council for honesty over its Kilburn Square affordable housing proposals:

 

My letter published in the “Brent & Kilburn Times” on 19 January 2023,

 

On 9 February, after several brief exchanges of emails, I had written to Brent’s Head of Affordable Housing (with copy to the Cabinet Lead Member for Housing) saying:

 

‘Please confirm that you have now instructed JLL to submit a revised Affordable Housing Statement for Kilburn Square (application 22/3669), giving the actual and updated tenure split for the proposed 139 homes, including those you intend to "convert" from LAR to shared ownership. 

 

If you cannot give that confirmation, please explain why, and what you intend to do over the tenure split on this scheme. Thank you.’

 

This is the full text of the reply I received on 10 February:

 

‘Hello Phillip,

 

I have previously confirmed we are still in a live procurement, this means we have not confirmed the market costs of this build and do therefore not know if a change in tenure would even be required. 

 

I can assure you as head of affordable housing and partnerships my role is to deliver as many social homes as possible. 

 

Best wishes

 

Emily-Rae’

 

I have to admit that I found the claim at the end of the first paragraph difficult to believe! If I had replied straight away, I’d probably have used words I might later regret. So I waited several days, and this is the full text of the reply I sent to Brent’s Head of Affordable Housing on 14 February:

 

This is an Open Email

 

Dear Ms Baines,

 

 

Thank you for your email of 10 February.

 

 

I was pleased to read of your determination 'to deliver as many social homes as possible.' I hope that by 'social homes' you mean homes at Social Rent level, as strongly recommended by the Brent Poverty Commission report in 2020, or at least the other form of "genuinely affordable" Council homes, at London Affordable Rent ("LAR") level.

 

 

I was surprised to read that you 'do not know if a change in tenure would even be required', for the 99 "general needs" homes proposed for Kilburn Square in your planning application 22/3669.

 

 

That is entirely the opposite of what was set out in the "Update on the supply of New Affordable Homes" report ("the Report") to the 14 November 2022 Cabinet meeting, for which you were the first named Contact Officer.

 

 

At para. 1.1 of the Report it stated:

 

'This report specifically outlines viability gaps across 10 schemes, which are not yet in contract and sets out options for cross subsidisation where possible for the Council’s consideration.'

 

 

Paragraphs 4.17 to 4.30 of the Report dealt with 10 New Council Homes Programme ("NCHP") schemes which were not yet in contract, with para. 4.18 stating:

 

'To better understand the Council’s options, officers have reviewed all 10 of these schemes to explore possible options for making schemes viable. This in real terms means the conversion of some social rented homes to shared ownership or other tenures in order to cross subsidise the scheme.'  

 

 

Four of the ten schemes were identified from this review as being suitable for "conversion", and Kilburn Square was one of the four. From the information supplied in the Report, it appears that details of the review's evidence and conclusions, from its assessment of the ten schemes, were set out in an "exempt" appendix to the Report, which was made available to Cabinet members and some Officers, but not to the public. 

 

 

Para. 4.19 of the Report gives that information, as follows:

 

'Appendix 2 sets out a summary table of this assessment and overall, there are four schemes which allow for conversion of some homes (50% or under in keeping with planning requirements) and result in a positive net present value which mean they are financially viable.

 

These schemes are: 
· Kilburn Square
· Windmill Court
· Seymour Court
· Rokesby Place '

 

 

Specific details of the number of homes involved in those four schemes, and the total number to be "converted", were stated in para. 4.20:

 

 

'Across these four schemes, there were 204 affordable homes due for delivery either at Social Rent or London Affordable Rent. This conversion would see this number reduce to 145 homes for London Affordable Rent and 59 homes for Shared Ownership.'  

 

 

Paragraphs 4.22 and 4.23 appear to make clear that only two homes from the small schemes at Seymour Court and Rokesby Place could be "converted" from LAR to shared ownership. That would leave 57 of the LAR homes proposed for Kilburn Square and Windmill Court to be converted to shared ownership, according to the November 2022 Report.

 

 

Given that detailed information, from just three months ago, it is difficult to understand how you can now claim that Officers involved in the NCHP 'do not know if a change in tenure would even be required' for Kilburn Square (which has roughly twice the number of proposed LAR homes than those approved for Windmill Court).

 

 

As the Report was signed off by the Corporate Director, Resident Services, and recommended (and received) greater delegated powers for him in respect of the tenure split for NCHP schemes, I am copying this email to him, and to the Council Leader (as well as to the Cabinet Member for Housing).

 

 

Mr Gadsdon may wish to explain to the Council Leader (and Cllr. Muhammed Butt may wish to receive that explanation) what has changed so much in the past three months to make the previously unviable Kilburn Square scheme, where perhaps around 40 LAR homes would need to be "converted" to shared ownership, now potentially viable, so that no such "conversion" might be needed.

 

 

I am sure that a number of other councillors, and interested local residents, would like that explanation to be made public. 

 

 

As things currently stand, the apparent difference in the situation over the affordable housing tenure split at Kilburn Square, between that set out in the Report in November 2022 and that suggested in your email of 10 February, could be seen as an exaggeration of the viability problem last November, in order to mislead elected councillors into transferring some of their powers to Senior Officers. Some clarification is surely needed!

 

 

Best wishes,

 

Philip Grant.’

 

 

Has there genuinely been a massive change in the viability of Brent’s proposed Kilburn Square housing scheme in the past three months? Was the “viability gap” on New Council Homes schemes overstated by Council Officers in their report to Cabinet in November 2022? 

 

Or has the true position over the tenure split of the proposed homes at Kilburn Square not been disclosed in the email sent to me on 10 February, in an attempt to maintain an unfair advantage over affordable housing when the Council’s planning application is considered? You can decide which version you believe!


 

Philip Grant.