Showing posts with label Brent Cabinet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brent Cabinet. 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.

Monday 13 March 2023

Cllr Eleanor Southwood to step down from Brent Council Cabinet

 

Rumours that had been circulating for some time were confirmed today when at the end of a 30 minute Cabinet meeting, Council Leader Muhammed Butt, announced that Cllr Eleanor Southwood was stepping down as a Cabinet member and returning to the backbenches.

A potential successor had been named to Wembley Matters but no confirmation was forthcoming after enquiries were made. There is always the possibility of sharing the portfolio amongst the remainder of the Cabinet or a reshuffle at the Labour Group AGM. 

Cllr Southwood was considered one of the most able of the current Cabinet with a command of the detail of her brief and a strategic approach to its development.

Saturday 11 February 2023

Brent Civic Centre - a modern rival to Watkin's Folly?

 

 

Brent Cabinet last week approved a major reconfiguration of part of Brent Civic Centre under the low key title 'Improving Customer Experience at Brent Civic Centre'.   In fact these are major works costing £2m to the 'state of the art'  building which is just 10 years old.  The Cabinet report recognised problems that have been there since the building opened.  At the planning stage Brent Green Party were the only local political party that opposed the grandiose project as expensive (c£100m) and a vanity project when councils were facing funding cuts. By 2011 Labour had reviewed their support and decided to go ahead, Liberal Democrats wanted the library reduced in size as other libraries were being closed and Tories wrote to the local press, 'We don't need a new sparkling civic centre at the detriment of people's jobs and front-line services'. LINK

The initial aim was to centralise the many Brent Council buildings in Wembley. There was even a proposal from the then Brent CEO to rename the borough the London Borough of Wembley. Soon it became apparent that not everyone in the boroughwas prepared to go to Wembley for services and 'hubs' were set up in other areas. The complaint that the Council is 'Wembley-centric' is still common.

Well we got a 'sparkling civic centre' that one critic described as a building fit to house the parliament of a small European state , with an imposing atrium and staircase (not actually used as a staircase) occupying a huge amount of space. The steps were handy for wedding photographs, post-election photo ops and demonstrations. It was a huge area of empty space with office space for concil workers on one side and large and small IKEA style meeting rooms for councillors on the other.

Strathcona closure demonstration

As with any new building there were teething problems but some of those were a product of the sesign itself. The building was cold in winter and hot in summer despite the green credentials, acoustics were so bad in meeting rooms that microphones had to be used even for fairly small rooms, and people had wave their arms in the air to operate the movement activated lighting.  One of the worse issues early on was the telephony system which failed to the extent that staff hads to operate mobile phones on not very good lines. When you rang you could hear other staff bellowing down their phones in the background in an effort to be heard.

Cuts in funding led to a reduction in staff with some floors emptied and attempts were made to let them out to commercial organisations to raise funds.  The Melting Pot restaurant featuring in the public relations video closed.

Wembley Matters early on drew attention to the inflation of library visitor figures because staff chose to walk in and out of the Centre via the library entrance which was convenient to Olympic Way and the station.

That entrance, next to Sainsbury's will now be the new main entrance for residents, rather than the one opposite the Arena which opens on to the atrium and its staircase.

Extract from the report:

New entrance: With the improved layout, residents will enter the building through a new main entrance on Exhibition Way by Sainsbury’s. This follows feedback from residents that the current entrance is overwhelming, unwelcoming, intimidating and very cold in the winter months. Instead, residents will now enter into a dedicated space where they can immediately be triaged and directed to the service that they need. Customers will now have a clear journey through the building.

Temperature: The new layout will resolve current issues with the temperature of the atrium. The atrium’s temperature is similar to outside which means that, during the winter, conditions are extremely uncomfortable for customers and staff. A Health and Safety concern has been raised for staff who spend hours meeting customers in this space. It also creates an unwelcoming and hostile environment for residents visiting the building. The improved layout will see residents enter through a new ground floor entrance, into a vestibule, that will help to maintain heat in the building. This layout will help to ensure that the Civic Centre provides a warm space for residents, which is increasingly critical given the current economic and energy crisis.

Welcome Desk: Currently, residents seeking support and business visitors to the Civic Centre queue together at the Welcome Desk. This contributes to delays and confusion for both customers and visitors. Potential businesses looking to hire floors in the Civic Centre have expressed concerns about the current setup as visitors, including those arriving for interviews, meetings and conferences, are often delayed at the Welcome Desk. The new layout will mean that the smaller Welcome Desk is dedicated to business visitors. This will ensure that the Civic Centre represents a more appealing location for businesses and/or organisations wanting to rent office space. This pressure on the Welcome Desk to triage visitors will only increase with the restacking of the building. Without these changes, there is a risk that the forecasted additional income of almost £750,000 per annum, generated by renting out further floors, could be jeopardised.  (Not quite 'poor doors' but resident and business separation.)

The changes will cost £1.96m which will be borowed over the course of 10 years at £242k per annum with a potential National Lottery Heritage Fund for enhancement of the library. Rather ominously the report notes that the scheme will be partly funded through savings to be identified 'primarily' in Customer Services; Libraries, Arts and Heritage, and Revenue and Development. I am not sure the Lottery will buy that.


Customer Services Area 'Concept' (Willmott Dixon Interiors)

There can be no doubt that the atrium  space is rather overwhelming for visitors to the centre, especially if you are a homeless family with small children dragging your suitcases to find help. The contrast to the surroundings serves to intimidate and make you feel small and insignicant.

I am struggling to work out what is going to happen to the atrium. The presentation below gives few clues.

Overall the proposals raise questions about the original 'grand design' and its suitability, rather similar to those that the GLA experienced at the 'glass testicle' (now abandoned) - a building where architects neglected effective function. LINK

Watkin's Folly was the ill-fated attempt to build a tower at Wembley Park to rival the Eiffel Tower. If history deems Brent Civic Centre a 'folly', I wonder who it will be named after?


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 

 

Monday 28 November 2022

Brent’s Affordable Council Housing – figuring out Cllr. Butt’s reply

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 


On 14 November, Martin reported the questions which Cllr. Anton Georgiou had asked at the Cabinet meeting about the number of new Council homes Brent has delivered, and the proposal Cabinet was considering about “converting” some homes the Council was building from London Affordable Rent to Shared Ownership. The Leader, Cllr. Muhammed Butt, said the Council would come back to him with a detailed reply. 

 

Cllr. Georgiou has received that reply. He’s passed a copy to me, saying he would be happy for me to share it, as it should be public knowledge. I’ll ask Martin to attach the answers to the questions (prepared for Cllr. Butt by Brent’s Head of Affordable Housing) at the end of this post. At the Cabinet meeting, Cllr. Butt said that he hoped the Council and its Officers were not being accused of deliberately misleading the public. As the information he has supplied may be slightly confusing, I hope this article will provide a bit more clarity.

 

Brent’s Lead Member for Housing emphasising ‘genuinely affordable housing’.
(From the publicity video for Brent’s Clement Close “infill” scheme)

 

Much is made in Brent’s publicity about ‘Delivering 1,000 New Council Homes’ (“NCH”). What does the Council’s housing policy actually say? Brent is committed to there being 5,000 affordable homes built in the borough between April 2019 and March 2024 inclusive. As part of that aim, the Council itself has ‘a strategic target of delivering 1,000 new council homes at genuinely affordable rent by 31 March 2024.’

 

There are two types of “genuinely affordable” rent which can be charged by social housing providers such as Brent. The first is Social Rent (sometimes known as Formula Rent, which is the maximum rent for each size of home, calculated by the Regulator of Social Housing). This is the “rent capped” level which can be charged to existing tenants of social housing provided by local authorities and Housing Associations, or new tenants if the registered provider choses Social Rent as the tenure. These Social Rents can only be increased by a set “formula” each year, so rents paid by existing Council tenants may be less that the maximum “rent cap”.

 

The current maximum weekly Social Rent levels. (Regulator of Social Housing website)

 

The second type of “genuinely affordable” rent, in London, is London Affordable Rent. It was introduced by the Mayor, Sadiq Khan, in 2016, as the genuinely affordable rent level at which new homes built using his “affordable homes” grants could be charged. The weekly amounts are slightly higher than the maximum Social Rent level. (Currently, the annual increase “formula” for both rent types, set by the Regulator, is the previous September’s CPI + 1%, although the cap for increases from April 2023 was recently limited by the Chancellor to 7%).

 

London Affordable Rent levels. (From the GLA affordable housing website)

 

I’ve given this information before examining the answers provided to Cllr. Georgiou’s questions, as I think it will make it easier when I try to explain some of the replies. 

 

Paragraph from the 14 November “Update” report on the success of Brent’s NCH Programme.

 

The item being discussed at the Cabinet meeting was an update on the supply of affordable housing (see my guest blog of 11 November for more details). The Report said that the Council had developed and let 684 NCH. Cllr. Georgiou asked how many of the 684 were at each type of rent level and what types of tenure made up this total. This was the response:

 

Extract from the document sent by Cllr. Butt on 21 November.

 

In the first list, there are 235 new Council homes shown as being at Council (which must mean Social) rent level. There is a reason for this, which was first highlighted in a September 2021 “Life in Kilburn” blog about Brent’s “1,000 New Council Homes” Programme. 209 of those 235 were homes into which existing tenants from the Gloucester and Durham blocks in Kilburn, which Brent will demolish to redevelop, had been transferred. Their rents had to stay at their old Council/Social level, and its possible that the other 26 at that level are for a similar reason.

 

The 253 of 684 at LAR are probably new homes that have been supplied to people on the Council’s waiting list, or similar genuinely new Council tenants. But what about those at ‘London housing allowance rent level’? You will notice that the figure of 149 at that level matches the 149 shown for tenants in temporary accommodation, and 92 of those will be at the Council’s Knowles House development for temporary accommodation in Harlesden.

 

LHA is actually Local Housing Allowance level, a series of scales calculated by the Valuation Office Agency as a way of setting housing benefit entitlements for tenants living in the private sector. It is higher than rent levels that the Council could charge as a social housing provider, so Brent’s temporary accommodation is treated as a sort of semi-private Council housing. 

 

Weekly LHA rates for areas covering most of Brent. (From the VOA’s LHA website)

 

The LHA figures applicable in Brent are those calculated for the Inner North London (basically south of the River Brent) and North West London areas. They are the maximum amounts which the tenant can claim Housing Benefit (or the housing part of Universal Credit) for. In that respect, they can be seen as “affordable”, but it is not the “genuinely affordable rent” which the 1,000 new homes are meant to provide.

 

It will be seen that the 47 “Assisted Living” homes are not included in the rent level breakdown answer, so they are not provided at “genuinely affordable rent” either. And the claim that 488 of the 684 are ‘social rent homes’ is also incorrect. As shown above, only 235 are at Social Rent level. This is yet another example of the misleading descriptions of housing often used by councillors and Council Officers. It would be correct to call the 488 “genuinely affordable” homes “social housing”, or Brent Council social housing, but they are NOT all for ‘social rent’.

 

Another clarification that Cllr. Georgiou asked for at the 14 November Cabinet meeting was the difference between the 684 figure, and that given to the Scrutiny Committees when they were jointly considering Brent’s Draft Borough Plan the previous week. When asked how many NCH had been built, the Chief Executive, Carolyn Downs, said around 800. Cllr. Butt cut in to say 768. 

 

From the reply now received it’s clear that those figures included new homes completed in 2018/19, before the start of the five years covered by the “1,000 New Council Homes” pledge. Of the 103 from that year, only 30 were “general needs” homes at LAR. It may just have been a misunderstanding that a higher figure was given at Scrutiny, but the councillors hearing it may have mistakenly believed that was the current progress towards the Council’s target, so the record needs to be put straight.

 

The final part of Cllr. Georgiou’s questions was on the thorny subject of Shared Ownership. In a guest post on 12 October, I made clear that this is actually an “assured tenancy”, which would only become “ownership” if or when the tenant succeeded in purchasing 100% of the home. The information provided by Cllr. Butt showed “0” shared ownership in the rent or tenure details, but then admitted that there were 39 ‘shared ownership homes within the HRA account’.

 

At the Scrutiny meeting on 8 November, Cllr. Georgiou had requested ‘complete clarity for the committee’ on Brent’s Council housing (see transcript at the end of my 11 November “Affordable Council Homes” guest post). When he put to the Chief Executive that Brent appeared to be including shared ownership as part of its Council housing, Ms Downs replied: ‘We have not ever built a single Shared Ownership. Developers might, we the Council haven’t.’ 

 

That reply seems to have been playing with words. The shared ownership homes in Brent’s Housing Revenue Account must include 23 built for Brent Council, by a developer, under a Section 106 planning agreement, as part of the Grand Union development (the other 16 may well have been acquired under similar agreements). But under that same S.106 agreement, 92 of the 253 LAR homes included in the 1,000 NCH count were built, for Brent but not by Brent. This “double standards” treatment could be considered misleading!

 

You will see from the reply attached below that the proposed “conversion” of “genuinely affordable” LAR homes to shared ownership, which Cabinet approved on 14 November, and the commissioning of a report into shared ownership demand in Brent, is explained like this:

 

‘The proposal was therefore to identify new examples of best practice so Brent can be a leading example in any shared ownership homes that it provides ….’

 

Along with the reply to the questions, Cllr. Butt sent two other documents. These were a December 2017 Report by the Cambridge Centre for Housing & Planning Research on “Affordable housing products in Brent and their affordability to target client groups” and some “Shared Ownership data sets” extracted from that report. 

 

Shared ownership affordability for a couple with two children in Brent, from the data sets.

 

The report seems to be the source of much of the data supplied to the later Brent Poverty Commission, which led to this extract from a report to Cabinet in October 2020:

 

Brent Council’s policy on Shared Ownership, as set out in a Cabinet Report, October 2020.

 

That assessment does see the need for some shared ownership homes in the borough. However, an “Update” report to Cabinet a few months earlier, on progress towards meeting the strategic target of 5,000 new affordable homes by March 2024, showed that other shared ownership providers had more than enough such homes “in the pipeline” to meet that need.

 

Table from the July 2020 Update Report on progress towards the new affordable homes target.

 

On the data currently available, it seems likely that there will already be more shared ownership homes in Brent than existing Brent residents, who might be thinking of this “housing product” in order to “get on the housing ladder”, can afford. They are mainly suitable for young professionals, who would like to eventually own their own home and who foresee their income level rising significantly as they gain experience. But they are also the ones most likely to have read about the pitfalls of shared ownership on social media (see this 2020 guest post from a shared ownership tenant in Kilburn)!

 

If you wanted to get on the shared ownership ladder in Brent now, there are plenty of opportunities to chose from. But you can only qualify for this supposedly “affordable” housing option if your annual household income is less than £90k! Then, if you managed to get a mortgage to buy a 25% share of a home, you’d probably have to pay service charges of at least £250 a month, on top of your mortgage payments and rent for the other 75%.

 



A small representative selection of the shared ownership homes in Brent
currently advertised on the internet.

 

At the end of his presentation on 14 November, Cllr. Georgiou urged Brent’s Cabinet to reject the Officer’s recommendation to “convert” LAR homes in the NCH Programme to shared ownership. His plea, and the evidence he’d given to support it, was ignored. He tried to get the Full Council meeting on 21 November to consider a motion calling for Brent to concentrate on delivering genuinely affordable rented homes, and not to make some of the homes it plans to build shared ownership or open market sale. 

 

The attempt at a proper debate on the issue was ambushed by Cllr. Shama Tatler, with a Labour Group amendment, which backbench Labour councillors were “whipped” to support. But I still believe that ordinary residents should have their say, so if you would like to, please add a comment to my guest blog “SHARED OWNERSHIP – Let’s have a debate!

 

Have I figured out Cllr. Butt’s reply for you? If I’ve done my sums correctly, more than 3½ years into the five year Strategic Target, Brent’s New Council Homes Programme has only delivered 253 genuinely affordable new homes for people on its long waiting list. It has also built 235 genuinely affordable new homes for existing tenants, “decanted” from homes it plans to demolish in order to redevelop the sites for housing in future. That’s 488 in total, out of 1,000.


Philip Grant

 

Councillor Muhammed Butt's reply to Cllr. Georgiou's questions.