Sustainable Communities Act and Brent

For several months, I have been trying to get progress on the Sustainable Communities Act in Brent. This first came up when a constituent approached Cllr Bobby Thomas and me at one of our regular surgeries in St Mark's Church (at the bottom of All Souls Avenue) in March.

he was a keen advocate of the Act which has been passed with all party support in an effort to encourage a more bottom up kind of local government. Bobby and I took it to the Labour Group (i.e. a meeting of all the Labour councillors in Brent), and quickly got support from our fellow Labour councillors.

That is where the problems started. When we went to the Brent Council legal department to find out how to present a proposal, we were told it depended on what the proposal was. So we had a problem: no one would produce a proposal because they was no mechanism to consider it, and there would be no mechanism until someone produced a proposal. We nagged away at this on the Forward Plan Committee until eventually the Executive agreed and a motion was passed at full Council. It is surely bizarre that something that had all party support and the vote of every single councillor took three months to bring about.

A bizarre twist in this, was that the constituent who approached me originally also raised it in the Harlesden Area Forum (as Bobby had suggested). In the discussion with him beforehand, I mentioned the problem of the no proposal/no mechanism, and suggested that I was thinking of proposing a change to the licensing laws on betting shops in order to provide a test case. There had been a recent controversy over the new William Hill opposite Harlesden Methodist Church. Because that site had formerly been a restaurant, the betting shop didn't require planning permission, so my Harlesden Labour colleague suggested a change to the licensing laws. Anyhow, he must have suggested this to the other parties, and the Brent Liberal Democrat Leader Paul Lorber put it in his motion to Full Council.

Unfortunately, the main point of the proposal (to provide a test case for the Sustainable Communites Act) seems to have been lost in translation. Paul Lorber, who isn't really the sharpest tool in the box, is suggested changes to licensing betting shops should be made under the Local Authorities Act, which is an entirely different piece of legislation.