St Mark's Church Expansion

My post yesterday about All Souls Church reminds me that there is also a planning application in about St Mark's, the church opposite the Law Medical Group Practice. After a fund raising drive, they more or less have the money to expand the Church Hall with a bigger kitchen and a disabled toilet. They also want to turn the car park area at the front into a garden, with just enough space for dropping people off.


Here is a picture of Dawn Butler MP with two St Mark's supporters at the launch of the fund raising.

Vince Cable and VAT

The Evening Standard carries a story that the UK began to recover at the ned of 2009 at a much stronger rate than previously thought. I was interested in the quote by Vince Cable towards the end, where he says the economy may slip back as a result of the reinstatement of the full rate of VAT. The reinstatement may well have caused people to bring spending forward, but I seem to remember St Vince saying a year ago that he didn't regard the VAT cut as being a significant stimulus to the economy. Now he seems to think reinstating the full rate will knock the economy back. Sounds a little inconsistent to me.

All Souls Church, Harlesden

The Harlesden Town Centre design project, which meets on 1 March, is encouraging us to think how we could make the town centre a beautiful place. I think the frontages in the Harlesden Town Centre Conservation Area already are beautiful, and All Souls Church is as beautiful a church as you can find anywhere. I particularly like the way All Souls has been refurbished in a modern style without destroying the qualities of the Victorian original.

Bertha Joseph Reported to the Police

Bertha Joseph, the suspended Conservative councillor in Kensal Green, has now been reported to the Police for collecting money for two charities and then spending it on herself. I believe the two charities that should have benefited from the fundraising were the Down's Syndrome Association and the Shooting Stars Children's Hospice. Incidentally, Brent Conservatives have announced that Bertha Joseph will stand for them in Kensal Green in May, although how that squares with the Conservatives' professed desire to clean up politics is hard to see.

UPDATE

Brian Coleman has got to go asks who has reported her? The answer is Cllr Ann John, Leader of the Labour Group in Brent.

Atiq Malik Statement

Atiq Malik has finally sent an email stating his objection to my post of 7 January. I print it in full:

Dear Cllr Powney,
Thanks for your email. I never stated that British women or men should be subject to Sharia Law.

Regards.
Atiq

Broken Promises on Council Tax

I see both the Brent Tories and the Brent Liberal Democrats have been claiming to have kept their promises on Council Tax levels. Rubbish.

As you can see here, the Liberal Democrats promised to freeze the Council Tax four years ago. Since that time they have raised Band D Council Tax in Brent by more than one hundred pounds.

The Future of the Route 18

Dave Hill has commentary on a debendified route. Route 18 is losing its bendy buses in November, so you can see the future and it doesn't look like it is going to work.

UPDATE

As I understand it there have to be more buses trundling along in order to match the capacity of the bendies. However, as the route is usually bursting anyway there is probably a case for increasing capacity on top of that.

Park Parade Boards

Here is an example of the kind of poor signage left by estate agents that my colleague Lesley Jones has blogged on. This example is on Park Parade, just off High Street Harlesden.

Allotments

I have blogged previously on the exploding waiting list for allotment sites in Brent. The list has trebled in the last three years, and I think we need to review how they are managed and how we can get some new ones.

I am a bit worried about how effectively they are managed because I know of a case where someone worked an allotment for three years before it was realised that he didn't have a formal contract to do it. Looking round, for example at the Longstone Avenue allotments, some of the sites do not appear well cultivated. I wonder if Brent Council are as pro-active as they might be in following when peoples' circumstances change? I suspect that there are cases where people move away from the area, but retain ownership of an allotment that they are unlikely to use. I don't want to hurry people off, but perhaps we can do better in encouraging people to use their sites or perhaps sub-dividing them if they get get to be too large.

The second issue is increasing the supply. I don't whether reconfiguring the sites would yield more plots, but we should also look to use planning powers to address the shortage we have at the moment. Even quite a small number of plots can be viable, and we need to be more imaginative in we meet the growing need.

Overview and Scrutiny Bill

At the start of February, John Denham announced governement support for a Private Members' Bill called the Overview and Scrutiny Bill. This bill is intended to allow Councils to compel responsible organisations to attend Scrutiny meeting where they explain things like "like dug up roads, poor facilities at train stations, or threatened local bus routes". It sounds as if it would be tailor made for the problems we get all the time in Kensal Green, like the consatant digging up of Palermo Road by one company after another, or the dreadful state of Willesden Junction.

The problem will be if, given the very small amount of parliamentary time left in this Parliament, it gets talked out. Even worse is the fact that the MP sponsoring it is David Chaytor, who is being charged with false accounting offences, something of a distraction from shepherding a bill through.

Wrottesley Road Resurfacing

Resurfacing has finally begun on the site of the burst main on Wrottesley Road (see this picture from this morning), so hopefully the traffic lights will be taken away soon.

Harlesden Library Finally Re-opens

Harlesden Library is due to re-open in March. At least that is when they intend to hold the opening ceremony. The project has had a number of issues. It certainly wasn't supposed to take 19 months to refurbish the place. The closure of one of the Borough's main libraries during that period must have seen quite a downturn in usage.

The second big problem has been the shifting of the BACES operations across the road. People using BACES regard Harlesden Library as inferior as there is less space and no room for a creche. I have been told that the creche at BACES was underused, but the Council does have plans to replace it at a new site at Challenge House. Challenge House (opposite Harlesden Methodist Church) isn't ideal as the site for a creche, but they need to sell the existing BACES building on Craven Park Road to pay for the Harlesden Library refurbishment, so the loss of that building is irreversible.

There is no doubt that the Library Service in Brent is struggling at the moment, with Willesden Green Library Centre in trouble as well. It has lost its Cafe and now the Belle Vue cinema has closed, threatening the whole concept of using the Library Centre as a community hub, not just a stand alone library. Willesden is supposed to be our flagship library so its sorry state makes you wonder about the rest of the fleet.

Cricklewood Library, which has one of the lowest usage rates, was put forward as a combined library and Children's Centre. Again, this ties in with the "hub" concept. You group more than one attraction in the same place, and some of the footfall going to the Centre would rub off on the Library. However, this has hit a legal obstacle. The building was originally gifted by All Souls College in Oxford with a condition that it be used as a library. The College lawyers have queried whether combining a Children Centre and a library would break that condition. I understand that the Brent Council lawyers think it would be fine, but the two sets of lawyers need to agree a basis for going forward before progress can be made.

Wrottesley Road Still Blocked

Despite my kind words about them, Thames Water have yet to take away the barriers where the water main burst recently. Possibly this is because the spot is on the traffic calming hump at the junction with Furness Road. This used to cause an awful amount of noise every time a lorry passed over it as the contents of the lorry jumped and then crashed down. People on Ancona Road used to complain about it, not just the Wrottesley Road residents. This was largely solved by some clever redesigning, and it may be that Thames Water need some sort of specialist help in sorting it out. I will ask Streeetcare to find out.

Bertha Joseph: The Judgement

I have been reading the judgement given against Bertha Joseph and I am struck by the strength of the Judge’s language in criticising her. He refers to her “recklessness as to the propriety of her behaviour” and her “repeated lack of credibility”.

The appeal was based on the idea that the sanction against her was too severe, so there is little discussion of the facts, as they were admitted, just any mitigating factors.

In comments to the Harrow Times, Bertha Joseph has attempted to suggest that the judgement against her was some sort of political conspiracy. That really doesn’t wash. The Borough Solicitor appointed a senior Council officer who specialised in financial investigations for the initial report, and a solicitor independent of the Council for a second report. None of these people can be regarded as party political. The Standards Committee itself has two independent members, a Tory, a Liberal Democrat and a Labour person. The independent Tribunal has now confirmed their decision as “entirely appropriate”. That Bertha Joseph still refuses to accept this says more about her than about anyone else.

The Tribunal certainly didn’t accept her relaxed view. It said: “Quite clearly she solicited gifts from more than one person and failed to account properly for them. Attempting to plead mitigation in that way does not help her cause. Nor does the submission that her actions took place in the context of organising an event to benefit her chosen charities. There is more than a possibility that a greater financial effect would have been achieved had she not chosen to spend the cash she received in the way that she did.” I think that is pretty damning.

Interestingly, the Tribunal didn’t see any need to determine whether Bertha Joseph had sought to blame officers. That surprises me, as I thought that was quite an important issue. They simply say: “But officers cannot be expected to account for money paid in cash to the Mayor and not handed over to them. Her claim to have relied on others to record sponsorship simply lacks any credibility.”

The comment that I think that Boris Johnson and the Tories need to think about is: “She surely cannot expect again to serve as Mayor given the disrepute that she has caused to the office.” Doesn’t that logic also apply to her membership of the London Fire Authority? And does it not also apply to whether the Tories put her forward as one of their candidates in the local elections in May?

You can read the full judgement on http://www.adjudicationpanel.tribunals.gov.uk/

Who Runs Brent Council?

I was interested to see this blog post from Brondesbury Park's Conservatives. It feature a broken street sign on Milverton Road close to the South Hampstead Cricket Club, and suggests that Brent Council is pretty useless in looking after such things. Don't they realise that the person in charge of repairing street signs is Conservative councillor Irwin Van Colle? Doesn't it say something of the poverty of the Conservative offer that they campaign against the Council they (and the Liberal Democrats) control?

Vitamin D

Tom Watson has an interesting piece about vitamin D. The stories he reports sound like the sort of thing Ben Goldacre writes about. What he doesn't mention is the diversity issue that attaches to vitamin D deficiency. Not only do people in the North of the UK suffer more because the cold deters them from going outside, but certain ethnic minorities may suffer as well.

Lib Dems Fail on the Sustainable Communities Act.

My colleague Cllr Janice Long uncovered a striking example of how useless Brent Council's current Liberal Democrat / Conservative administration is. I have blogged before about the difficulty of getting the Council to consider this. To avoid the political flak, Cllr Lorber put forward a motion for the Council to develop a mechanism for submitting proposals under the Act. Several dozen authorities have already managed this, but Brent Council wasn't up to the job.

The motion was passed unaminously, before the first deadline for receiving suggestions. The administration leapt into action by forming a working group which had its first meeting in ..... October.

The answer given to Janice by the Liberal Democrat Lead Member for these things in January this year explains that they only started to think about a mechanism in October. By this stage, it was too late to submit any proposals, so they gave up.

What is the point of Brent Council voting for a motion at Full Council without a single vote against if the passed motion is then ignored by the very Liberal Democrat councillors who voted for it? Why did Paul Lorber put the motion forward if he is happy to see it come to nothing?

Brent Council's Savage Cuts

Brent Council's Chief Executive recently circulated a letter saying that he wanted the Council to lose 250 posts by September this year. Given that the Council has a total of 3,000 employees, that is a pretty severe cut. It is tempting to see it as Brent Liberal Democrats implementing Nick Clegg's call for "savage cuts" in public services. If job losses on this scale do not lead to poorer quality services for Brent residents, then the Council must be seriously inefficent in its use of Council Taxpayers' money.

One of the things that always puzzles me about cost cuttting on Brent Council is that every time it happens we get told that the Council will get rid of agency staff. That makes sense as you have to pay extra to employ someone from an agency, and you don't have to pay so much to get rid of them. How then do we still have so many agency staff? The Chief Executive says we have about 500. How can this be if they are the first people we cut?

Elmwood Tennis Club

By the way, I have added a link on "Kensal Green Links" to Elmwood Tennis Club. I had not realised it was such a venerable institution. Their web site says that that triangle of land between Buchanan Gardens and Holland Road has been used for tennis since the reign of Queen Victoria.

Trees in Furness Road Pocket Park

Two trees have been planted in Furness Road Pocket Park. These were paid for as part of the Neighbourhood Working initiative (which is money agreed by myself and Cllr Bobby Thomas for small projects in Kensal Green).