How The Queensbury Was Saved

Typo Corrected

The sensational victory by Save The Queensbury campaign last Wednesday is a massive cause for celebration for Willesden Green. It was achieved through the relentless collective efforts of residents and their supporters. One of the founding members of the campaign and irrepressible agitator for its cause, Sujata Aurora, tells the story of how the battle was won.

Guest blog by Sujata Aurora

The Save The Queensbury group won a significant victory on 12 March when Brent’s planning committee threw out proposals to demolish Willesden Green's landmark community pub and replace it with a 10-storey block of flats. 

The 18 month-long campaign was a true community initiative initially set up in October 2012 by a handful of residents and largely ignored by the political parties until the local elections began to loom. It is much to the credit of the campaign that they mobilised mass local support to the extent that they persuaded several previously indifferent councillors to back their cause, almost certainly because the level of attention the issue was generating made them fear the electoral consequences of not doing so. Sadly two of our Willesden Green councillors, LibDems Ann Hunter and Gavin Sneddon, refused to represent residents’ views despite repeated requests, their unresponsiveness maybe a consequence of their not restanding for election.

Despite attracting the belated support of some local politicians the campaign never became compromised and fiercely iterated its independence. As Brent Council's treatment of Save The Queensbury became ever more shabby there was a dawning realisation that the battle was not just against developer Fairview Homes but also against the council itself. Many in the group had had no previous dealings with the council and, perhaps naively, put their faith in the ability of various processes and politicians to protect the pub. Their awakening was rude and the criticisms that they were subsequently forced to make of the council upset some of The Queensbury’s Labour supporters. Yet as one campaigner pointed out, "this is a cross party campaign and we welcome all support, but if we shy away from pointing out the failings of Brent Council where they could have acted to save the pub, then we are doing this cause a disservice.”

Getting the Message Across

While professing some limited support for the campaign, no political party or councillor was prepared to actively lobby in support of policies that would have protected the pub from demolition.

• The attempt to have The Queensbury listed as an Asset of Community Value (ACV) under the Localism Act was initially refused with Brent citing, in part, the reason that they needed to consider the developers intention for the site in considering whether it might have future community value. That reason has been confirmed by other authorities and by experts on the Localism Act as a significant misapplication of the regulations. It was only after a threat to go to the Local Government Ombudsman and a new application covering just The Queensbury Pub rather than the entire site, that a listing was successful.
• Queensbury campaigners took members of CAMRA and planning experts with them to meet with council leader Muhammed Butt in April 2013 - they presented him with examples of pub protection policies from numerous other local authorities. A request for Brent to develop a pub protection policy and produce some planning guidance which would prevent “Change of Use” applications for buildings listed as ACVs got an initially favourable reception from Councillor Butt – but almost a year on they are still waiting for even a draft policy to be produced and the expert on pubs and planning policy who offered to assist is still waiting for a call.
• A presentation by the Queensbury campaign in October 2013 to officers and councillors at the Partnerships and Place Overview and Scrutiny Committee asking for a review of the ACV listing procedure and a further request for planning guidance to protect ACVs from “Change of Use” resulted in the following resolution: "That the committee will write to the lead member for Environment and Neighbourhoods and ask them to consider implementing a policy on Assets of community value." Six months on, a direct query on progress to the Lead Member for Environment and Neighbourhoods (Cllr Roxanne Mashari) got a response that this is not her remit and she knows nothing about it. A further request for clarification to the chair of the committee (Cllr Zaffar Van Kalwala) is still unanswered. 
• Numerous requests to have the Queensbury considered as worthy of a local listing (i.e. regarded as of historical or architectural merit) were similarly stonewalled.

In this context the decision of the planning committee to vote against demolition of the pub and to go against the advice of officers is a huge achievement and will hopefully set a precedent to show that Brent is not necessarily a soft touch for developers. As we lose our heritage buildings in Willesden Green like Electric House one by one, this is no mean feat – it is a testament to the well-organised and uncompromising campaign that has been led by residents rather than party politicians. More than that, it is a demonstration that people in Willesden Green desperately need a strong, independent and grassroots voice to represent them.

The Democratic Right to Recall Councillors

Make Willesden Green is an electoral platform whose aims begin and end with democracy. We want more accountability, greater transparency, wider participation and better representation in Willesden Green and beyond.

Brent residents have had to put up with Councillors such as Willesden Green's Gavin Sneddon who attended just three meetings throughout the whole of 2013, and Dudden Hill's David Clues who absented himself to Brighton and refused to even answer emails for two years, yet we are powerless to force them to resign. This is unacceptable. We should not have to wait for elections every four years to bring our elected politicians to account. We need local politics to be injected with some direct democracy. I therefore want residents to have the right to recall Councillors and submit them to re-election.

I have signed the following pledge and have asked all other candidates standing in the Willesden Green ward to do so too:

"I pledge to be fully accountable to residents if elected as a Councillor. In the event of 51% of the number of voters who participate in the election in the Willesden Green ward signing a petition for my recall, I will resign to force a by-election in order that voters can judge my record".

I am also calling on Brent Council to submit a proposal to central government under the Sustainable Communities Act so that residents' right to recall Councillors is enshrined in law. This Act was passed in 2007 under a Labour Government, but its many possibilities for local democracy have not been exploited.

The Make Willesden Green Manifesto also includes proposals permitting residents to address Full Council meetings, giving residents control over Ward Working money and ending automatic allowances for Councillors.

Our Manifesto is Now Out!

The full Make Willesden Green electoral Manifesto is now available here. It is packed with  radical new ideas to make our neighourhood and Brent more democratic, vibrant, egalitarian and environmentally balanced. The Manifesto is the result of many months of public engagement with and among residents, and draws from the various local campaigns that have championed our schools, pubs, libraries and public services and spaces over the past few years. It offers voters in Willesden Green a genuine alternative to the three main parties at the Council elections on 22 May, challenging narrow party-political outlooks and representing an independent, grassroots option for our area. I hope you will find much in this Manifesto to support – if so, please help us spread the message by canvassing, leafleting or simply letting your neighbours, friends and family know about Make Willesden Green. Join us by signing up to our mailing list here.

A Short Note on Our Policy Afternoon

MWG candidate Alex Colas discussing the education proposals

When Make Willesden Green was launched in October, a common response among our supporters was the need for the campaign to develop some specific policies. It’s taken us a few months of public engagement and private reflection to identify our key policy areas, but on Saturday a gathering of Make Willesden Green supporters discussed, debated and agreed to a Manifesto which will focus on four themes: democratic participation in Brent; our local environment (including the High Road); housing; and education. A general disillusionment with the way ward Councillors of both parties and the Labour-led Local Authority have responded to pressing issues like the Library and Queensbury redevelopment or the privatisation of our schools, was  matched in our deliberations with some very creative and radical ideas about how to make Willesden - and indeed Brent- more democratic, vibrant, sustainable, socially mixed and affordable. The final version of the Manifesto will be published and disseminated soon.



MWG supporters (a stripey jumper consensus seems to be emerging)

At Saturday’s policy afternoon a statement was circulated on an issue that has exercised some of our opponents, namely Make Willesden Green’s relationship with the Green Party. Here is the statement, which is hopefully self-explanatory:
'Make Willesden Green (MWG) is not a political party but an electoral platform emerging from various community campaigns that have been active in our neighbourhood over the past few years. Alex Colas, the platform's candidate is not a member of any political party. We welcome the decision of the Green Party to stand only two candidates in this ward, leaving their third slot to the local independent grassroots candidate from MWG. In recognition of this, and the Green Party's ongoing and consistent support for community campaigns in our neighbourhood, MWG recommends our supporters give their two remaining votes to Green Party candidates.'

More discussion and debate, this time on local democracy

Welcome to Brent EasyArchive

Will Shanice also be serving as Brent Museum archivist?

One of the aims of the Make Willesden Green platform in coming months is to establish connections between budget cuts, the quality of our public services and local democracy.  These are obviously hot political issues across the whole of the country, but they manifest themselves in very specific ways in our own neighbourhood, and should be a focal point of next year’s Council elections.

Take the case recently highlighted by Phil Grant, staunch defender of Brent’s local history and eloquent advocate for Willesden Green’s heritage LINK. Phil patiently details his own experience of  the consultation over Brent’s new Museum and Archives Strategy, and how he has tried to stop this being made a waste of time by a staff restructuring exercise which is going on simultaneously.  The restructuring appears to be an attempt by the Head of Libraries, Arts and Heritage to impose her own ‘vision’ before the Council’s formal consultation process ends in December 2013. Key decisions around staff restructuring - which will have a huge impact on the type of service delivered at the new Brent Museum and Archive in Willesden Green - were made prior to her consultation with staff, making it in Phil’s words ‘a complete sham’. Senior Council officers have said the matter is not open to further discussion, and it seems the jobs of the existing Archives staff are to be ‘deleted’.

The  new ‘vision’ for Libraries, Arts and Heritage aims to ‘move to a culture of archives users learning to research resources for themselves’  where ‘[customers] will be encouraged to self-help’ – presumably in line with our friendly new receptionist at the Civic Centre, Ms Holly Gramm. In Phil’s view,  the job descriptions for the new Heritage Officer posts suggest ‘they are not expected to have the detailed local history knowledge, or knowledge of the collections they are in charge of, that the existing staff have. Where ever possible, they will point you to a computer and say "find out for yourself". There will be more "digitised material" available, but how you will work out what you need to find in order to answer your particular question remains a mystery’.

Budget cuts will no doubt be trotted out as the reason behind the Archive’s staff restructuring, yet I understand that there is an alternative proposal on the table that would allow for modest savings whilst retaining existing staff. This too, it appears, has been dismissed in the consultation process thus far without further consideration by senior Council officers.

Those of us involved in the farcical ‘consultations’ over the Willesden Library redevelopment will sadly find much that is familiar in Phil’s story. The wider context is certainly one dominated by the ConDem cuts to local authority budgets, but it is the arrogance and lack of spirited creativity on the part our Labour-led  Council that will ultimately be responsible for the ‘no frills’ DIY Archives Service when it reopens in 2015. Until then, you can make the most of our existing Archives Service, relocated to a desk in the basement of George Furness House, and contribute to the Museum’s revised content and design HERE.   

 

A Sorry Tale of Two Boroughs

It is likely that next week Governors at Gladstone Park Primary, the local school for many children living in Willesden Green, will decide to become an Academy, handing over this Local Authority (LA) school to a private sponsor. This comes after a six-month campaign by parents and staff to keep Gladstone Primary under LA control HERE. Over in Redbridge, northeast London, staff and parents also organised during the summer to keep their school under LA control after it was put in ‘special measures’ by Ofsted and threatened with forced academisation. Yet Snaresbrook Primary last week won its battle against the Department for Education (DfE) and will remain a LA maintained school.

What explains this contrast in fortunes? How did a Tory-controlled Redbridge manage to fend off the DfE, while a Labour-run Brent sat on its hands watching the unwanted academisation of Gladstone Park Primary? The answer essentially lies in political will.

The Save Snaresbrook campaign had cross-party support from Redbridge Councillors, Council officers and their local MP John Cryer who actively sought to keep the school under LA control. Redbridge Council immediately and unanimously passed a motion opposing the academisation of Snaresbrook Primary and forcefully made their case to the DfE HERE. The Council also backed change in the school’s senior leadership - a new Executive Head and Associate Head were appointed and they immediately got on with the task of improving the school under the LA umbrella.

 When I joined a parent delegation to meet our local MP Sarah Teather in February, she told us fighting academisation was futile and the best we could hope for was to try and find a sponsor that met our school’s ethos. Soon after, a

Gladstone Park Parent Action Group was formed and we campaigned vigorously for our elected officials and senior Council officers to fight to keep our school under LA control. The spectrum of responses to our efforts stretched from apathy to hopelessness. Senior Council officers reiterated that there was no alternative to academisation (and that it ‘wasn’t so bad’, anyhow); Willesden Green Councillors remained silent on the issue, while Cllr Butt was asked to instruct his senior officers, including the Council’s Chief Executive, to oppose the academisation of our school. He sent a letter to Sarah Teather instead. To his credit, Dudden Hill Cllr Hirani did correspond with the DfE, but without wider Council backing such lonely voices inadvertedly detracted from our campaign.

It is this frustrating experience of indifference toward, lackluster opposition to and in some cases, complicity with the privatisation of Gladstone Park Primary School that has in large measure led me to stand as an independent, grassroots candidate for Willesden Green in the forthcoming Council elections. On this, as in other key issues affecting the ward, our elected officials have lacked the political backbone to stand up for their proclaimed principles, hiding instead behind the faceless authority of senior Council bureaucrats. Local residents deserve better than this. It now falls upon us to stand up for our own neighbourhood, to defend the public assets we all rely upon and thereby make Willesden Green more democratic.

Lift Off for Make Willesden Green

It was great to see so many familiar faces from local campaigns, and some new ones too, at the launch of Make Willesden Green last Wednesday. The aim of the meeting was to present this new electoral platform, collect ideas about where to focus our energies, and gather support for the campaign. I think it’s fair to say we’re now airborne.

I opened with a few introductory remarks about why I’m standing for the Council elections under the banner of Make Willesden Green – how this initiative emerges from neighbourhood campaigns around housing, education, public spaces and local democracy, and in response to the the lack of  proper representation from the mainstream parties.

Campaigners from Save the Queensbury, the Gladstone Park Parent Action Group and Keep Willesden Green spoke passionately about, among other things, the dangers of  developers turning our neighbourhood into a dormitory town; Brent Council’s dereliction of duty in standing up against the academisation of our schools; and the increasing disparities between Wembley and the south of the Borough.

People asked about my views on the Coalition’s cuts and the Immigration Bill currently going through Parliament, as well as my position on children with special educational needs in mainstream education (The clip below captures my response to these questions). A very important point was also raised about whether Make Willesden Green is a residents’ association or a political party.  I suppose the answer is neither and both: we’re an electoral platform seeking to give political weight to community campaigns.

Responses to our questionnaire on campaigning priorities highlighted the need for more community and open spaces, housing, education, High Street improvements and support for local business, as well as ‘tackling developers’. All these chime with the core aims of Make Willesden Green.

Wednesday marked the beginning of what will be a long and challenging effort to make Willesden Green’s campaigning voices heard at the local elections. We now have a critical mass of supporters and will be taking our message about affordable housing, state-funded schools, public spaces and amenities, and a more democratic local politics across the whole of our ward and beyond.

We’ll be  setting up a stall next to the Willesden Green Post Office on Saturday 9 November from 10.30am, to raise the profile of our campaign and to hear residents’ views on your aspirations for our neighbourhood. Please do come along to Make Willesden Green – you can stay in touch with the campaign by signing up to our email list above.

Hollowing-Out Democracy in Willesden Green

 
Demolition of Willesden Green Library & Bookshop (Thanks to Willesden Herald)

I've lived in Willesden Green for over a decade and, in the inevitable ups and downs of  any neighbourhood's public life, the last two years have marked a new low. This is partly due to the Coalition Government's callous and vindictive cuts to local authority budgets. But the asset-stripping of our community was planned before austerity set in, and it's been orchestrated by the Labour-controlled Local Authority, with the support of our ward's Lib-Dem councillors.

The gutted shell of the Victorian Library building, and the heap of  rubble that once was our Library centre are perfect symbols of  how local democracy has been hollowed out in Willesden Green. Thousands of local residents raised objections to the Library redevelopment and over 80 per cent of those consulted opposed the plans. Despite this, the Council steamrolled ahead with the project, while our ward councillors cheered them on. We have now lost  valuable open space, a cinema and a bookshop while the Council has gained new offices and sold public land to developers who are due to cash on the sale of 92 luxury flats marketed to wealthy speculators. Similar plans are underway for Electric House and the Queensbury pub on Walm Lane. Only a privileged minority will  benefit from these developments. The prospect of yet more absentee landlords will do little to revitalise our High Street or democratise our local housing  market.

But it's not just the lack of transparency and accountability in these property deals that is undemocratic. Democracy is also, fundamentally, about equalising people's life chances, and education is clearly central to this aspiration. Gladstone Park Primary - a highly-valued local authority school that has for decades been successfully educating our rich mix of children  - was targeted for forced academisation in January. Instead of defending this precious local asset, Council officers have been complicit in the privatisation of the school, leaving  parents and governors to their own devices as we fight to keep our school under public and democratic control.

 By demolishing our libraries, producing new gated communities with no affordable homes, facilitating the privatisation of our schools; in threatening to close a community pub like the Queensbury and evicting the only independent bookshop in our area, the Labour Council is drastically narrowing access to public spaces, services and amenities. It is effectively shrinking ordinary people's quality of life across our neighbourhood, and that is deeply undemocratic.

As local residents, we can respond to this predicament in at least two ways. We can elect  new councillors who will radically address the democratic deficit in our borough and beyond. The Greens are the only local party to have consistently supported grassroots campaigns for democracy in our neighbourhood. We can also make Willesden Green more democratic ourselves, by continuing to mobilise as citizens for social rights, political accountability and public goods in our vicinity. There is still a silver lining in the dust cloud hanging over Willesden Green: the sense of community and public-spiritedness that has emerged in recent local campaigns. I very much hope we'll keep that collective spirit alive and make it fight for our neighbourhood in the coming months.