At the Conservatives London Assembly hustings, Brent Councillor Joel Davidson defeated Harrow Councillor Ameet Jogia by 17 votes, despite Cllr Jogia was heavily promoted by the Harrow East MP Bob Blackman and his associates, primarily to block Brent candidates.
The newly selected candidate for the Brent and Harrow GLA constituency is from a Conservative split group – the ‘Brent Conservative’, recognised by the Conservative party. His reported performance at the hustings was mature and much better.
Councillor Joel Davidson represents the Brondesbury Park ward along with his group leader Cllr Warren and deputy leader Cllr Carol Shaw whose sour relationships with Mr Blackman hit the national headlines. The other group of three is from Kenton, and are well supported by Harrow East Conservatives.
Under Mr Blackman’s leadership of the Conservative group at the Brent council, the number of the Tory councillors went down from 31 in 1990 to 15 in 2006 and 6 in 2010, seemingly due to the unpleasantness within the Tory ranks – a situation similar to Harrow under Cllr Hall’s leadership.
The divide amongst the six Tory councillors is so toxic now that the leader of the Brent council (Lab) had to write to the chairman of the Conservative Party to intervene.
Like the Tory candidate for Brent and Harrow constituency in 2012, who was a Barnet councillor and heavily defeated the Harrow candidates, Cllr Joel Davidson is unlikely to have a warm welcome by the Harrow Conservatives, music for the Labour candidate, the sitting assembly member Navin Shah.
Such is the lack of interest in and enthusiasm for Cllr Joel Davidson success that there is hardly any publicity of his well deserved win.

London Mayoral candidates in place, now a buzz about the candidates for London Assembly elections next year.
The Brent and Harrow constituency has never been short of dramatic events.
In 2008, Navin Shah (Lab), a Harrow councillor at the time, beat the sitting GLA member Bob Blackman (Con), despite the Brent conservatives were not fully fragmented then.
In 2012, Navin Shah won again, this time beating an Asian Conservative candidate by a huge majority – the Conservative candidate was selected in his party’s hustings where councillor Hall, leader of the opposition Conservative group, failed, adding to her similar failure at the MP hustings in Harrow West before the 2010 general elections (Cllr Hall has only achieved political defeats since: Councils in 2010 and in 2014 where five sitting Tory councillors were defeated – 2 Harrow West by-elections in 2013 and 3 Tory Cllrs defected because of her leadership).
This time round, following are some of the possibilities for the Brent and Harrow constituency candidacy.
Navin Shah: Labour can’t retire this winning horse unless they declare his constituency as ‘female’ only to benefit a Tory candidate.
Kishan Devani (Con) – somewhat local, who once described himself as a nephew of Lord Popat, has been unsuccessfully trying for all sorts of political openings – he tried to dislodge most respected sitting MP Keith Vaz in Leicester East in the 2015 general elections, and miserably lost.
Hannah David (Con) – a Tory favourite: a soft face of the harsh Harrow Conservatives image who almost beat the sitting Harrow West MP Gareth Thomas at the 2015 general elections. She is very likely to be supported by the Harrow Conservative associations. She is also seen as someone who could pave way for Goldsmith, Conservative London Mayoral candidate. Both are from a similar background.

While the corporate director community post was advertised internally and externally and an external candidate has been appointed, the corporate director people post has been advertised only internally with a predictable outcome.
As expected, an internal candidate has applied for the £135,000 fixed term corporate director people post – most probably the interim corporate director people in this post since 1 October 2015 as he decided to stay on when the corporate director, children and families post was deleted due to the restructuring of senior management.
His appointment is all set to be ratified by the Chief Officer’s Employment Panel that approved the internal advertisement in the first place, seemingly aware of the expression of interest.
By not testing the market for the senior positions in the new management structure, the council has badly missed an opportunity to redress the absence of the borough’s diversity at the second and top tiers of the management, a long-standing concern. Such practices perpetuate inequalities.
Last year, the ex-police commander who was hired by the council to investigate the possibility of the racism within the institution of the Harrow council, made recommendations to the council ‘to build on employee relations and to meet the council’s goal of having a workforce representative of the Harrow community’.
The investigation found a ‘clear disproportion in staffing numbers at middle and senior grades in the council’.
‘There are no Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) officers at director level at the council and only 11 per cent at service manager level’, informed the investigation report.
He also recommended the council reviews existing senior appointments panel process in terms of recruitment, develop comprehensive leadership and mentoring programme for BAME staff and relaunch BAME workers group for council staff.

“Mental illness affects more of us than cancer. It affects more of us than heart disease or stroke. It affects more of us than diabetes” says the Case for Change report that provides the context for the mental health transformation programme in North West London.
The study that has not carried out the Equality Impact Assessment yet, expects the Harrow Health and Wellbeing Board to endorse the Like Minded Case for Change, including the models of ‘care and support’ emerging from this work so far.
“We will not effectively engage with and take the population of North West London with us in supporting the Mental Health and Wellbeing strategy.
“Models of Care may be insufficiently informed by needs/ views of services users. Models of Care may be opposed by some local people, which could result in challenge” alerts the risk assessment graded in red.
Commenting on the report, Dev Mahadevaiah, a retired Clinical Biochemist at the Royal Free Hospital who lives in North Harrow and has suffered from the bipolar manic depression, said “the red alert says it all. The case for change is arguing what is best for me without asking me what I think is best for me.
“The ‘caring’ professionals and ‘concerned’ institutions, including some national bodies operating in Harrow, remote from the grass-root users, come together to represent us to justify their own existence”.
No surprise that mostly a handful of people involved in determining and providing health care are everywhere.
For example, at least three shareholders of Harrow Health Limited are not only the leading members of the Harrow Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) but also voting members at Harrow Health and Wellbeing Board, including its vice-chairman.

“The biggest cause of death in all deprivation bands is circulatory disease and this also shows the biggest inequality gap. The second highest inequality gap is in respiratory disease. The third largest inequality gap is in all cancers” informs the Harrow Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG)..
The prevalence of hypertension, stroke, coronary heart disease and diabetes is greater in Asian groups at younger ages and lower BMIs (body mass index).
The CCG asserts that if mortality rates from Coronary Heart Disease in the most deprived parts of Harrow were to reduce to the rate seen in the most affluent, life expectancy would increase by over a year in males and over 9 months in females.
Most multiple deprivation is in the centre of the Borough, with pockets of deprivation in the south east and Harrow’s least deprived areas are in the west of the borough – a sort of Labour and Tory wards situation.
The CCG believes that culturally appropriate services need to be considered for children’s services and older adults services in the future. It would like to ensure that providers of commissioned services undertake regular surveys of patient experience, identifying inequalities of access and experience as part of their contractual requirements.
The group says that the success of its work will be guided and measured by the Harrow Health and Wellbeing Board (HWB).
Easy said, than done.
While it is likely that the Care Quality Commission could help in standardising the work of the health and care providers which would ease the coordination of multiple provisions from a number of streams, at present an effective coordination in multi-agency settings is very challenging and a key factor in not narrowing the inequality gap.
What is further challenging are the difficulties in ensuring full transparency in commissioning and that the Harrow council is pre-occupied with regeneration, management restructuring and money saving.
We wonder why health and care agencies and providers have not formed a formal partnership, modelling the successful Harrow School Improvement Partnership (HSIP).

The council chose to rollout the Straight’s 7 litre kitchen caddy and kerbside caddy (food waste bin) to Harrow properties.

Residents use their kitchen caddy to collect food waste in the kitchen and transfer collected waste into their outside kerbside caddy, collected every week.
Cllr Henson, responsible for environment, said that everyone in the household can play their part in the new waste disposal practices.
One of the concerns about the kerbside caddy is its size which might not be adequate in all cases.

Not knowing on what basis this size has been worked out, we contacted the manufacturer Straight Ltd, part of the thriving OnePlastics Group.
Straight has carried out a case study re Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, but Stockport has a very different population profile and lower average house hold size – a declining 2.35 – than Harrow.
The average household size in very diverse Harrow is 2.81, and in many wards above 3.00, which effects the quantity of the food waste generated, more so because of the food specific socio-cultural variations and cooking and eating practices.
The other concern in about the kitchen caddy bin liners. Although the use of a liner is not a must but the fact that council insists “please only use ones approved for use by Harrow Council” and encourages to buy these through the council, seems like an anti-competitive practice that the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) discourages.
The council approved liners are £2.50 for 50 but much cheaper elsewhere.

Being neighbouring boroughs with similar population profile and inter community links, Brent and Harrow have opportunities to learn from each other, especially in the field of education.
Therefore, an interest whether Harrow could learn from Brent once again, this time from the Brent’s education action plan (2014) based on the recommendations of the Brent Education Commission, chaired by Christine Gilbert, a well known educationist who progressed from Harrow.
“There are things that we in Harrow could learn from our colleagues in Brent, the flow of learning has clearly been in the opposite direction” said Chris Spencer, corporate director of Harrow children’s services.
In 1985, the ‘Two Kingdoms’, Brent’s education report that forcefully located pupils’ under-achievement in the education system, came at the time when Harrow was struggling to adopt an equal opportunities policy as its school population was rapidly changing, raising concerns about the achievement by different groups of pupil.
Education initiatives like the Development Programme for Racial Equality (DPRE), inspired Harrow education in a number of ways at the time, but by 1990s, the value of the Brent’s educational initiatives was lost in the mist of the local and national politics.

While Brent, with a higher deprivation factor, has struggled to address its educational achievement, Harrow has made progress in pupils’ academic care, partly because of the thriving private tutoring and excellent leadership of the well established Harrow School Improvement Partnership (HSIP).
Mr Spencer informs that senior officers from Harrow and some of the  HSIP associates have been advising schools in Brent on all aspects of school improvement.
But things are changing. While the Harrow’s education direction is uncertain because of the management restructuring and LA savings (still short of £7m), Brent is fully determined to excel and the Brent Schools Partnership under the strategic direction of the HISP leadership is all set to positively impact Brent’s educational outcomes.
Brent is not short of good practices either: for example, its education authority is more community orientated with readily available information about its work and the school matters like the school funding from various streams, keeping the Freedom of Information requests low.

Interesting that the twenty six Tory opposition councillors are almost visibly invisible as far as the Harrow council work is concerned, while enjoying the councillor’s allowance.
Occasionally Cllr Marilyn Ashton leads the way to come out of such a state of rigor mortis by noteworthy and planning specific letters in a local newspaper, showing her authority on the subject.
Cllr Ashton, a planning expert, was responsible for planning in the pre2010 Tory administration, elected by the voters.
Very strange that such a capable councillor has not been placed on the planning committee by the Tory group leader since Ms Ashton’s return to the council in 2011 in the Stanmore by-election that was called due to the resignation of a Tory councillor unhappy under Cllr Hall’s leadership.
Many feel that Harrow has been deprived of the Cllr Ashton’s planning expertise because of the acrimonious relationship of the Tory group leadership which became obvious when Ms Ashton decided to come back to the council in 2011.
The Tory group refused to comment why Cllr Ashton has not been placed on the planning committee to enrich the planning decisions and has been reduced to the position of a letter-writer!
Councillor Hall’s record of political leadership has been poor as it has set a pattern of defeats – Councils in 2010 and in 2014 where five sitting Tory councillors were defeated – and 2 Harrow West by-elections in 2013.
Cllr Hall’s short-lived administration, a fluke, further damaged Tory credibility in Harrow.

Harrow council has made first appointment under its redone senior management structure.
Tom McCourt, Hackney Council’s assistant director of public realm, has been appointed corporate director community. The directorate has responsibility for commissioning services, housing as well as environment, community and culture.
Mr McCourt has progressed from a traffic engineer to head of traffic and transportation, to the assistant director planning and transportation, and to his present post in Hackney for the past nine years.
Commenting on this first senior appointment under the new management structure, the council chief executive Michael Lockwood (photo) said, “We are in the middle of a really positive transformation in Harrow and the skills Tom brings will be a great addition to the senior management team to help improve the vital front line services”.
Mr McCourt appears to have far more experience in public realm. Public realm is any publicly owned streets, pathways, right of ways, parks, publicly accessible open spaces and any public and civic building and facilities.
Although Mr McCourt has worked in a borough like Tower Hamlets which faced active racism for years and now he works in Hackney, his housing and community work profile appears to be less obvious. This is interesting considering the demanding housing situation and diverse population in Harrow which require high level of community orientation and engagement, especially at the time of financial instability like community and culture are forecasting a projected overspend of £284k against a total net budget of £5.084m, and the housing is facing £2.002m pressure.
Some of the Harrow characteristics: non-White 69.1%; 5-17 age group 16.21%; 25-59 age group 49.6%; non-White pupils in schools 81.5%

A motion before the next Council highlights how the government welfare cuts ‘will detrimentally affect Harrow’s residents’ (Harrow Council for Justice and Harrow Monitoring Group focussed on some of this months ago). Summary:

• Making 18 – 21 year olds exempt from housing benefit will further hit young people who are struggling to get on the housing ladder.
• The cut to Employment & Support Allowance will penalise people with disabilities who require more resources to remain in good condition.
• Cuts will push more and more people in to severe poverty, rent arrears and homelessness.
• Benefit cap at £23,000 will force families out of Harrow and London, putting more pressure on children and families.
• Limiting certain benefits to families with a maximum of two children has put some vulnerable families in a terrible place.
• The new national ‘living wage’ is solely an increase to the minimum wage, and falls below the actual living wage, which in London is £9.15.

All this is fine but what really interests is the next part of the motion that says ‘the Council will monitor the impacts of these welfare cuts on our residents’.
Perhaps in arguing for the motion in the interest of the residents, the councillors (photos), bringing the motion to the meeting, could describe how exactly the complex long term and short term impacts could be effectively evaluated, monitored and addressed, rather than describing the cuts and their implications which are public knowledge anyway, including ‘Harrow protest against cuts and austerity measures’.

We share the recognition of long service by Councillors Bath and Noyce – well done both!