Guest Blog Part 3: Naqvi: “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!” by Concerned Resident

 Part 3: Naqvi: “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!”

What of this apparent business of the “ousting” of Naqvi?

Well!

Things seemingly kicked off during the last week of the 42-day formal planning consultation for WCP.  Up to that point there had only been less than 20 responses.  This is not a surprise, given that we are a Ward that lacks a decades old amenity society (with large a membership and a planning sub-committee packed with retired planners, architects &/or lawyers).

For context, the Edgware Community Hospital redevelopment consultation got 27 responses.  While it was consulted on during the pandemic, is it is clearly of interest to more people, so we might expect that to be the high watermark for a development in the Ward.  After that, the most objections to a ‘major’ development in the Ward is less than 10!  On that basis, 20 isn’t bad, but given the floodplain context, one would expect it to be higher.

So, what happened during that last week?

Our fortunes flipped:

- With the introduction, on Saturday, of a handy ‘click and send’ objection form, initiated by a neighbouring amenity society with significantly better resources, there was a massive uptick.
- In just two days, the objections had trebled.
- On Monday, Naqvi had been outed in the press.
- Objections continued, so by Tuesday there were almost 100 responses (only one of which was in Support and one Neutral).  
- That same day, Naqvi had been removed from his Cabinet post and no longer a member of the Labour Party.
- He was gone by Wednesday.
- A by-election was announced on Thursday.
- On Friday Cath Shaws CEO job was on Barnet Council’s jobs board.  (OK, I don’t know whether that is connected, but I’m throwing it in for good measure given that acting CEO roles don’t normally take two and a half years to get advertised...)

The front page of the February edition of the Barnet Post does a big splash on the Naqvi story. It reserves the permanent CEO role article for page 4. Still, the front page story reads, “The Post began to investigate in December after being told that Naqvi’s register of interests had been removed and updated in November after a query was raised with the council.” and “However, the Post was sent an image of the document before it was updated”.  The Post can take credit for the investigating, but what I want to know is, “Who exactly is doing all the telling and the sending?!”.

The smooth delivery of the redevelopment looked like it was heading for omnishambles territory in that last consultation week.  So, if you were in favour of the redevelopment, the last thing you need is ex-Cllr Naqvi as your Finance lead, relevant local Ward councillor and ex-SPC member, when serious questions need answering!   For those that don’t know, he was known for some spectacular gaffs!

I cannot prove it, but I am not alone in thinking that ex-cllr Naqvi was “thrown under the bus”.   My back of the envelope musings currently read like a game of Cluedo, that I just can’t solve:

- Miss Scarlett:  His own party (distracts the electorate, removes the man they blame for the mess).
- Prof. Plum: A non-resident who doesn’t much care for Burnt Oak, and who mistakenly believes that not redeveloping here would mean housing would go elsewhere (even though the units associated with WCP are no longer part of the Local Plan and the housing target for Barnet was reduced in 2024 anyway).
- Rev/Major Green: The Developers (financial motivation).
- Mrs White: Council Officers from any given department (relying on WCP to be the ‘Goose that Lays the Golden Egg’).
- Colonel Mustard: Reform Party (trigger an election and test the waters ahead of 2026 if things don’t go well in 2025).
- Mrs Peacock: Tories (amplifies the narrative about Labour’s finance management).

'Who Done It?' or 'Far Fetched Nonsense'? 

You tell me!

In conclusion
There isn’t time/space for me to go into what residents want, need and deserve from Councillors and Officers going forward. 

Nor is there time/space for what role the press has played (or failed to play) in the last two years.

And no, there is no time/space left to deal with what having a decent reputation actually means to any or all of these people (particularly with respect to avoiding bias and unreasonableness in planning decisions and not least trying to avoid insurance liabilities and worse, a drowning tragedy should redevelopment of the main site take place).

These are blogs for another day, if I am permitted.

As for the Leader of the Council, maybe now he has something he would like to share with us?

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Concerned Resident is a Barnet Resident residing in Burnt Oak ward. Guest blogs are always welcome at The Barnet Eye

Guest Blog - Part 2: Watling Car Park - It’s all about the money, honey! - By Concerned Resident

 The second in our series of Guest blogs by Concerned Resident (read episode one here - https://barneteye.blogspot.com/2025/02/guest-blog-first-there-was-capita-then.html)

Part 2: WCP - It’s all about the money, honey!

What does Watling Car Park (WCP) have to do with the ousting of Naqvi, the Council Finances and the incredulity of a Labour safe seat while WCP motors ahead?

Bear with me! I’m just getting to that!

Point 1: Naqvi sat, believe it or not (because I barely can), on the Strategic Planning Committee for about 8 or 9 years.  So, he should have been best placed to raise concerns about the unsuitability of Site 6 when the Local Plan was consulted on.  Similarly, when the H&G Committee agenda item arose 18 months later, he again would have been best placed to tell our other Councillor (Sara Conway), what needed telling.  She was one of the three Labour Councillors on that Committee who ‘Abstained’ when the time came to vote on the disposal (when one would hope and expect the them to vote ‘Against’ it, given all that we now know they should have known).

Point 2: the Council-owned land disposal is arranged as a ‘Sale and Leaseback’ transaction.  Happy to be corrected, but from what I can see, if the planning application is approved, the Council will receive a whole lot of wonga in an instant.  What is not clear to me, is how much of the money stays with the Council, and how much goes to the developer to commence the build.  Naqvi should have known the details, but alas, residents can’t quiz him on that any more and even if he had refused to resign and then decided to tell the truth (ha ha ha!), then who on earth would ever believe him?

Point 3: If the source of the ‘wonga’ comes from outside the public sector (i.e. NOT the PWLB), then the development will sit OUTSIDE of the ‘Housing Revenue Account’ (“HRA”).  The HRA is a ringfenced area of the accounts which contains income and expenditure relating to the Council’s housing portfolio.  If a development is outside the HRA, this means that the Council can spend any of the rental income from tenants on anything it likes – it could, if it chose, neglect to spend it on housing maintenance.  But who cares about the quality of housing when the party’s reputation for financial management hangs in the balance?  To be hailed as financial equivalent of Einstein or Merlin ain’t no bad thing.  Did Naqvi know this?  If so, was he OK with this and intend that the money be used in this way? And what of the other Councillors?

Point 4: The Labour Party’s 2022 manifesto strongly argued against “No Tower Block Blight”.  Indeed, less than a year earlier, the Labour Group’s response to the (then) Tory draft Local Plan stated, “The document does not go far enough to protect the Borough from over‐intensification, inappropriate density and inappropriate height of new buildings ‐ especially in town centres which in Barnet are suburban in nature.”  It’s worth mentioning at this point that WCP is within the Watling Estate Conservation Area (which is a low-rise Garden Suburb development)!  At the time of writing, live planning applications for two other Council-owned car park redevelopments contain proposals for residential buildings of no higher than 6 storeys (while WCP STARTS at 6 storeys!). This is the case, despite neither of the other two sites being in a Conservation Area (let alone on a floodplain nor removed from the Local Plan!).  The illogicality and unreasonableness of these contradictions presumably seems perfectly fine and dandy to Naqvi et al…

Point 5: Strictly speaking, the current administration did not “inherit” the WCP regeneration proposals.  They themselves converted the previous administration’s “Preferred Developer” into the official developer (in January 2023).  They did so in full knowledge of the fact that the main site was due to be removed from the Local Plan on the grounds that it “has been found to be not developable due to constraints arising from the extent and magnitude of flood risk affecting the site…”.  Quite apart from the draft Local Plan, long-standing Councillors would have been in full knowledge of the fact that the Car Park is a flood risk because of the Silk Stream (part of the Brent River Catchment), is responsible for flooding houses in Colindale. Their flooding will be made even worse if the functional floodplain is undermined upstream should people see fit to pile buildings on top of it!

If like me, you know that Labour councillors and MPs consistently support residents elsewhere in the borough who object to oversized, inappropriate and downright reckless redevelopment proposals, you have to wonder why, those same Councillors / MPs won’t do the same for this locality.  Indeed, you would also wonder why they are in favour Tall Buildings in hazardous places for which there are conservation ‘planning constraints’ yet they object to buildings that aren’t even Tall which have no conservation planning constraints and aren’t in hazardous locations!

Burnt Oak Ward is still a “Safe” for Labour, probably because the Party is confident that a lot of the Burnt Oak electorate have been blissfully unaware of the WCP proposals (which is true); possibly believe that the decision has already been made (ditto); and don’t tend to understand how to engage in the planning system as confidently as residents in other localities (ditto). 

I am left thinking that people are happy to ‘sell Burnt Oak residents down the river’ purely because of a lack of ‘Postcode Parity’.

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Concerned resident is a Barnet Resident. Guest blogs are always welcome at The Barnet Eye

Guest Blog - First there was Capita, then there was Long Capita: Part 1 - By Concerned Resident

By Concerned Resident,

The idea for this blog started after reading the one from 22 January 2025 about the origins of Barnet Council’s woeful finances (Capita), the armchair auditors that uncovered it (‘Barnet Bloggers’) and some of its legacies (the unaccountability of the Barnet Group/Council). 

Crucially, it also referenced the (no longer new) Administration’s lack of interest in “critical scrutiny” and its failure to properly expose the finances it inherited, the disgraced former cabinet member for ‘Financial Sustainability & Reducing Poverty’ (ex-Councillor Naqvi) and the (then) forthcoming by-election in the (still!) super-safe Labour seat of Burnt Oak Ward.  

The Leader of the Council was invited to write a guest blog, but from the look of it, he wasn’t keen.  

So, I thought I’d have a go - only it won’t be in the Council’s defence, seeing as I happen to live in Burnt Oak and because what the Council is now attempting to do to Burnt Oak, is a symptom of what I now call, ‘Long Capita’.

Part 1: You can take the employees out of Capita, but can you take the Capita out of the employees? OR “Floodplain?! What floodplain?!”

A quick recap may be in order for those who haven’t been following what has taken place in Burnt Oak over the last few weeks and months.

Readers are no doubt aware of the jaw-dropping redevelopment proposals for Edgware Town Centre.  But what people are barely aware of is the similarly jaw-dropping (but comparatively smaller scale) redevelopment for Burnt Oak.

The planning application for what is often unhelpfully referred to as the ‘Watling Car Park’ (“WCP”) redevelopment went out for formal consultation in late November 2024 and officially concluded in the first week of January.   The “WCP” name is unhelpful, because it involves at least five sites not just the Car Park area.  The other four sites are Burnt Oak Library (Site 2), a former builders’ yard (Site 3), plus two areas adjacent to the car park a car lot and fenced-off greenspace (which together with the car park are known as Site 1, which is the main site).  

Developers propose demolishing the library and relocating it to the builders’ yard (which is on a residential side road, barely a 5-minute walk away from the current library).  In its place, they want to build flats instead.   If that wasn’t stupid enough, the worst of it is, they want to build flats, 6 to 13 storeys high on ‘Site 1’, which is on a functional floodplain. 

The fact that the site is on a functional floodplain shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, because Council minutes prove that this is precisely why Lidl failed to build on it in the noughties.  Council minutes are silent about why Tesco’s/St James’s Investments failed to build on it a decade later, but we can guess!

The current attempts to build on the floodplain is all the more alarming because in 2021, the Environment Agency objected to the very notion of Site 1 being part of the Local Plan’s ‘Site Allocation’ list (although in that document it is known as ‘Site 6’).  Their objections resulted in the Planning Department agreeing to remove the Site 6 from the Plan in September 2022, just before the Planning Inspectorate arrived to conduct Local Plan Hearings.  As a result of the agreed removal, the EA did not need to turn up to the Hearings and make representations in person, for all to hear and see.  This may have been seen as a win for the EA in policy terms, but problem for us is, their floodplain objections remained under the radar for another year, and unfortunately would have made it easier for interested parties to carry on with redevelopment ideas regardless.

Thus, in a parallel universe down the corridor to the Planning team, the “Re”-gen Department had their own ideas:
- Spring 2020: they invited developers to express an interest in the redevelopment;
- July 2020: H&G Committee’s ‘Development Portfolio Programme’ paper includes the Car Park along with another site, and the combined number of housing units is 300;

- June 2021: the disposal of the Car Park was approved at a Housing & Growth Committee meeting.  Only at this point, the library site is included as part of the mix. 

The inclusion of the Library is an eye-opener, because until June 2021 it isn’t mentioned.  Furthermore, it doesn’t crop up in the first or second draft of the Local Plan.  On top of that, EA’s initial objections to Site 6 (made during the first draft consultation of Jan-Mar 2020) only pop up in the papers for the Policy & Resources Committee, which takes place TWO DAYS AFTER the H&G Committee in which the disposal vote was taken!  

So, the likelihood of any newbie on the H&G being asked to vote to dispose of the sites for redevelopment actually knowing about but the flood risk is likely to be nil: the officers report recommending disposal doesn’t mention it and the ‘Background papers’ list does not link to the October 2012 Cabinet & Resource Committee minutes (which provide chapter and verse about Lidl’s abandonment of its aim to develop the site and Tesco’s, presumably misguided interest in acquiring the freehold!).

If that isn’t iffy enough for you, bear in mind that the most of the above meetings are scheduled during a global pandemic, when the last thing the average person cared about was what may have been going on in largely obscure Committee meetings.  And even the most committed geeks are unlikely to notice the blatant inconsistencies between the housing numbers fed into Regen-driven committee papers (which doubled in the space of one year from c.150 to 300) vs those found in ones concerned with the Local Plan (which dropped from 229 to 160 during the same time period).

Two years later, things get even more iffy, when, from Spring 2023, the redevelopment was introduced to the Council-sponsored Burnt Oak Partnership Board (“BOPB”).  During the months that followed, the developers revealed their early proposals and then commenced their informal consultation (Autumn 2023).  Not a dickie bird was spoken about the floodplain!  But residents discovered the issue at the tail end of the consultation and fed it into their responses.  It was not until December 2023 that the Comms Officer (who quit Barnet in the Summer - for a job as Head of Comms at a Property Developer!), dared to mention the floodplain.  But the BOPB minutes neglected to mention anything he had said.  Even after corrections were sent, guess what? Nothing again.

To misquote Suella Braverman (with whom I share absolutely no political allegiance whatsoever), “Pretending we haven’t got a functional floodplain, carrying on as if everyone can’t see that we have a functional floodplain, and hoping that things will magically come right is not serious community engagement”.

Then a rumour started -seemingly from within the Council, but diffused through residents- that the redevelopment was/is a “Foregone Conclusion” as.  There is a kind of poor and self-sabotaging reasoning going on in the mind of any resident who goes around spreading this stuff, which I hope is rather obvious to this readership…

The iffiness didn’t end there.  The start of the Council’s formal planning consultation (winter 2024) was inexplicably delayed for two weeks after the application was validated.  This pushed the consultation period deep into Christmas and the New Year (instead of it finishing on Boxing Day).   Again, normal or abnormal, who is likely to be noticing, let alone responding to planning applications at that time of year?

The only thing I can conclude from all the nonsense is the following: the WCP redevelopment phenomenon could ONLY arise and be sustained under a Capita (and later ‘Long Capita’) Culture, within which Officers have been stewing for years.  Because to pursue what looks like some kind of “Shhh, don’t mention the floodplain!” injunction, then a super-injunction about NOT mentioning the mentioning of it, and then a super-super-injunction as if to gaslight everyone into thinking there isn’t one at all, is a kind of madness, both morally and legally.

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Concerned resident is a Barnet Resident. Guest blogs are always welcome at The Barnet Eye