GRENFELL TOWER FIRE

Watching breaking news about the Grenfell Tower fire catastrophe. Too soon (5am) to even guess at numbers of casualties and fatalities. Our heartfelt and sincere condolences to all who have perished, to the injured, to those who are bereaved or are still searching for missing loved ones.

Regular readers of this blog will know that we have posted numerous warnings in recent years about the very poor fire safety standards at Grenfell Tower and elsewhere in RBKC.

ALL OUR WARNINGS FELL ON DEAF EARS and we predicted that a catastrophe like this was inevitable and just a matter of time. Below is a list of links to previous blogs we posted on this site trying to warn the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea who own this property and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation who supposedly manage all social housing in RBKC on the Council’s behalf:

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/fire-safety-scandal-at-lancaster-west/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/kctmo-playing-with-fire/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/more-on-fire-safety/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/another-fire-safety-scandal/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/kctmo-feeling-the-heat/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/why-are-we-waiting/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/05/29/grenfell-tower-from-bad-to-worse/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/more-trouble-at-grenfell-tower/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/the-disempowered-of-grenfell-tower/

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/tmo-still-asleep-at-the-wheel

KCC – Clear And Present Danger

BIG PLANS FOR NORTH KENSINGTON COLLEGE

Back in April 2016 the Grenfell Action Group published a blog highlighting our concerns regarding the long term future of Wornington College. We provided a link to a RBKC Cabinet Key Decision report (KD04801R) that revealed that the Wornington College building had been secretly sold to the Council for demolition, after which the site would be privately redeveloped as housing.

The report was markedly vague on specifics, presenting instead a mish mash of options that ranged from selling the entire site (planning permission included) to a private developer or alternatively entering into a partnership with a Private Rented Sector (PRS) developer. The plans appear to have been conditional on retention of some unquantified educational component, provision of some ‘affordable housing’ by the developer, and possibly an option for the Council to to repossess  part of the finished development for use as decant housing for council tenants displaced from redevelopment elsewhere. Under this mish mash of half baked ‘planning’ many, perhaps most, Wornington students would presumably have to travel to Hortensia Road in Chelsea if they wished to access education.

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2016/06/12/wornington-college-threat-confirmed/

Rather than deal with the concerns raised by our blog, and by supporters of the Save Wornington College Campaign, the management at Kensington and Chelsea College attempted to demonise those trying to protect this much loved educational institute. Members of the KCC management team abused their power by attempting to intimidate our supporters, and shamelessly spread rumours that the Save Wornington College campaign was responsible for declining student enrolment numbers at Wornington and for endangering the future of adult education in North Kensington. When Interim Principal Michelle Sutton was invited to provide credible evidence that the Save Wornington Campaign was responsible for these negative effects she failed to do so.

Instead of working in partnership with the North Kensington community, acknowledging the management and financial problems at KCC, and the threat to the long term future of Wornington College following the departure of Principal Mark Brickley, the College opted instead for a disingenuous propoganda campaign. Using similar tactics to those employed by the neo-Cons at RBKC, when they sold off the North Kensington Library to their friends at Notting Hill Prep School, the KCC management claimed, in a Press Release in April 2017, that the Wornington building was no longer fit for purpose, was too large and could not meet the needs of those students and staff with disabilities. The KCC Press Release also sought to negate and dismiss the fears and concerns of the existing College’s supporters by stating that KCC remained committed to expanding its presence in North Kensington, claiming that it planned to replace the Wornington facilities on-site or nearby with modern state-of-the-art facilities for both school-leavers and adults, creating space for increased student numbers and potentially more courses.

http://www.kcc.ac.uk/news/big-plans-north-kensington/

We now understand that despite these promises the future of Wornington College and the provision of adult education in North Kensington is still very much under threat. Instead of securing the long term future of Wornington the KCC Board appears to have begun making existing staff redundant, pending a merger deal in which they will become the subserviant partner to a rival adult education college and in which they are unlikely to have any say in whether adult education will survive in any form in North Kensington.

In a serious and troubling development, it has come to our attention that members of the Wornington College teaching and auxillary staff have been issued with voluntary redundancy notices. These have been distributed to staff recently and cast doubt on KCC’s previous claim that staff numbers will be protected by virtue of an increase in student numbers and an expansion in the number of courses that the College will be offering.

It is our understanding that members of staff who might be tempted to accept offers of voluntary redundancy will not have their length of service or seniority taken into consideration as part of any financial settlement and will simply receive a statutory redundancy pay out. Any member of staff who accepts voluntary redudancy and is below retirement age will not be able to apply for social security payments such as unemployment benefit, housing benefit, etc if they fail to find replacement jobs, as they will be deemed to have made themselves intentionally unemployed.

It is also our understanding that the KCC Board were preparing to make a vitally important decision concerning the future of the College at a Corporaton meeting last Tuesday 6th June. We applied for permission to attend this meeting but were refused, ostensibly due to the sensitivity of the issues scheduled for discussion. It is a matter of record that major changes in adult education have been encouraged at a national and regional level following major cuts to government funding and a recent government review of further education which recommended that local colleges (such as Wornington) should merge with neighbouring colleges in order to protect their longer term prospects.

In line with this recommendation KCC and City Lit have conducted merger negotiations on two occasions since 2012. Both of these attempts failed, the most recent, earlier this year, because KCC failed a due diligence test performed by City Lit, apparently because of poor financial viability and poor Osted inspection results over the past three years. We have made a Freedom of Information request to City lit seeking access to the due dilignce report. We will publish this when and if we acquire it as it may shine some light on the management failings at KCC under former Principal Mark Brickley. The failure of KCC to satisfy this due diligence test has left KCC in an invidious position and vulnerable to a hostile take-over from either Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College or the recently merged North West London/City of Westminster College.

Ideally we would all prefer that KCC remain a fully independent college serving the specific needs of the local RBKC communities but we acknowledge that, in the present austere financial climate, a merger appears to be a necessary evil. With this in mind, we feel that it is a great shame that the proposed merger between KCC and City Lit failed. The benefits of a merger with City Lit have been explained in the minutes of previous confidential discussions by the Governors of KCC who stated that:

KCC students have good reason to fear the consequences of the failure of the City Lit merger. It has left KCC extremely vulnerable to a hostile take-over by either Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College or the North West London/City of Westminster College and we believe that such an outcome will greatly disempower and reduce the quality of our local education provision. There are concerns also that if either of the two aforementioned colleges are successful in a take-over of KCC the provision of adult education at the Wornington Centre, and in North Kensington generally, may cease altogether and adult educational courses may be halved at the Hortensia Centre.

These concerns are based on hard evidence obtained through Freedom of Information requests and access to supposedly confidential minutes of the KCC Corporation. We also have a copy of an email sent to RBKC councillors by Tony Redpath, a member of the KCC Board of Governors and a senior Officer at KCC in January 2017, that refers to Kensington and Chelsea College as some kind of tempting carcass that other ‘suitors‘, including Ealing Hammersmith and West London College and North West London/City of Westminster College ‘are already circling’ and waiting to devour. Redpath goes on to identify the predatory nature of such a take-over in that ‘KCC’s problem, put baldly, is that it’s attraction to other College’s is based on it’s assets rather than it’s activities’ and that following any take-over ‘a longer than anticipated period of change and uncertainty for the College beckons’. We believe that this statement from Tony Redpath unequivocably highlights the clear and present danger that faces the future of adult education in RBKC.

https://grenfellactiongroup.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/redpath-confidential-email-kcc-ofsted-result-etc.pdf

Redpath’s analysis is entirely consistent with minutes already quoted of a KCC Board meeting in 2012 when a hostile take-over by Ealing, Hammermith and West London College was characterised as an unwelcome but distinctly possible outcome. Confidential minutes from that Board of Governors meeting state the following:

www.kcc.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/KCC-BOC-minutes-111212.pdf

We have little doubt, based on the evidence above, that the kind of take-over that now seems inevitable will be extremely detrimental to the future of adult educational provision in RBKC generally, and North Kensington in particular. We believe that the failure of the proposed merger with City Lit has left KCC at the mercy of more powerful and predatory organisations that are primarily concerned with KCC’s financial assests and property portfolio rather than with providing the adult educational services our communities need.

The KCC Board of Governors and senior management team need to be held fully and properly accountable for their failure to secure a more propitious merger with City Lit. This failure has left KCC open to a hostile take-over by either Ealing, Hammersmith and West london College or City of Westminster/College of North West London. Both of these outcomes could best be described as worst case scenarios but have somehow become the most likely outcome we can expect. The KCC Board should be held accountable for this!

KCC resignations – was there a cover-up?

LET’S HOPE HE WASHED HIS HANDS!

The Grenfell action Group have recently been contacted by the Information Commissioners Office regarding our appeal against the refusal of Kensington and Chelsea College to provide us with information we requested explaining the departure of former Principal, Mark Brickley, and his former sidekick Deputy Principal Fiona Ross. The correspondence between the Information Commissioners Office and the Grenfell Action Group must remain confidential for now as we do not want to preempt the appeals process which we hope will lead to disclosure of the information we are seeking. However, we can confirm that we have lodged a formal complaint with the Information Commissioner in an attempt to obtain a full explanation from KCC of the departures of Mark Brickley and Fiona Ross from the College in such haste and in such opaque circumstances.

Following the sudden departure of Mr Brickley, at the end of October 2017, the College claimed that he had resigned for ‘personal reasons’, although the circumstances of his departure  have never been fully explained and were not recorded in the minutes of the relevant Board of Governors meeting. Following Brickley’s departure there have been persistent rumours, in College circles and in the local community, that the departure of the former Principal had less to do with ‘personal reasons’ and may have had much more to do with some form of serious misconduct in office.

It has become evident to the Grenfell Action Group that the interim Principal, Michelle Sutton is well aware of some of the allegations made against the former Principal and other  members of the College’s senior management team that surfaced through responses to a recent staff survey at the College. These concerns were recorded in the mintues from the KCC Governors Meeting held on 5th December 2016 and paint an alarming picture of low staff morale and poor leadership at this much loved educational establishment.Members of the Grenfell Action Group can only guess at the contents of the alleged ‘unprofessional responses’ made by staff members against various members of the senior management team but it hasn’t escaped our notice that the Interim Principal, Michelle Sutton, seems to have done her best to intimidate complainants into silence by strongly implying that their most serious allegations were ‘defamatory or libellous comments’.

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis will know that the Grenfell Action Group do not normally publish content based only on rumour or hearsay and that all of our postings are backed up with authoritative corroborating evidence. For this reason we have not yet detailed the nature of the rumours that accompanied the sudden departure of Principal Mark Brickley and Deputy Principal Fiona Ross from KCC.  However, we have not shyed away from our efforts to reveal the truth behind the circumstances surrounding Mark Brickley’s departure from the College and we are now in a position to publish, with some confidence, further information that we have received in relation to this matter.

At a recent “Let’s Clear Some Air” community event organised by Rap23 at the Acklam Village a member of the Grenfell Action Group spoke with our local MP, Victoria Borwick, and a local Tory Councillor, Robert Freeman, who were both attending the event. We took this opportunity to speak to our elected representatives about the situation at KCC and asked Cllr Freeman to explain why the freehold for the College building had been purchased by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council and why the College appeared to be in crisis and facing such an uncertain future.

Cllr Freeman chose to answer these questions by stating that the College building was too large for it’s current student intake and that most of the students that now attend the College come from other London Boroughs and are no longer local. This response was then challenged by our representative who pointed out that the College is still vital to the educational well being of the North Kensington community and that the dire situation that the College finds itself in might be partly attributed to the behaviour of the ex Principal Mark Brickley. It was at this point that our MP, Victoria Borwick turned to Cllr Freeman and asked what was meant by this latter statement. Cllr Freeman responded thus; “Mark Brickley was the unfortunate man who put up those compromising photos”.

The Grenfell Action Group would not wish to overinterpret the statement above made by Cllr Freeman to our local Member of Parliament, and witnessed by others present at the event, but we would suggest that these words certainly hint that there might be more to the departure of Mark Brickley than has so far been revealed by the College.

We have been informed by KCC that Brickley resigned his position for ‘personal reasons’ but we strongly suspect that these ‘personal reasons’ may be related to the actions so tantalisingly referred to by Cllr Freeman at the Rap23 event. If we are correct, and KCC are attempting to cover-up serious professional misconduct by either Brickley or Ross, or even both, then we can be confident that the Information Commissioner will order KCC to release the documents that we have requested, and which they have so far witheld.

McConville’s Gravy Train

Back in early April 2017 the Grenfell Action Group published a blog entitled “Untrust the Trust” that laid out our concerns about the apparent lack of moral compass marking the management and governance of the Westway Trust.

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2017/04/03/un-trust-the-trust/

This article concluded that the Trust;

“…has become a morally corrupt and unhealthy proxy of RBKC that seeks to disenfranchise the residents of North Kensington and marginalise, rather than empower the local community. It appears to have morphed in recent years into a body that exists solely to collude with the Council’s gentrification of North Kensington while providing lucrative employment opportunities for its own senior management”.

On May 2nd 2017 the Westway Trust held a Public Forum to hear the myriad concerns of local residents. This meeting was convened largely as a result of community pressure and a member of the Grenfell Action Group used the opportunity to raise the subject of the grossly inflated salary commanded by Angela McConville as Chief Executive of the Trust.

It is understood that Ms McConville earns close to a mind boggling £120,000 per annum, therefore taking home a pay packet that is close to that of the Prime Minister of the UK. Our representitive at the Public Forum stated that in one of the poorest areas of the whole country it was obscene that the Chief Executive of this local charity should be paid so much and asked the Trust to justify their actions. Much to the surprise of all those attending the Chair of the Westway Trust Board, Alan Brown, refused to fully answer the legitimate concerns surrounding Ms McConville’s emolument and decided to ‘take one for the team’ by stating that if anyone should be criticised for how much money the Chief Executive is paid it should be Mr Brown himself as he was part of the decision making process that approved her outlandish pay packet.

The Grenfell Action Group believes that it is a sad fact that the Westway Trust seeks to exploit the local community by relying on the use of cheap labour and volunteers while using the Trust’s revenues to pay themselves hugley inflated salaries. A cursory look at the Westway Trust facebook page will reveal how much they rely on the good will of the local North Kensington community volunteering to carry out tasks for the Westway Trust. While McConville won’t get out of bed for less than close to £10,000 per month the Trust are willing to take advantage of the local workforce by offering employment opportuinities that appear to exploit employees and pay far less than the London Living Wage. A recent example of this was the attempt by the Trust to recruit a ‘creative producer‘ on a 12 month contract with a yearly salary of  just £4,600 and the successful applicant was expected to pay for their own advertising materials out of this measly sum!

While the Westway Trust feel free to abuse their position in this unashamedly crass manner they delight in paying themselves obscene amounts of money. The Grenfell Action Group challenges Angela McConville to justify her exorbitant salary on the evidence that we have produced below revealing the average earnings of charity chiefs around the UK .

http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/average-salary-charity-chiefs-55500-last-year-acevo-survey-reveals/management/article/1333730

“The median salary of charity chief executives last year was £55,500, according to the annual pay survey by charity leaders group Acevo, (the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations) demonstrating that charities have been ‘taking a responsible position on pay’……For charities with incomes of between £50,000 and £1m CEO salary was £42,210; for those with incomes of between £1m and £5m it was £61,938; for those with incomes of between £5m and £15m it was £80,000; and for those with incomes greater than £15m it was £105,000.”

To provide some additional context, other Chief Executives paid less than McConville include the CEO’s of Oxfam, Christian Aid, Sightsavers and the RSPB.

According to a strategic adviser for Oxfam CEO Mark Goldring;

‘…has a big job by any standards: multitasking between running a 700 shop retail chain, managing 5,000 employees and 20,000 volunteers, a £360m budget and ensuring the safety of staff in some of the riskiest places on earth”

Mr Goldring has a salary of £124k. That’s only around £4k more than the CEO of Westway Trust, Angela McConville, (who admittedly does also ensure the safety of her staff in one of the riskiest places on earth- Lol).

According to the same report McConville should be earning a yearly salary of around £80,000 as the Trust’s annual turnover is approx £7 million, according to their own accounts.  As we know she actually takes home approximately £120k. ie an entire workers wage MORE than the average for a charity with an income over £15 million.

At least the Westway Trust cannot be accussed of exploiting the pay difference between male and female Chief Executives that is so common elsewhere in the charity sector. The same article linked to this post has carried out research that identified;

“…a £10,000 gender gap in chief executive pay: the median salary for female respondents was £50,250; for men it was £60,000. Just under half (48 per cent) of respondents were female, up from 45 per cent last year, and women made up the majority of chief executives of smaller charities, but were much less represented in medium-sized and larger organisations”.

However, all is not rosy in the Westway garden on the issue of race. The ‘Third Sector’ article quoted above also unearthed some damning evidence regarding the lack of multi-cultural representation among the higher echelons of charity organisation management structures in the UK. It states;

“Most concerning in this year’s survey is the continued lack of progress towards a civil society leadership THAT IS MORE REPRESENTATIVE OF ITS WORKERS AND OF THE BENEFICIARIES IT SERVES. With 91.2 per cent of chief executive respondents stating their ethnicity as white, and 100 per cent of chairs surveyed saying the same, we have a long way to go.”

Anyone who has witnessed the composition of the Westway Trust Board and senior management cannot have failed to notice that it too is dominated by white, middle class professional males who cannot claim to be representitve of the diverse socio-economic and ethnic communities that inhabit the Westway area and North Kensington generally.

In this context the Westway Trust, an organisation that ought to be a multi-cultural beacon in the area….turns out to be just another among the many damp squibs. Sir Stephen Bubb, CEO of ACEVO (Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations), which speaks for charity leaders says “Our guidance is that good pay means charity staff, trustees, beneficiaries and donors agree it represents value for money.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11435754/32-charity-bosses-paid-over-200000-last-year.html

We have no reason to doubt that the other Trustees of the Westway Trust support the obscene salary that McConville is happy to pocket every month. Alan Brown (ex City banker) has openly admitted his role in supporting the pay scale of his Chief Executive. The Remuneration Committee that agreed the CEO’s remuneration package is likely also to have included Karen Bendell (fashion sales executive), Joanna Farquharson (solicitor) and James Caplin (corporate career coach). We would have to question the judgement, not to mention the street cred, of these individuals who have decided that McConville represents value for money. We would question also whether they have the knowledge wisdom or empathy to decide on behalf of the local community what true value really is.

It would be interesting to hear the staff and donor views on that…. and even more interesting to hear the view of the beneficiary herself – Ms McConville.

Wornington College – The Smoking Gun??

The pieces of the jigsaw are slowly falling into place and our knowledge of how the Wornington College building passed from the ownership of the KCC Corporation into the hands of the Royal Borough is now becoming much clearer. It was always our understanding that it was the arrival of RBKC’s Director of Strategy, Tony Redpath, onto the KCC Board of Governors that was key to the sale of the freehold but a recent discovery of confidential KCC minutes has revealed that the plan was actually hatched sometime before.

Reg Kerr-Bell has had a high profile in the North of the Borough for a number of years and once stood unsuccessfully in local elections as a Conservative candidate in the Golborne Ward. He was a member of the Golborne United SRB board, and was a founder member and chair of the West Row Tenants Association (Hortensia West Residents Association). Golborne United was created in September 1999 and was dissolved in 2006, when the SRB programme ended, at which point it was succeeded by the Golborne Forum.

Between 1999 and 2006 Golborne United received grants totalling £2.7 million under the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) programme, which it distributed as small grants to 80 local projects – including, rather strangely, the TMO and the Westway Amenity Trust (Westway Trust) both of which were awarded generous grants, despite the obvious fact that they were both revenue and asset rich satellites of the Council. The SRB programme had been set up by the former Labour Government, and a crucial part of its function was to channel small grants to local voluntary groups, which it did via the local authority to which Golborne United applied for funds that were entrusted to it for wider distribution.

When Golborne United was dissolved Kerr-Bell stayed on as a member of the Golborne Forum. He was subsequently elected to the Board of the KCTMO in 2009 and became Chair of that despised organisation between 2010 and 2012, at which point he was superceded as chair by the present incumbent Faye Edwards. Kerr-Bell maintained his presence in this ‘mini-mafia’ by chairing the Finance, Audit and Risk Committee. In his apparent lust for power and influence he also joined the KCC Board of Governors in 2006.

Over the years his involvement with these various bodies has afforded him ample opportunity to rub shoulders and curry influence with Councillors and Officers of the RBKC, and readers of this blog need not be reminded of the unholy and incestuously close relationship that exists between the Council and their stooges at the supposedly separate TMO, to the great detriment of TMO tenants and leaseholders.

It is, however, his actions as a Governor at KCC that are of special interest and concern to us in the context of this current blog. We recently discovered confidential minutes from a Board of Governors meeting held at KCC in December 2012 revealing that the seeds of the plan to dispose of the Wornington College building and grounds into the hands of RBKC were first sown at this juncture. It is our considered opinion that this is the moment, in December 2012, that triggered the start of the process that has seen our much loved Wornington College fall into the hands of the Neo-Cons at Hornton Street:

www.kcc.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/KCC-BOC-minutes-111212.pdf

The ‘Audit Committee for Council Housing’ referred to by Mr Kerr-Bell was, of course, the Finance, Audit and Risk Committee of the TMO. His proposal regarding ‘the potential to develop the Wornington Road Centre’ was met with token opposition from some KCC Board members, who favoured a merger with City Lit, as recommended by the Skills Funding agency (SFA), in order to secure the college’s financial future. However, as a result of the Kerr-Bell proposal it was resolved by the KCC Board that:

(The Grenfell Action Group are currently in the process of trying to obtain the minutes of these follow up meetings by use of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.)

We now know that following Mark Brickley’s recruitment as the new College Principal in October 2013, the KCC Search and Development Committee requested that RBKC be contacted and ‘an officer with experience of education’ be invited to join the Board of Governors. It is a matter of record that Brickley subsequently wrote to Nicholas Holgate, the Town Clerk at RBKC, seeking his recommendation for this role, and that Tony Redpath, Director of Strategy and Local Services at RBKC, was subsequently nominated and joined the KCC Governing Board in March 2014. Kerr-Bell and Redpath then sat concurrently on the KCC Board before Kerr-Bell resigned his position at the College in March 2015. The role of Tony Redpath was apparently to represent RBKC interests more directly and authoritatively on the KCC Board, to relay insider information back to RBKC, and possibly to approve evolving proposals, whenever necessary, on behalf of RBKC. The sale of Wornington College to RBKC was negotiated and announced to the public, without any public consultation, or even the knowledge of the RBKC Labour Group, in May 2016.

The Grenfell Action Group can only guess at the motivation behind the suggestion by Kerr-Bell that the financial problems bedevilling KCC could be remedied by a fire sale of the Wornington Road complex to the Royal Borough. We are horrified that a single individual, a senior TMO Board member, who bragged openly about his influence with RBKC Councillors from the Planning and Housing Development Committees, could so directly and decisively influence the sale by KCC of this vital local asset to RBKC.

At this point we would call into question whether the actions of Kerr-Bell were in keeping with (i) the code of conduct for individual KCC governors and (ii) the Corporations guidelines concerning the requirement for Board Members to remain free of external influences as laid out in KCC’s Statement of Corporate Governance and Internal Control:

(i) “members of the Board of Governors agree always to act in the best interests of the College and not to speak or vote as if mandated by other persons or bodies”.

(ii) “The Coroporation considers that each of it’s non-executive members is independent of management and free from any buisness or other relationship that could materially interfere with exercise of their independent judgement”.

The recent history of the TMO reveals them as willing and enthusiastic partners in the Council’s ideology of remorseless demolition of social housing, and destruction of local communities, in the name of ‘regeneration’ and the pursuit of profit. We have little doubt that Kerr-Bell shared this ideology and used his influence at RBKC, and his position on the boards of both TMO and KCC, to facilitate the aquisition of the Wornington Road College by RBKC in the full knowledge that it would be demolished and redeveloped for profit.

We have no doubt that, as a senior member and former Chair of the KCTMO Board, Kerr-Bell was too close to RBKC councillors and officers not to have had a glaring conflict of interest in advising KCC regarding the sale of the Wornington complex to the Council. We believe Redpath too had a similar conflict of interest. It seems equally clear to us that the actions of both parties significantly breached the Code of Conduct for KCC Governors, and yet not a single member of the KCC Board appears to have even considered this to be an issue. We have to question what this says about the quality of management and governance at Kensington and Chelsea College during this time of crisis!

Management and Financial Failures at KCC

In previous blogs the Grenfell Action Group promised to shine some light on the management of the Kensington and Chelsea College, and especially on our concerns that the College’s current problems have been caused by the actions of the Board members who were supposed to safeguard the wellbeing of this much loved educational institute.

Our earlier efforts to expose the shameful decision of KCC to sanction the international travels of former principal Mark Brickley, on a pretence of recruiting overseas students, has brought dividends. After publisising the fact that Mr Brickley had spent nearly £70,000 on his travels in pursuit of illusory international students the management  decided to veto further attempts to recruit students from abroad. This is welcome news as it is high time that the powers that be at KCC came to their senses and realised that their primary duty should be to serve local residents, including the community in the Wornington Road area which is one of the most deprived areas in the whole of the UK.

The Grenfell Action Group have now raised our sights to focus on two other issues that are causing concern. The first of these is the manner in which the Wornington College building was sold to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in May 2016, in what appears to have been a private backroom deal. The second issue we wish to expose is the sudden decline in the financial robustness of the College despite statements in the summer of 2016 from the Vice Principal with special responsibility for Finance and Resources that the College was in a sound financial position.

The Sale of Wornington College to RBKC:

The Grenfell Action Group will be writing to the Kensington and Chelsea College Financial Auditors, Grant Thornton, and raising our concerns about how the College was sold to the Council without an open tendering process and without the opportunity for the market to decide the true value of the Wornington Road site. We believe the sum of £25.4 million that the Council paid for the building falls short of what might have been obtained on the open market and we question why there was a need for so much secrecy surrounding the sale of this prized KCC asset. It has subsequently emerged that local Labour Councillors were not even informed of the sale until the deal had been completed and there is no evidence that any bid other than that by RBKC was considered.

The Financial Forcasts of KCC:

A look at previous minutes of the KCC Board of Governors raises a series of concerns that the Grenfell Action Group will be addressing with the current management team and the College’s financial auditors in order to understand what has actually been going on behind the scenes.

Our primary concern is the inexplicable change of fortunes of the College’s finances over the last four years. It is a matter of record that the financial forecasts for the College during this period have been totally inaccurate and call into question the professionalism of the manner in which these forecasts have been compiled and presented to the Board of Governors, despite the fact that the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) has written to Principals and Chairs to remind them of the importance of these budget estimates.

There is a history of inaccurate financial forcasting at KCC stretching back to 2012 and KCC has been in financial difficulties throughout this period. The Skills Funding Agency (SFA), on which KCC depends for a significant proportion of its annual funding, issued a formal Notice of Concern in October 2012 which was not lifted until September 2014.

The issuing of the Notice of Concern appears to have resulted from a pattern at KCC of initially forecasting end of year surpluses that subsequently degenerated into significant deficits by year end. In 2015 this pattern continued and worsened considerably. In July 2015 the College’s draft budget for 2015/2016 showed a planned surplus of £300,000 with surpluses of £331,000 and £312,000 predicted for the following two years. By October 2015 KCC were instead forecasting an in year operating deficit of £948,000 and this was followed, the following year, by a projected in year deficit of £1.7 million.

Back in July 2016 it is our understanding that Vice Principal Bill Blythe was responsible for producing a forecast of the College’s finances, that the Management Accounts were subject to detailed review from the Finance Committee, of which he was a member, and that the detailed budget and associated course plan for 2016/2017 were produced in collaboration with the managers concerned. The financial forecast reported that the College’s finances were in a healthy and robust state:

“The budget currently shows a surplus of £501k after taking into account the effects of depreciation and interest, the new headline measure – surplus before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation costs is a healthy £1.213m surplus. The position improves further into 2017/2018 with an operating surplus of £917k forecast.”

At the same meeting Mr Blythe announced that he was jumping ship and had found alternative employment elsewhere. This news was recorded in the mintues thus:

” The Vice Principal is on a 6 -month notice period and is working with the Principal on an exit plan. The Principal is seeking a replacement for the post. The Board congratulated Bill on his appointment to a new post and relocation to Devon and thanked him for all his support and hard work at the College”.

Events that followed saw Mr Blythe, despite having given notice of his resignation, promoted to take over the overall running of the College following the sudden departure of Principal Mark Brickley, and Deputy Principal Fiona Ross, whose sudden resignations were not recorded in Board minutes and with no vote of thanks recorded for either.

Subsequently, the minutes of the Board of Governors in December 2016 containd an Annual Report from the Audit Committee which stated that:

“The Audit Committee’s opinion is that that the College’s risk management, control and governance systems and its internal processes for securing economy, efficiency and effectiveness at the College are adequate and effective and that the Governing Body should have confidence in relying upon them. The Committee is satisfied that where weaknesses are identified they have been responded to in an appropriate and timely manner”

However, subsequent minutes from the Board meeting in Feburary 2017 revealed that the College’s finances were in a much more precarious state than previously indicated. The minutes of that meeting reported that;

“The Management Accounts up to 31 December 2016 indicate that the College will fall significantly short of its income target for the current year. The overall shortfall is expected to be in the region of £1.7 million.

Governors expressed concern at the dramatic change in financial forecasts compared to what was reported to the Board in October, where the then Management Accounts forecast a year-end surplus of £256k.”

Due to cuts of 24% in the national budget provision for further education in 2015/2016 the SFA began recommending that FE colleges should merge wherever possible to strengthen their finances, and specifically recommended a merger between KCC and City Lit in which both parties would hopefully retain their individuality and a measure of independence. Unfortunately the KCC/City Lit merger fell through, and this has left KCC facing a hostile takeover by ‘Ealing Hammersmith and West London College’ (EHWL) in which KCC is likely to lose control over what’s left of its assets and operations at Hortensia Centre.

The situation as it now stands is that, despite repeated assurances by both RBKC and KCC that youth and adult educational provision will continue in North Kensington, the Youth training facility at Maxilla Walk has already been closed and Wornington Road College has been sold off to RBKC for redevelopment.

However, the closure of Maxilla and the sale of Wornington were first discussed and planned in 2012 and cannot therefore be blamed on the budget cuts inflicted on the SFA in 2015. The Maxilla closure and the Wornington sell-off are actually evidence of failing management and governance at KCC. These same failings have left KCC more vulnerable to the additional stresses resulting from the budget cuts of 2015. The subsequent failure of the City Lit merger has now left KCC at the mercy of EHWL and in a deep crisis of its own making. This also means that the future of further education in North Kensinghton cannot be guaranteed and can only be described as more precarious and uncertain than ever.