Refugees in London are being housed by the Home Office in run-down, insect-infested hotels. Meanwhile, private housing providers are raking it in.

Corporate Watch spoke to an Iraqi Kurdish family who arrived in the UK in November 2020. Since then, the family – who wish to remain anonymous – have been put up by the Home Office in disgusting conditions in several hotels in London with their six children. They told Corporate Watch that – aside from the insect infestation – they have had to deal with the ceiling caving in; water pouring in from the apartment above them; insufficient food, a lack of electricity, and – when there has been power – dodgy and dangerous electrics.

Mother of the family Rojda (not her real name) told Corporate Watch:

“I’m a mother of six kids, our life is very hard here, and we have no rights.

When we arrived here [in 2020] we had two rooms for all of us… all of our accommodations have been very bad”

Rojda described how she often had to take the family to see another friend living in a different hotel in order to take showers because of the lack of hot water. Rojda said that it was a “shame” that despite living in a rich capital like London she didn’t even have electricity or hot water.

The adults in the family have not been given permission to work in the UK and are completely dependant on the Home Office for accommodation.

They are currently living in a hotel in just three rooms for a total of eight people. The hotel is infested with bed bugs which are causing skin irritation. They provided Corporate Watch with these shocking photos:

A baby with a skin irritation caused by bed bugs

Dead insects on a child’s cot

The family were temporarily moved to new accommodation after a housing officer intervened, but Rojda told us that within weeks they were forced to return to the bug-infested hotel.

Heartbreakingly, Rojda told us that the staff at the hotel had denied her son food, after he complained about the state of the family’s accomodation.

Rojda said that it’s not just her family who are suffering. She doesn’t have a common language to communicate with the other families at the hotel, but she can see that the conditions are just as bad for them

The Home Office’s slum landlords

Nearly 55,000 refugees are currently housed in the Home Office’s ‘contingency accommodation’ waiting to find out if their asylum claim will get approved. The UK’s asylum housing contracts have been wholly privatised since 2012.

The company that is responsible for providing the accommodation that Rojda’s family is housed in is Clearsprings Ready Homes, which reported a massive jump in profits in its last set of accounts – to £4.5m. Its surging profits have led to a seven-fold increase in dividends to the parent company. Clearsprings handles the asylum accommodation contracts for the Home Office in the south of England.

Clearsprings also runs Napier, an ex-military barracks which is being used to house refugees in Kent in conditions described as “squalid” by lawyers of the residents.

In other parts of the UK, the Home Office has awarded contracts to Serco and Mears Group. Outsourcing giant Serco reported £180m in profits in 2019, while Mears reported over half a million worth of profits from its housing business alone.

We’ve decided not to name the Central London hotel because of fears that fascists will target the residents.

“Imagine coming to school with that”

Rojda suggested that we speak to the children’s teachers so they could tell us about the effect living in these conditions has on the wellbeing of the children and their education.

The school provided a statement which says that it has had to get “more and more involved” with helping children in “temporary accommodation”, including providing support with practical things like travel and uniforms, as well as “navigating the bureaucracy”. Its statement reads:

“Living in these difficult conditions obviously impacts the children. They tell us about how overcrowded it is, how noisy, and how they have trouble sleeping.

Imagine coming to school with that. They are trying to learn a new language, integrate into a new school, adapt to a new culture when at the same time they have to deal with great uncertainty about how long they will be staying for.”

Passing the buck

The Canary contacted the Home Office about the conditions at the hotel. They passed the buck to Clearsprings, saying:

“We are dealing with unprecedented pressures on the asylum system, but despite this we continue to ensure the accommodation provided is safe, comfortable and secure.

However, we expect high standards from all of our providers, and any asylum seekers who have problems can get in touch with Migrant Help 24/7, every day of the year.”

We also contacted Clearsprings Ready Homes. A spokesperson said:

“Clearsprings Ready Homes works closely with its delivery partners to ensure that safe, habitable and correctly equipped accommodation is provided. Whenever issues are raised, or defects are identified Ready Homes will undertake a full investigation and ensure that those issues are addressed.”

The Home Office also said:

“The Nationality and Borders Bill that we are introducing will deliver the most comprehensive reform in decades to fix the broken asylum system.”

However – far from making the situation better for refugees – the Nationality and Borders Bill will make the situation even worse by introducing endless reviews of people’s asylum claims, which stretch out the asylum process. This means that people are reliant on Home Office accommodation for even longer. In general, the bill is designed to make claiming asylum in the UK even more difficult.

“Not an isolated experience”

Rojda’s family’s situation is not unique at all. The Home Office’s private contractors routinely provide dirty and dilapidated accommodation to those seeking asylum. Earlier this month, Clearsprings was forced to make improvements to flats it’s using to house refugees in Uxbridge after they “were found to be rife with damp, mould, water leaks and pest infestations”. Last year, six men won a high court legal challenge. The court ruled that their accommodation at the Napier Barracks in Kent – which is managed by Clearsprings – failed to meet a “minimum standard”.

We spoke to Maddie Harris, director of the Humans for Rights network. She said:

“The experience of this family is utterly appalling and shows a clear disregard for their health, wellbeing and rights. It is also, not an isolated experience. We have spoken to hundreds of people seeking sanctuary in the UK who are accommodated in hotels throughout England and it is clear from the testimonies shared with us that there is no attention paid to upholding even the most basic of rights. People often spend well over a year in cramped, overcrowded hotels, run by private contractors who surveil their every move.”

Medical care is limited

Harris continued:

“Medical care is often limited or restricted by staff who refuse to assist people in registering with GP surgeries. Food is nutritionally poor and small in quantity and often lacks consideration for faith, cultural or dietary requirements. Access to solicitors and legal advice is severely lacking and little to no information is provided to people. These hotels and accommodations such as Napier Barracks, are for many experienced like quasi-detention and we have heard from numerous people that their mental health is severely effected by isolation, lack of information and complete uncertainty as to the progress of their asylum claim. These accommodations are run by private companies, who profit from and are responsible for much of this harm.”

“Ultimate accountability lies with the Home Office”

Harris concluded that, although private companies are profiting from running the accommodation, the Home Office bears the final responsibility. She said:

“Ultimate accountability lies with the Home Office who are responsible for these contracts and the welfare of asylum seekers in the UK, yet there is a complete lack of oversight for how these contracts are managed, resulting in untold harm to many thousands of people seeking sanctuary in the UK.”

Solidarity

Refugees living in the Home Office’s slum accommodation can be found in many of our communities. These are people who are new to the UK, and they are bearing the brunt of a racist state which is colluding with ruthless private companies out to make a fast buck from the suffering of others. We need to be ready to stand in solidarity with people in the Home Office’s slum accommodation, and to struggle alongside them for better conditions.

Featured image via Alisdare Hickson/Wikimedia Commons (resized to 770×403 pixels), all other images used in this article were provided to Corporate Watch by Rojda’s family (with permission)

We know that Rojda’s family’s situation is just the tip of the iceberg. If you – or people you know – are in a similar situation you can talk to Corporate Watch here.

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Hyde, which manages nearly 49,000 homes in London and the South East of England, remains in strong financial health. In its latest annual report, Hyde says it has delivered “a healthy surplus and maintained a robust balance sheet” and that its “core financial strength has enabled us to grow and sustain our business, even through the short term COVID-19 challenges”.

Management is also keen to direct readers to the group’s credit rating, which shows how impressed city analysts are by the company’s financial position. Hyde’s rating is a very impressive A+. That’s the same as Amazon, and Nestle, and better than Goldman Sachs, Volkswagen and Disney.

So Hyde still has a lot of money. It should be easy enough to fix disrepair, make sure homes are safe and build developments with lots of social housing. And yet they regularly fail in this, as shown by the cases we have found and grouped together below.

Cases like these have not stopped those at the top of Hyde from moving up in the world. In September 2021, Peter Denton, Hyde’s former chief executive was appointed CEO of Homes England, the government’s authority responsible for distributing housing funding.

In response to news of the appointment, the Social Housing Action Campaign said: “Denton’s legacy at Hyde was a great deal of misery for tenants and residents, and a corporate reputation for fleecing them through service charges… Apparently, maladministration at a social landlord is a highly desirable qualification for a job doling out government money to housing associations.”

Local and national media contain many examples of Hyde providing substandard accommodation and unsafe cladding, evicting tenants and provoking residents. We have grouped some of these examples by issue below.

Unsafe cladding

• Hyde found fire safety problems in all 86 of its tower blocks when it inspected them following the Grenfell Tower fire. Hyde promised to invest heavily to address safety issues but residents have complained about the measures taken. In February 2018, The Guardian reported that the action taken by Hyde to limit the risk of fire in Greenwich’s New Capital Quay – the largest housing development in the country to have Grenfell-style cladding – was the “least efficient” solution of the three recommended by the London Fire Brigade. A Hyde tenant said, “people have been cutting corners for so many years and are putting people’s lives at risk and they have to be held accountable.”

• In January 2020, ITV reported that residents of Hyde’s Blake Court tower block in Gosport had been living in a building encased in plastic sheeting since safety inspections in 2018/19. The plastic sheets were installed as a temporary safety measure. Residents complained that they had had enough of “living in semi-darkness” and were becoming depressed as a result.

• In November 2020, two housing blocks owned by Hyde in Brighton’s New England Quarter were put on ‘waking watch’ – with 24-hour patrols in case fire broke out – after they failed fire safety checks post Grenfell. Leaseholders in the buildings also found themselves in the position where they were unable to sell due to the building’s fire safety status.

• In 2021, Southwark News reported that Davoll Court – a building in Bermondsey – had not been awarded a fire safety certificate. One resident of Davoll Court – who owned a 25% stake in his home – was unable to sell because of the building’s fire safety status. He had fallen behind with his rent after his relationship broke down with the co-owner of the property. Hyde Housing ignored the predicament he was in and repossessed his home.

• In May 2021, Hyde announced its intention to pass on the costs of recladding its Bolanachi building in Bermondsey to its leaseholders, billing them £26k each.

Substandard accommodation

• In November 2021, The Sun reported that mould in a Hyde Housing house had left a young asthmatic child too sick to go to school. His mum said her son has suffered from a chest infection while living at the property and at one point his health was so bad that medics put him on steroids. His school and his doctor have contacted Hyde – which manages the property – after he reportedly missed weeks of class due to repeated illness.

• A Hyde tenant in Lewisham has been living with a hole in his ceiling for 15 years. Ignatius Okafo, 58, who has a partner and three-month-old baby living with him, has won two disrepair cases against Hyde, which runs his building, but the problem is yet to be fixed. Mr Okafo moved into the top floor of a housing block on the Pepys Estate in Deptford in 2004 after Lewisham Council decided to demolish the low-rise building he was living in. He told londonnewsonline that “he saw hairline cracks in the walls before construction had even finished… In 2007, he noticed a leak coming through the ceiling of the main bedroom. Workers from Hyde found there was no insulation between the room and the roof of the building. It became so cold that he had to sleep elsewhere. He said that over the years both his joints and his mental health have been severely affected.”

• In June 2021, a 15-metre tree fell on the roof of a Hyde Housing property in Plumstead. Many local residents complained that it took 11 days for Hyde to arrange for the tree to be removed.

• The Mirror reported in July 2020 that a Hyde Housing tenant had spent the first coronavirus lockdown in a house so damp that mushrooms were growing on the walls. The tenant had been requesting that the landlord sort out the problems for over ten years and had even taken Hyde to court in 2018. Hyde still hadn’t made the improvements at the time The Mirror’s article was published, despite the court having awarded compensation and demanding that the landlord carry out repairs a year earlier.

Evictions

• In October 2019 Hyde was accused of having a family of three evicted from their accommodation by police and bailiffs. During the eviction, some of the family were seriously hurt. The mother of the family suffered a concussion. At a previous eviction of the same family, Hyde had allegedly confiscated approximately £86,000 worth of the tenant’s property, despite the fact that the tenant reportedly didn’t owe any rent.

• In 2013, Hyde Housing teamed up with the Metropolitan Police to make life harder for ex-prisoners. Hyde – whose then-CEO Elaine Bailey used to run Serco’s prison and immigration businesses – collaborated with the police in a scheme that aimed to enable fast-track evictions of tenants who broke ‘good behaviour’ conditions after they were released from prison. The trial was carried out on the Stonebridge Park Estate in Harlesden.

• Again in 2013, it was reported that Hyde Housing had carried out evictions of ‘gang members’ for breach of tenancy. The ‘gang’ label has been widely used to stigmatise and criminalise working-class people of colour, and can easily be used to uproot members of the poorest communities by evicting them from their homes. Hyde has continued to use this stigmatising label on its website, and to collaborate with the police to evict people from its homes in London. Hyde published an article on its website in 2018 entitled ‘Cracking down on Gang Culture in Stockwell’, where it reported that it had served possession notices on six tenants from the Stockwell Gardens and Studley Estates following a “joint operation with the Metropolitan Police”.

Resistance to Hyde developments

• In 2020 Hyde obtained planning permission for a controversial housing development off Falmer Avenue on the edge of the South Downs. When the initial planning application for the project was made in 2016 the council received 300 letters of objection and a 4,000 signature petition against the plans. Protests were also held at Brighton Town Hall. A local councillor – Heather Butler – said: “We have all been concerned about the design of this development and its visibility from the South Downs National Park. The view will be radically changed by a view of ‘boxy’ houses, prominent on the site with no design review or input from the South Downs National Park.”

• In July 2019 hundreds of people voiced concerns against a new Hyde Housing development in Coldean, another joint venture with Brighton & Hove council. A local resident – Becky Hobbs – said that ecological surveys carried out were “inadequate” and disputed findings about the number of badger setts in the area. The council and Hyde planned to “close” three of the eight setts. Hobbs said “this will be the next Newbury bypass. There will be protests.”

• In 2016, Brighton & Hove Council applied the brakes to a £100m housing scheme amid concerns about “the close relationship between the council and Hyde”. The idea – a scheme to create 1000 homes – had been proposed by Hyde as a joint venture with the council. The Argus reported that a similar joint venture between Lewes District Council and another company – Karis Group – had encountered problems because “Councillors were placed in a difficult position by being given commercially sensitive information they could not share with the wider public which severely limited discussion”. The proposed board for the new project was to include three Hyde representatives and three council employees, but no councillors. Councillor Mary Mears voiced concerns that the scheme would be a repeat of the Open Market development, where she said: “traders were outvoted on the board and felt it did not represent their best interests.”

• In 2015, the Campaign for a Better Harrow Environment opposed Hyde’s plans to build a 19 storey skyscraper. The objections were that the building was unsightly, would not include affordable housing and would block views of Harrow on the Hill and St Mary’s Church. The plans were rejected by the local borough council but given the green light by the Secretary of State.

• In 1999 Hyde received £9m from the Housing Corporation for the redevelopment of the Pepys Estate in Lewisham. The Municipal Dreams blog said that only “cosmetic consultations” had taken place, with the bulk of the decision making about the scheme happening “behind closed doors”. Tenants groups and housing activists mobilised against the ‘decanting’ of local residents into council flats, with relocated tenants not allowed to return to the new estate.

Images via Pedro Ramos on Unsplash and Action for Fire Safety Justice

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In recent weeks the Scottish tenants’ union Living Rent have been organising marches and protests against the rent hike, spreading tenants’ overwhelming demand for a rent freeze. In support of their campaign, we took a look at the finances of GHA’s parent company, Wheatley Group, to ask – do they really need to put up rents? The simple answer is: no.

The group’s accounts show that:

• Rents already cover the costs of repairs and building improvements twice over. There’s no sign that extra money is needed to do work on existing tenants’ homes.
• The company made a handsome surplus (profit) of £14 million in the year ending 31 March 2020, the latest year accounts are available for.
• Wheatley Group’s main expenses, rather, include management and admin costs, and paying interest to lenders who are financing new homes being built. Is the rent rise really about subsidising growing the business?
• While tenants struggle with rising rents, CEO Martin Armstrong got paid £351,000 last year. How much of the rent rise will go to keep paying high salaries to executives?

GHA and Wheatley Group

But before we get to those figures – just who is Wheatley Group? Glasgow Housing Association (GHA) is the “social landlord” set up when Glasgow’s council housing was privatised in 2003. But it is now part of a bigger company called Wheatley Group, which has numerous smaller associations and subsidiary companies across Scotland. Wheatley Group owns or manages 94,000 homes altogether. GHA is the biggest subsidiary with around 40,300 homes of these. The next biggest part is Dumfries and Galloway Housing Partnership (DGHP) with 29,000 homes, which joined Wheatley in 2020.

GHA is by no means alone in this trend. Once upon a time, Housing Associations were non-profit organisations set up to provide affordable housing for local communities. But in the last 20 years they have transformed, becoming big businesses. Successful associations have grown by buying up others, merging to become massive groups which own properties often across the whole of the UK. They have also increasingly become property developers and private landlords, renting and selling homes at market-level prices. This growth is funded by borrowing large amounts from banks and investment funds.

Why do GHA say they need to put up rents?

Right at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, in March 2020, GHA imposed a rent increase of 3.4%.³ One year later, it is asking tenants to face a further 1.7% rise. How does GHA justify hitting people with this extra burden?

This isn’t so clear. GHA sent round consultation documents GHA saying that if rents go up they “could keep delivering services and all the investment work already planned”. But they don’t say rents need to go up to do this. They just don’t give tenants any option to keep rents the same. They don’t provide any figures to show how much money they make from rents, what it is spent on, or why it is not enough for next year. There is a vague “breakdown of how each pound was spent” – but without actually giving any amounts!

If we want to understand what’s going on, the information GHA gives to its tenants is pretty useless. However, the information Wheatley Group gives to investors in its Annual Report is much more detailed, so we can take a look there.

In the money

Wheatley Group’s latest Annual Report shows that it had a “turnover” of £357 million in 2020. This is all the money coming in from rent and other regular sources, before paying its costs.

As a “non-profit” company, Wheatley Group’s accounts don’t talk about profit. Instead, they use the term “surplus” to talk about the money they bring in minus the costs going out. Wheatley Group made a surplus of £14 million in 2020. So one thing is clear: Wheatley Group doesn’t need to raise rents because it’s losing money. It made a very healthy “profit” (surplus) in 2020.⁴

Sometimes companies can be profitable but still short of cash to pay their immediate expenses – e.g., because they are owed money which hasn’t come in yet. This is not so for Wheatley Group. They had no less than £116 million in cash sitting in the bank according to the latest accounts – more than enough to pay for repairs several times over.

Note: Wheatley also made a massive gain of over £200 million from the extrahousing stock, cash and other assets DGHP brought with it when it joined. This gave Wheatley Group a truly enormous surplus on paper of £245 million in 2020. We are not focusing on this figure as it isn’t available to spend. It’s “locked” into the value of the properties they took on, and it does not reflect the group’s performance – so isn’t a reason for higher or lower rent.

So where does the money go?

GHA’s consultation documents say rent increases will be spent on “delivering services” and “investment work”. But the reality is that about half of tenants’ rents aren’t spent on their homes at all. The rest goes on everything from subsidising new house building to paying managers’ salaries and bankers’ profits.

Wheatley Group’s Annual Report clarifies that the company spent a total of £129 million on repairs and investment in properties in 2020. £61 million of this was for repairs, with £66 million on “improvements” – e.g., new bathrooms and kitchens, or other spending to “improve” flats and communal areas.⁵

But as we just saw, the group had a turnover of £357 million. The bulk of that money came from social housing rents: £242 million, plus an extra £6 million in service charges.⁶

So: GHA and other Wheatley Group social tenants paid their landlord almost double what was spent on work on their homes. Or about four times what was spent on repairs. On any interpretation, it’s stretching the truth to say that rent rises are needed for “repairs and investment work”. And this is without the proposed rent rises.

CEO Martin Armstrong receiving an award from business lobby group the Institute of Directors (Scotland)

Who gains?

Many GHA tenants have been struggling to meet rent payments during the COVID-19 pandemic – and now they’re being asked to pay even more. Meanwhile, some other people have been doing very nicely out of the housing business.

The accounts show more money goes on paying interest to investors – £72 million⁷ – or on “management and maintenance administration” costs – £62 million⁸ – than on repairs.

Let’s take the management and admin costs first. These are barely broken down in the accounts and we do not know how many of these are ‘genuinely’ necessary for the management and upkeep of properties. But we can find details of one item included: the bosses’ pay.

Last year the six people deemed “key management” together made £1.4 million. Of these, CEO Martin Armstrong was the highest individual earner. He made £351,000 – a base salary of £296,000 plus another £55,000 in pension contributions. The other five managers got paid over £160,000 each. That’s a lot more than most GHA tenants are taking home.⁹

Meanwhile, the “non-executive” Chairman of the Board, Alastair MacNish, pocketed £32,370. MacNish is the retired boss of South Lanarkshire Council. He isn’t involved in the day-to-day running of Wheatley Group and this money will be just for chairing meetings and other ‘supervisory’ duties. The hourly rate must be huge.

Rent goes to some even bigger earners. As we saw, Wheatley paid £72 million in interest last year. This goes to the banks and investment funds who lend the group money to pay for its building of new homes (Wheatley also receives grants from the Scottish government for this: the company spent £86 million¹⁰on building new properties in 2020, while receiving £41 million in government grants).

In total, Wheatley owes over £1.5 billion in interest accruing debt. Main lenders include the world’s biggest fund manager, BlackRock, as well as the UK’s giant banks HSBC and RBS. Ultimately, the hugely wealthy bosses of these institutions benefit from the interest. Tenants could ask exactly what this money is being used for, and whether it is worth the interest costs.¹¹

Is that clear?

In its Annual Report, Wheatley Group tells its investors a lot more than it does tenants. One basic fact we do know: the landlord is making a healthy profit, it doesn’t need to raise rents because it’s in the red. Another: rents already pay for much more than the cost of repairs and building improvements – they are used to subsidise other expenditures such as executive salaries, finance costs, and expanding the business.

But there’s still a lot of detail we can’t find from the published information. These are just a few questions tenants might want to ask:

• How much of the rent rise is really about paying manager’s high salaries?
• Why are management and admin costs so high? Can Wheatley Group provide tenants with a proper breakdown of where all that money is going?
• Why is Wheatley Group paying so much interest to banks and investment funds? How much of this borrowing has been used to fund the group’s rapid growth, buying up and building more properties, rather than on essential work for existing tenants?
• Tenants may agree with building new houses – but how much of that should be paid for by raising rents to help cover borrowing costs? Shouldn’t they have a say in this?
• The group spends £10 million on “activities to support the community”¹² Tenants may agree with the landlord providing community services, e.g., emergency food packages during the COVID pandemic. But should it be tenants paying for all this from their rents? Or what about, for example, executives chipping in from their big salaries?

If managers disagree with any of the points we’ve made above, we’d say: the onus is on them to provide clear information about where the money goes. Why aren’t tenants being told just what they plan to spend these rent rises on?

Notes

1 GHA don’t say how many tenants they have – this figure is estimated by Living Rent, based on multiplying the number of properties by the average Scottish household size of 2.15 people.

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How did the Residents of Penally Union form?

Camp Residents of Penally (CROP) started as a WhatsApp Group among some of the asylum seekers in the camp. Then we added people from outside (“the supporters”) to the WhatsApp Group and with them began to organise voluntary work and trips outside the camp for residents. The first experiment with a trip outside and voluntary work was with the Croeso Teifi charity, and then had sanctuary day trips with County of Sanctuary Pembrokeshire (COSP ). We were then helped to write our constitution as an unincorporated organisation with a Chair, a Treasurer, a Secretary and other committee members from within the camp.

What has the union been doing?

At its first meeting CROP set organising English classes as its first priority. The classes are led by asylum seekers who were English teachers in their countries. After that we agreed that we should develop opportunities for voluntary work in the community, and day trips for residents for relaxation and friendship and to get away from the camp environment and the threatening protests. We also set up a “buddy-match” arrangement with COSP. Then we helped The Heart Organisation to identify the needs of residents for shoes and clothing which they then supplied. We also organised art classes using Zoom, with a local artist through Art-is-an-Avenue in Tenby. We then started to organise music classes – also done remotely using Zoom.

When a director from Migrant Help [a private contractor running refugee advice services for the Home Office] and one of their trustees visited the camp, we organised a meeting for the residents with them. This was done so that medical cases and other urgent issues could be raised directly with Migrant Help and, through them, passed on to the Home Office and Clearsprings Ready Homes for action. As a result of this some urgent cases were moved to proper, safer accommodation.

What are the conditions like in the camp?

The camp is in a poor state of repair. The facilities in the camp are all within separate stand-alone buildings. For example, the toilets and showers are in blocks separate from the living quarters; the washing machines are in another; and the TV room and dining room are within their own stand-alone buildings. This means that if residents want to use the toilet or shower, they need to leave their sleeping quarters, go outside and walk across the site to the toilet and shower blocks. Because all the facilities are in separate buildings, residents spend a lot of time outside in the elements. Not only is this unpleasant because of the bad weather, it also means that the anti-migrant protesters outside the camp gates can see you moving around the camp and can film you.

As for the sleeping spaces, there are three kinds. Some buildings are divided into four rooms with two people in each. Then as new people arrived they started to use a different type of sleeping quarters – stand-alone buildings divided into two rooms with each room housing six. When yet more men arrived, the third type of sleeping quarters were put to use. These are the “Nissen hut” arched buildings containing just one room with six people inside.

The rooms contain bunk beds. There is no wifi in the rooms and initially there were no lockers for our belongings, just a single chest of drawers. Long thin rusty metal lockers were eventually provided but the padlocks we were given would not fit them so they remained unlocked and unused. The rooms were only lockable from the inside since the office staff refused all requests for keys to lock the doors from the outside.

Penally breakfast: (un)boiled eggs

We have heard a lot of stories about the food and drink at Penally. What can you tell us about this?

Following earlier complaints passed on to Migrant Help, we were clearly told that residents are entitled to adequate portion sizes and the right to ask for additional servings. This is not happening, for example, requests for additional slices of bread are routinely refused.

As regards quality, the breakfast menu is constantly the same, boiled eggs (often uncooked) and porridge. Rice is poorly cooked (either under or over boiled) and is served swimming in water. Often the chicken pieces still have feathers attached and the other meat is extremely tough to cut or chew. It is clearly poor quality and cooked badly – though apparently the food can be cooked properly on those days when there are visits from Migrant Help or other outside organisations.

Is there any problem with drinking water?

Again, CROP has raised this with Clearsprings before and now the situation has deteriorated. There are supposed to be three operational water dispensers in the camp but, as the Administration Office is aware, they are not routinely checked and refilled. Consequently, there are times when there is no drinking water available and service users have been told to fill their bottles with water from the bathroom taps.

As for hot water – Clearsprings have removed all the kettles. They have said this is for Health and Safety reasons. The kettles were newly purchased and donated by local charities, checked upon being brought to the camp, and were safely used for at least four weeks. These kettles belong to the charities which donated them, and we have not heard if Clearsprings have returned them to the charities so they can give them to other people.

There are only two working hot water urns in the whole camp – one in the Library and one which was in one of the common rooms. The third urn, located in the dining room/canteen area has never worked. Quite often only the one in the library is working. This inadequate provision of hot water for hot drinks and removing the need to walk long distances in the inclement weather in winter was why CROP and the local charities provided kettles for the men in the camp.

How is the heating in the camp?

The heaters mounted on the walls in the sleeping quarters and communal areas often do not work. The broken heaters often do not get repaired or replaced for several days. In one case, several heaters, which were broken for more than a week, were replaced only on the day that the Migrant Help director and trustee visited for a second time. Other heaters remained unrepaired. The rooms are very cold when the heaters are not working.

In the communal areas it is also very cold. The radiators in one of the communal rooms did not work until about 12 weeks after the camp had been occupied. The doors in the communal areas are often kept open because of the amount of people in the rooms in a vague attempt to avoid Covid 19 transmission.

Do you have access to phones and internet to communicate with friends and family?

Yes, those of us with phones can. Those without are now obtaining them via Care4Calais and the British Red Cross. Wifi only exists at two points in the camp, in the TV-social rooms. There is nowhere for private calls or internet-calls using wifi, e.g., to speak to solicitors or family.

How is the situation with social distancing and corona?

None of us were asked to self-isolate before being moved from the hotels we were in; nor did we undergo any type of mental or physical health assessment before we were moved; and nor were we given a Covid-19 test. We have no idea how the Home Office or Clearsprings made sure that there was no risk of Covid being brought into the camp. Very little was done to manage the risk of Covid. Hand sanitiser and soap dispensers are often either empty or not working. Outside the canteen, there is one dispenser which is often left empty, including for three days on one occasion.

Mask wearing is only enforced within the dining area. There is no enforcement to wear a mask in any other part of the camp, including in the communal TV rooms. Because of this, many men do not wear masks. Masks are only available on request.

Social distancing is very difficult. During protests, some men would interact with protesters at the camp gates with neither group wearing masks. Many of us have to share sleeping quarters with five other people with totally inadequate isolation measures, short pieces of ply would fixed to the bunk beds and sheets which we put up ourselves. We have been provided with cloths to wash plates and cutlery which are shared between large numbers of people.

There were signs on the floor reminding people to socially distance, but these rubbed off after a day and were not replaced. The only Covid safety measure in evidence at all is the taking of temperatures of residents as they leave and visitors as they enter the camp.

How do the staff that run the camp behave towards you?

CROP, not for the first time, has reported to Clearsprings that some of the security staff have demanded a resident tell them his destination and show identification when he was outside the gates meeting a charity worker. Inside the camp, there was a noticeable increase in aggression from the security staff at least since their own recent protest about unpaid wages.

The kitchen serving staff make no allowance for people’s lack of English and there are no signs in different languages to help people obtain the right food options. Their attitude is simply to demand “What do you want?”, and then shout “Next”. This is neither respectful nor necessary (let alone appropriate) when dealing with people who have queued outside in the cold and rain and who do not have English as a first or even second language. This antagonistic behaviour adds to the widespread frustration building in the camp.

Do you feel safe at the camp?

Not particularly. It is very unpleasant trying to get back in to the camp when there are protesters outside, especially when the Police are not controlling them. Sometimes there have been problems between the security guards and some of the men, which makes the camp feel unsafe.

The protesters shout and set off fireworks. It is terrifying as it sounds like gunfire. They take photographs and videos of the men and these have been posted on YouTube. We are very worried about images being uploaded onto the internet as it might put families at risk back in the countries we have left.

How is healthcare at the camp?

Almost non-existent. Initially, the Clearsprings housing manager would take temperatures and blood pressure readings if needed. I think that a nurse visited on two days, and a doctor visited once. The medical professionals would try to arrange telephone interpretation for the men who had appointments with them. However, the signal would often be very poor and on a number of occasions other asylum seekers would have to interpret for the men at their appointments.

There remains considerable confusion about how to obtain medical treatment or get an appointment to see a medical professional.

What do you know about the companies running the different services (food, healthcare, etc) in the camp?

Clearsprings Ready Homes has the contract for the provision of this and the Napier Camp [in Kent]. But they subcontract nearly everything to do with the running of the camps (and the hotels we were in before) to another company called NACCS. The Security staff are provided by another sub-contractor.

Are there any people being deported from the camp?

We do not know about this, but we have heard of one member who was moved to Brook House Detention Centre at Gatwick.

Has the Union faced any problems from those running the camp?

CROP has not been prevented from forming by Clearsprings Ready Homes or the sub contractors on the site and they agreed to provide the classroom building for our use for the English, Art and Music classes we now run. However, they have not been responsive to our requests for improvements to the food, heating and cleaning issues we have raised with them since day one of the organisation.

What are the aims of the Union, what do you hope to achieve? And what message do you have for people who want to support your struggle?

The camp at Penally is not suitable for the use it is being put to now. The fact that it is clearly a military camp, with barbed wire and high fences (and even a shooting target in the shape of a man when we first arrived!) only adds further mental anguish and trauma to those who have suffered torture and other ill-treatment in military and intelligence service camps in the countries they have fled. We need help from people in writing to their MPs and the Senedd [the Welsh Parliament], supporting our view that the camp needs to be closed and proper accommodation provided.

We cannot believe that the UK government has fallen to the level of using such dreadful “camps” for asylum seekers.

Supporting the organisations which have been central to helping CROP would also be very much appreciated.

The post Camp Residents of Penally: an interview with refugees organising inside the Home Office’s military camp appeared first on Corporate Watch.

The Home Office has contracted management of the camps to Clearsprings, an Essex-based private company. Though not as well known as other Home Office outsourcers such as Serco and G4S, it has made millions from asylum housing over the last 20 years.

In response to requests, we have looked into Clearsprings, its track record and the people behind it. We have found:

• Clearsprings is owned and controlled by Graham King, an Essex businessman who has a range of other interests including consultancy services, caravan parks and taxi firms.

• Housing provided by the company has repeatedly been found to be substandard, with leaking plumbing, damp, broken fire alarms and electrical sockets, and infestations of cockroaches, rats and mice. In one notorious episode, Clearsprings was slammed for making asylum seekers in Cardiff wear red wristbands to identify themselves.

• Other controversies include a tax dispute with HMRC and a King-owned caravan park accused of profiting from homeless people.

• Clearsprings’ boss has been paid at least £4 million over the last five years.

• After the Home Office, Clearsprings’ other main customer is Kent County Council.

• Daily management in Napier Barracks is subcontracted by Clearsprings to Nationwide Accommodation Services, an East London property management firm that works for a number of local authorities.

Is there a company you think we should be looking into? Click here to get in touch.

The Napier Barracks. Image from Google Maps

Military camps: a new low for UK immigration policy

The UK Government has opened two unused military bases as camps to hold migrants arriving from across the channel. The Napier Barracks, near Folkestone in Kent, has room for 400 people. The Penally Training Centre near Tenby, in Pembrokeshire in Wales, can house 250. Both are part of the Ministry of Defence’s “training estate”, being leased to the Home Office. People housed at the camp are commonly from Eritrea, Iran and Sudan with smaller numbers from Kurdistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey, Palestine, Ethopia and other African countries.

Using military bases as refugee camps is common practice in many countries – notably Greece, where the army runs many of the “reception and identification camps” used to warehouse people who’ve crossed the Aegean Sea or the Evros Valley. But it’s an unusual step for the UK, bringing to mind wartime internment centres or the film Children of Men – in which refugees are penned in a concentration camp 50 miles down the coast from Folkestone at Bexhill-on-Sea.

So what lay behind this new policy? It may play well with politicians’ key audience of anti-migrant target voters: after the plans were announced in September, a Daily Mail op-ed from Sue Reid cheered a “sensational move by the Government” that is “determined to end criticism of Britain being a soft touch for migrants”. Although there has also been right-wing backlash after local ‘not in my back yard’ protests – meaning those both for and against supporting refugees may oppose the camps.

As a Home Office PR “sensation”, it is part of the latest anti-migrant media panic focused on the fact that thousands of people are now crossing the channel in small boats. In this context, the camps were announced alongside measures such as sending the Navy to patrol off Dover, and the rash of new deportation charter flights.

Grimness and resistance

Speaking in September, a Clearsprings manager said the camps would have TVs, wifi and sports equipment to keep people entertained, interpreters, information provided in several languages, plus sanitisers, masks and security.

We have gathered information from residents that suggests conditions are far more grim than that suggests. Men in the camp told us up to 14 people are made to share rooms together, even with cases of Covid-19 confirmed among residents. They hang sheets up between them for some privacy and dignity. No clothing is supplied with residents often still wearing the same clothes they crossed the channel in. Many have to share shoes between them.

The spread of Covid-19 is a constant concern. Residents complain of a lack of hand soap dispensers, crowded washing facilities and little social distancing. People think it’s only a matter of time till more get sick with COVID-19. There is a nurse on site five days a week, yet residents complained to us of not getting the treatment they needed. One man said: “I had an infection so I went to the nurse. I was told this country does not have any money to pay for my medical treatment.”

Residents, all of whom asked to stay anonymous, complain of the camp being like a prison. Far Right groups have protested outside during its opening and continue to agitate online. Although there have also been many demonstrations of welcome, with more than 200 people mobilising in a counter-demonstration to the Far Right in Kent. People inside, many of who fled conflict and dangerous situations, are suffering from stress and depression but there is little mental health support available to them. One man told us:

“I worry about the people who spend the whole day in bed. They wake up to eat and then go back to bed. They do not speak to anyone, they cannot speak English nor do they have a phone or anything. There are people like this in every building. I tried to get someone to use my phone to speak to his family but he didn’t know how.”

In general, reports show an institution ill-prepared for the diverse needs of its residents. For example, some of the staff in the Napier barracks do speak Arabic, but a third of residents don’t speak English or Arabic and as a result find communication far more difficult (though some residents said they were supporting others to learn). We were told residents claiming asylum because of being LGBTQ+ feel particularly vulnerable, worried those around them may share the prejudices they fled.

In response to the situation, local volunteers have formed networks to support residents inside the camps. Another complaint is not being given access to a lawyer, and some volunteers are concerned the Home Office is using the barracks as a holding space to enable more deportations before the end of the year. On 23 November, 14 people were taken from the camp to be deported.

Public concern is growing about the camps and the conditions inside them. Rather than address these concerns, Clearsprings has asked local volunteers to sign confidentiality agreements underpinned by the Official Secrets Act so they can’t talk about what they sees.

In Penally, reports suggest the situation for people inside the camps is similarly grim, with the camp targeted by far right protests. In response to their situation, residents have formed a union called ‘Camp Residents of Penally’ to “work democratically, transparently and fairly, to include and empower” residents, and to engage with Clearsprings, the Welsh government and the Home Office. Learning the Welsh language of the local area is a key goal, part of an aim to “meet their own needs and benefit the wider organisation”.

Clearsprings’ record

The Napier and Penally camps are both run by Clearsprings, a private company based in Rayleigh, Essex, that runs asylum accommodation for the Home Office in the South of England and Wales. The rest of the UK is contracted out to notorious outsourcer Serco – currently making millions from the failing Test and Trace system – and Mears Group, which has achieved particular notoriety in Scotland less than a year into its contract.

The business model is simple. The companies receive regular fees from the Home Office, then try to find the cheapest accommodation possible from local landlords and sub-contractors, with a bare minimum of management and maintenance, to maximise the “cut” they take. The result is thousands of people dumped in damp, squalid, rat and cockroach infested slum housing.

Clearsprings has not received the same media attention as Serco, Mears or G4S – which also used to run asylum housing. But it has been in the asylum housing business for close to 20 years and had a pretty grim track record, even before it took over the new camps. Here are just a few stories about Clearsprings’ asylum housing from the last five years that have made the news:

• 2020: BBC reports on “sudden and unexplained death” of a 3 year old child in Clearsprings accommodation in Wales.

• 2019: The Guardian exposes how hundreds of refugees are crammed into a number of hostels in Southall, London, which are “overrun with cockroaches, rats and mice”. Clearsprings manages the hostels through a subcontractor called “Mylondonlets.co.uk”.

Cockroaches and overcrowding in a flat for asylum seekers provided by Home Office contractors. The room on the left is shared by three people. Image from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/20/asylum-seekers-crammed-into-cockroach-infested-accommodation-home-office#img-1

• 2017: Local media report complaints of more than 200 refugees crammed into “house of horrors” St Lawrence Mansions in Kilburn, London. People are made to sleep in rows of single beds in bug-infested building with one small shared kitchen.

• 2016: The Welsh Refugee Coalition highlights substandard conditions in Lynx House, Clearsprings’ Initial Accommodation hostel in Cardiff. Issues include “broken fire alarms, leaking plumbing, damp, and broken electrical sockets.”

• 2016: scandal in Wales as people staying in Initial Asylum accommodation in Cardiff are made to wear “coloured armbands” identifying them as asylum seekers. The policy was dropped after complaints including from the Welsh government’s first minister and Jewish organisations.

Asylum seekers having to wear red wrist bands in order to be served food at Lynx House, Newport Road, Cardiff. From: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/chairman-company-runs-controversial-asylum-10864420

Following the money

None of these issues have stopped Clearsprings making good money from asylum housing. Accounts filed at Companies House show that Clearsprings Ready Homes Ltd – the full legal name of the company running the asylum contracts – was paid £68.7 million for its services in the year ending 31 January 2020.

Clearsprings makes its money as a housing outsourcer to central and local government. Its website lists UK Visas and Immigration, the Ministry of justice, Sunderland City Council, Plymouth City Council, Bristol City Council, Bradford City Council, Croydon Council, and the West London Housing Partnership as past customers.

But at the moment it seems to be effectively just an asylum profiteer. The current accounts state that its turnover comes mainly from the “provision of housing, support and transport to asylum seekers”. And they only mention two contracts: the Home Office asylum housing deal, which is set to run until 2029; and a local contract with Kent County Council, due to last until 2023.

While Clearsprings enjoys continuing Home Office’s support, it has found itself on HMRC’s naughty step. Clearsprings accounts from 2016 show the company had to pay £214,000 for a “settlement with HMRC regarding the group’s tax enquiries”.

Clearsprings made a profit of £796,000 from this business last year (2019). In total over the last five years Clearsprings Ready Homes has been paid £242 million and has turned this into a profit of £5.8 million.

What happens to this profit? The accounts show that the large majority of it – £4 million – has been paid out as dividends to a parent company called Clearsprings (Management) Ltd. This is directly owned by one man – Graham King.

Clearsprings Ready Homes Ltd revenue, profits and dividends 2016-20 (source: Companies House)

Clearsprings and the Kings

So who is behind Clearsprings? Records filed at Companies House show the parent company Clearsprings (Management) Ltd is owned and controlled by Graham King. An Essex-based businessman, he has a range of interests in the county – though none are as big as the asylum housing operation that has made him a fortune. Almost 95% of the parent company’s turnover comes from the asylum housing business. A small fraction comes from a computer security company called Softwerx Ltd.

Until last month, Graham King ran Clearsprings with his brother, Jeff King, who had a 40% stake in the business. Companies House records show Jeff stopped being a “controlling party” of Clearsprings (Management) Ltd on 2 November 2020, leaving Graham alone at the top.

Thanks to their asylum housing work, the Kings have been able to reward themselves handsomely. Clearsprings (Management) Ltd’s accounts say the “highest paid director” – presumably Graham King – has been paid £3.6 million in salary and other employment benefits over the last five years. On top of this, he shared a £1.4 million dividend payout with his brother in 2016.

So, assuming Graham King is indeed the highest paid director at the company he owns, he has made at least £4.3 million from Clearsprings just over the last five years.

Clearsprings (Management) Ltd Directors’ remuneration 2016-20 (source: Companies House)

And as well as the money he earns direct from Clearsprings, King may also profit from other companies he owns that contract their services to Clearsprings. The Clearsprings (Management) Ltd accounts say that in 2019 it paid £902,000 to Bespoke Strategy Solutions Ltd for “consultancy services”. It also paid out £848,000 to the same company in 2018. Bespoke Strategy Solutions is also owned by Graham King. We have not been able to discover how much Bespoke paid to King in dividends or salary.

Together with his brother Jeff, Graham King also owns the Thorney Bay Village caravan park and a taxi firm called Steve’s Radio Cars in Canvey Island, Essex (which also gets some money from Clearsprings). The island also hosts Sandy Bay, a “luxury residential resort” for the over-50s, owned by Holly King – another family member.

Thorney Bay Village made local headlines in 2015 after it emerged the Kings’ company had received £3.8 million in housing benefit from the local council in the previous years for putting up homeless people in their caravans. According to the Basildon Echo, residents in the park said the caravans were freezing in winter, while a local councillor accused the park owners of “profiting from others’ misfortune”.

Thorney Bay caravans. Image from: https://www.braintreeandwithamtimes.co.uk/news/south_essex_news/17922590.caravans-destroyed-damaged-fire-breaks-thorney-bay-park/

Graham King has been making serious money for a long time now. In 2008 the Daily Mail reported he was paid £637,000 in part thanks to Clearsprings’ work on a Ministry of Justice scheme to offer new bail accommodation and support services to ex-prisoners.

The Subcontractor: Nationwide Accommodation Services

What does King’s company actually do for its money? Like the bigger asylum housing contractors such as Serco, it is largely just a middleman.

At the Napier barracks, in fact, day-to-day running of the camp is handled by a sub-contractor called Nationwide Accommodation Services (NACCS). How do NACCS qualify for the sensitive job of managing the care of hundreds of refugees, who have just risked their lives on a perilous journey? This is not so clear.

From NACCS twitter: https://twitter.com/nationwideaccs?lang=hu

NACCS is a property management firm based in east London, specialising in sourcing temporary accommodation. Its website says it aims to “‘plug the gap’ in the property market between the varying housing needs of local authorities, and landlords who seek hassle free rental solutions.” Clients named include Tower Hamlets, Newham, Southwark and Harrow councils, plus the Home Office.

Companies House records show NACCS is owned by two thirty-somethings: Waseem Tailor and Mohsin Kothia. Law Society records show Kothia is a solicitor at Blakewells solicitors in East London. He is also listed as a director of 12 companies on Companies House, including most of which appear to be real estate ventures.

Image shows a broken shower with pipes held up with tape

The Home Office and asylum slum landlords: a rotten system

Clearsprings, and its boss Graham King, have done well as asylum housing profiteers. But this isn’t just the story of a few greedy individuals. Clearsprings is only one medium-sized player in a rotten asylum system which, at every level, puts outsourcers’ profits before the conditions of the people in its “care”. We end with a quick recap of how this system works – and how the Home Office has responded to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The UK’s approach to refugee housing has been basically the same since 1999, when the Labour government introduced its “dispersal” policy, scattering people claiming asylum into poorer regions around the UK. Like much of the UK Border Regime, asylum housing is outsourced to private companies under long-term contracts. (See The UK Border Regime chapter 5 for much more on this.)

The latest round of “Asylum Accommodation and Support Contracts” (AASC) started in September 2019, and are set to last ten years. They are divided into seven regions. Three companies won deals: Serco has two contracts, Mears Group has three, and Clearsprings the other two – South of England, and Wales. Serco and Clearsprings both also had earlier contracts from 2012-19; Mears is the new player, picking up deals lost by G4S following its latest scandal in Brook House detention centre.

(See here for a detailed guide to what the AASC contractors are supposed to provide, compiled by Asylum Matters.)

The system also involves a further contract for “Advice, Issue Reporting and Eligibility (AIRE)” services – acting as a main point of advice for refugees on their asylum claims, as well as liaising with their landlords. This £100 million deal is run by the charity Migrant Help.

In the AASC contracts, the three contractors basically act as middlemen between the Home Office and local slumlords. They own few, if any, of the properties themselves, but rent them from a second tier of private landlords. Some of these are fairly large specialist property companies – e.g., the notorious Jomast, mini-empire of Teesside multi-millionaire Stuart Monk; or Citrus Group, owners of the horrific Urban House asylum housing in Sheffield. Others could be small-scale local landlords with a handful of houses.

Asylum housing involves two stages. Refugees who have just claimed asylum, and do not have means to house themselves, are first placed in “Initial Accommodation”. This is not meant to last more than three weeks. People should then be moved to longer-term “Dispersal Accommodation” until their case is concluded. The same three contractors are in charge of both stages. Until recently, most Initial Accommodation was (at least in theory) provided in seven large accommodation centres (Urban House is one of these), supplemented by the use of hostels and hotels.

In the last year, since the new AASC contracts started last September, the system seems to have further broken down. While details are still emerging, it appears that at least some of the contractors have had major problems renegotiating their deals with local landlords, leading to a sudden shortage in housing provision in at least some areas. The contractors’ response was to turn even more to hostels and hotels – in July all three companies told a parliamentary committee that they are now using hotels for the bulk of Initial Accommodation.

Then, a few months later came the COVID-19 crisis, which pushed the government to boost Initial Accommodation for new arrivals who might otherwise been left on the streets. (This is referred to in the Home Office jargon as “Contingency Accommodation”.)

Though, as in so many other areas, what’s justified in the name of COVID-19 often makes little sense. The Home Office has argued that its contractors needed to turn to hotels in order to meet an increased demand. But in Scotland, Mears suddenly moved 300 people who had been housed in separate flats as “Initial Accommodation” and crowded them into hotels too – a bizarre decision that may have helped cause the death of Adnan Olbeh, and has been strongly criticised by the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee.

Talking about hotels, we should be clear that no five star treatment is involved. We are talking about people being dumped in the cheapest available accommodation, fed undercooked chicken and moldy bread. And we are talking about money for the likes of “Britain’s worst hotel chain” (Which? Magazine, seven years running) Britannia Hotels. This seemed convenient, at a moment when business was otherwise shut down by COVID-19 – although we don’t have information on what kind of negotiations went on between government, contractors, and hotel chains at this point.

From NACCS twitter: https://twitter.com/nationwideaccs?lang=hu

It is against this background of contract cock-ups, empty hotels, and bizarre unexplained decisions by the asylum landlords, that the military bases policy appeared. As right-wing media and campaigners such as Britain First railed against putting people up in supposedly luxurious hotel accommodation, MoD barracks provided a crowd-pleasing solution.

Meanwhile, as the Home Office stumbles from one half-baked measure to the next, outsourcers such as Clearsprings keep banking their management fees.

The post Clearsprings: Migrant Camp Profiteers appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Their initial application was rejected by Leeds City Council in October last year, after residents in the former mining community highlighted the damage Pemberstone’s development would do to their lives. But the company has appealed to the government to override the council’s decision. The appeal is set to be heard next month, on 6 October.

Worcester-based Pemberstone is owned by Andrew Barker, a millionaire businessman. Working closely with his lieutenants Mark Reynolds and David Annetts, Barker looks to profit from a wide range of business interests: black and white photography, indoor ski slopes, “ethical consultancy”, as well as multiple property ventures.

Corporate Watch has looked into Pemberstone and found:

• Even without their proposed development, Pemberstone has already made £2 million in profit from the rent paid by residents of the Sugar Hill estate.
• A key client of Pemberstone’s property management business over the last five years has been the Coalfields Regeneration Trust, a charity which ironically exists to support residents of former coalfields communities – just like those in Oulton.
• Swedish bank Handelsbanken is a key funder of Pemberstone.
• Other businesses owned by Pemberstone include black and white camera film manufacturer Ilford Photo, and Manchester snow dome the Chill Factore.
• Barker and Pemberstone also co-own Ethical Goods, a consultancy firm that works with charities and businesses including Crowdfunder, Comic Relief and Costcutter.

Click here to find out more about the Sugar Hill Estate residents’ campaign from their website, and click here to find out how you can help.

Click here to get in touch if there is a company you’d like us to look into.

Pemberstone and the Sugar Hill Estate

The Sugar Hill Estate is a former coal board housing estate containing 70 homes in Sugar Hill Close and Wordsworth Drive in Oulton, near Leeds. Average rents are around £500 a month.

Pemberstone, the company that owns the estate, wants to demolish the existing homes to make way for a new development. Under the plans, only 11 of the current households – those on so-called ‘protected tenancies’ – are guaranteed to be rehoused in the newly-built homes. Another 11 of the 70 new houses will be let out at rates that Leeds City Council deems to be affordable, though even these will be more expensive to rent than the current homes. The rest will be private.

Current residents have been campaigning against the scheme and resisting the break up of their community, fearing they will be priced out of the area.

We put the main points in this profile to Pemberstone. A spokesperson did not dispute them but said the estate is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and that the new development would create modern, comfortable and highly energy-efficient homes.

Hazell Field, who lives in the estate and is part of the campaign to save it, told Corporate Watch:

“This has been a long fight in this campaign. Unfortunately, we are a group of either low income or  pensioners and single parents. We have been fighting this on a limited budget and this is the scary part as we do not have the resources that Pemberstone do, so I am frightened we could lose this because of money.”

Following the money

Accounts filed at Companies House show that even without the planned development, Pemberstone have been making decent profits from residents since buying the estate in 1997.

In 2016, the last year figures are available for, Pemberstone made a profit before tax of just under £230,000 from the £400,000 in rent they charged to residents.

With revenue from rents rising each year, the estate has been a consistent source of cash for Pemberstone: in the ten years between 2007 and 2016 Pemberstone made a profit from the estate of £1.9 million.

Meanwhile the value of the estate has been going up. At the turn of the century, Pemberstone valued the land and properties at £1.2 million. By the end of 2018, they had increased their valuation to £3.8 million.

Pemberstone bought the estate in 1997 with a £1 million loan from the Nationwide Building Society, which was paid off in 2016.

The same year Pemberstone took out a new, bigger, loan from Handelsbanken, a Swedish bank with branches in the UK. Worth £1.7 million, this loan is due to be paid off next year.

The accounts do not say exactly what the Handelsbanken loan is being used for but around half of it seems to have been used to pay back the Nationwide loan. The rest appears to have been lent to another – unnamed – group company, presumably to fund whatever business it is engaged in.

In other words, the homes in Wordsworth Drive and Sugar Hill Close are being used as collateral to finance other parts of the Pemberstone business.

Picture from SaveOurHomesLS26 Facebook Page

Pemberstone: Andrew Barker’s (mini) empire

Image of Andrew Barker from Pemberstone.com

The exact name of the company that owns the homes in Wordsworth Drive and Sugar Hill Close is Pemberstone (Oulton Properties) Ltd. This is just one of over 100 companies majority-owned and controlled by founder Andrew Barker, most of them based in the Whittington Hall business park in Worcester.

Pemberstone has a diverse array of interests: property but also ski slopes, camera film, travel agents and retrofitting windows (click here to see a list on the Pemberstone website).

Barker continues to oversee all of these as chairman of the group, overseeing its operations and “strategic direction”. He seems to keep a low public profile, having deactivated his Twitter account following the controversy around the Oulton Housing scandal. He has appointed relatives as directors of other Pemberstone group companies.

Day-to-day operations are managed by Barker’s key lieutenants, Mark Reynolds and David Annetts. Both have the title of Group Directors and also hold ownership stakes in Pemberstone businsesses. Family members of both also serve as directors of other Pemberstone group companies.

Other Pemberstone Businesses:

Blue Marble Asset Management

A “bespoke commercial property investment and asset management company”, Blue Marble is a Pemberstone business that receives fees from clients to manage properties and source new ones for them to buy. According to its website, these clients include “investment businesses, high net worth individuals, trusts and family offices”.

But one of their most important clients does not fit those descriptions and may come as a surprise, given Pemberstone’s unpopularity among Oulton’s former mining community.

The Coalfields Regeneration Trust is a charity “dedicated to supporting former mining towns and villages throughout the UK”. They organise employment and skills training programmes and other charitable and community activities within ex-mining areas.

Previously reliant on government funding, the Trust has been told it needs to become financially independent in England (it continues to receive funding from the Scottish and Welsh governments). As a result it has developed a business to “to generate funds from commercial and residential properties”.

In 2018 the Trust brought in Blue Marble to manage these properties and help them find new ones. This was a major win for Blue Marble and Pemberstone – and their owner, Andrew Barker. A press release said it increased the value of properties under Blue Marble’s management to £100 million and called it a “wonderful opportunity” to provide “a full asset management service”.

According to the Trust, “outsourcing the management aspects [of their properties] to Blue Marble” was “an important step as we focus on increasing the returns that allow the Coalfields Regeneration Trust to continue to create programmes that meet with the diverse and complex needs that are still prevalent within former mining towns and villages.”

Which makes you wonder if Blue Marble is the best choice, given its sister business is trying to demolish a coalfield community’s homes.

When we asked the Trust about their relationship with Blue Marble, they were less enthusiastic than they had been in 2018. A spokesperson distanced the Trust from the company, saying they did not currently “retain” Blue Marble to manage their property portfolio. They declined to comment further when we pressed them on whether this meant they would not work with Blue Marble again in the future.

Picture of Blue Marble office from bmassetmanagement.co.uk

Blue Marble Property Fund

Other Pemberstone/Blue Marble property ventures include the “Blue Marble Property Fund 1 LP”, a commercial property fund launched in 2018. Essentially, they want to raise £10million from wealthy clients to invest in six to eight commercial properties across England and Wales. Investors must front up at least £100,000 to invest in the fund, managed by Salford-based company, Infinity Fund Management, which is not part of the Pemberstone group.

Whittington Hall Business Park

Picture of Whittington Hall Business Park from bmassetmanagement.co.uk

Barker also makes money from letting out commercial space at his Whittington Hall Business Park, where almost all his companies are registered. Run through Pemberstone subsidiary Pemberstone Partnership LLP and managed by Blue Marble, the group has made good money from the venture, with revenue totalling £1.3 million in 2015, the latest year figures are available for.

Tenants listed include Hofmann Pruftechnik UK Ltd, an “automotive software and control systems company” and a subsidiary of the Japanese instrumentation business Horiba Group. Housing Partners, a social housing tech provider, is also registered at Whittington Hall.

Company accounts show Handelsbanken has also supported Pemberstone in this venture, through a £5.4 million loan, due to be paid back in May this year.

Ilford Photo

In 2015, Barker and Pemberstone bought Ilford Photo, a photographic materials company which is dedicated to producing black-and-white film, paper and chemicals.

Accounts available at Companies House suggest it is one of Pemberstone’s biggest money-making businesses, enjoying the modest resurgence in analogue photography’s popularity. Ilford made a profit of £2.5 million in 2019, from revenues of £21million. Its film is sold across the UK and shipped to the US. You can find them on their website, Twitter and Facebook .

The Chill Factore

Not content with property, Barker bought the longest indoor ski slope in the country in 2015, Manchester’s Chill Factore. Jointly owned with property regeneration corporation the U&I Group, the Chill Factore posted revenues of over £7million in 2018 and is one of Pemberstone’s biggest businesses.

Image from https://aboutmanchester.co.uk/54744-2/

Ethical Goods

Another of Barker’s ventures is Ethical Goods, jointly controlled with ex-stockbroker Ralph Cotto. According to their website, their aim is to “offer a range of services that enable your company or charity to be more ethical, share your story and increase your bottom line”.

They have an ongoing partnership developing bespoke charity fundraising platforms for the Crowdfunder website. Their website lists a range of other businesses and charities they have provided consultancy for, including Comic Relief, Salvation Army, BikeUK, Getty Images and CostCutter (click here and here for full lists).

Click here to see the full range of the Pemberstone group on their website, including travel agencies, locks and labels.

To see how you can support the campaign to save the Sugar Hill estate, go to their website – https://saveourhomesls26.org/ – or Facebook page.

The post Pemberstone Group: we profile the company trying to demolish 70 homes in a Leeds estate appeared first on Corporate Watch.

In the last year, refugee and housing campaigners have been keeping a close eye on Mears, with local resistance to its slum landlord practices emerging across the UK. This report just gives a quick update on some recent news on the company.

Unless you live in one of the properties it manages, you may well not have heard of Mears. But it has quietly built up a small empire across the UK, primarily by taking over privatised housing services from local councils. Along the way it’s already clocked up a list of scandals from Glasgow down to Brighton, involving accusations of local government corruption and numerous alleged overcharging scams.

The death of Adnan Olbeh

Adnan Olbeh was found dead on 5 May 2020 in a Glasgow hotel where he had been placed by Mears Group under its management of the UK’s “asylum dispersal” scheme. He was 30 years old, from Syria. The cause of death is unclear, with any postmortem examination delayed by the corona crisis.

What is known is that Adnan was one of hundreds of refugees recently evicted from their flats by Mears and other asylum landlords.

The mass evictions were part of the Home Office’s coronavirus strategy. Often with just an hour’s notice, people were told to pack and leave their flats and moved into hotels. The logic behind this is not entirely clear, but it seems in line with other aspects of the government’s shambolic covid-19 response. “Social distancing” measures included people being transported four or five to a small van, stripped of cash support and facilities to cook for themselves, and instead being made to eat close together in hotel canteens — with food including the likes of undercooked chicken and mouldy bread.

According to Smina Akhtar, interviewed by John Grayson for the Institute for Race Relations:

“We have had lots of reports from people in the hotels about really awful food and poor conditions there. Adnan’s friend told me that his mental health really deteriorated in the hotel. A week before he died his friend asked the hotel to call an emergency ambulance because Adnan was in a terrible state. His friend went with him to the hospital but said that the staff there did nothing, they offered him no medication, and sent him back to his hotel.”

According to Mears, in evidence to the House of Commons Home Affairs select committee, it was acting on a directive from the Home Office.

Mears’ Home Office contracts so far

Adnan Olbeh’s death is one visible tragedy linked to the misery of the UK asylum system. Thousands more people live with the everyday effects of a housing system which “disperses” people into run-down slum housing in the country’s most impoverished communities.

For Mears, this means a ten year profit stream. For Mears’ new tenants – rat infestations, broken boilers, collapsed ceilings, piles of rubbish, and environmental hazards of all kinds seem the norm.

John Grayson of South Yorkshire Asylum Action Group (Symaag) has been documenting the “chaotic” and “failed” Mears contract in Yorkshire. In the past he reported on similar conditions under the last contract holder, G4S.

So have Mears even managed to underperform the shambles of G4S’ housing management? It’s maybe too early to make a full comparison. But it doesn’t look like things have got off to a good start.

G4S and others had complained bitterly about making losses on the former round of asylum housing contracts. To drive profits up, Mears started their own tenure by trying to slash the amounts they pay to the smaller landlords they rent from. In South Yorkshire, Mears offered landlords new contracts paying up to 20% less than G4S had done. Many refused to sign up in what John Grayson calls a “virtual landlords strike” which left Mears struggling to place the asylum seekers it was contracted to house.

In the North East, Mears had similar problems negotiating with G4S’ main sub-contractor Jomast – development company headed by Teesside multi-millionaire Stuart Monk. According to Grayson, this left over 1000 people stuck in hotels across West Yorkshire and Humberside in Wakefield’s “Urban House” temporary asylum accommodation over the winter. And, as he explained to us, the problem is by no means solved.

“When Covid-19 arrived the whole asylum housing system was frozen in the Mears contract areas with around 400 people still in hotels and 270 in Urban House. Many people have now spent four months in Urban House, when they are only meant to stay there a few weeks. Urban House has appalling conditions which have been extensively documented in pictures and videos sent out from people resisting inside.”

One thing Mears has achieved in Yorkshire is provoking a major local authority to come out against the contract. In January, as well as launching inspections of 240 Mears properties, Sheffield Council called on the Home Office to terminate the Mears contract and transfer asylum housing in the city directly to the council. This is only really a token gesture – the council has no say in national asylum policy. But it could be one move in a shift against the outsourced asylum housing system, if followed up elsewhere in the country.

In Scotland, there is a strong solidarity network in support of refugee housing rights – including the Glasgow No Evictions campaign and groups such as the Unity Centre, Living Rent tenants union, and charity Positive Action in Housing. The main rallying point in 2019 was previous contractor Serco’s threatened “lock change evictions” of 300 of its tenants. Well aware of the opposition, Mears has so far tried to tread more carefully. It has promised not to carry out similar evictions, and set up a so-called “independent scrutiny board” to deflect criticism.

In the North of Ireland, the PPR Project is one association monitoring and exposing conditions in Mears’ housing there.

Milton Keynes mystery

Before it turned asylum landlord, Mears’ big profit hope was getting more involved in the very lucrative business of housing development. One of its potential jackpots was a 50/50 joint venture with Milton Keynes council to redevelop seven major estates. The deal was valued at £1 billion, and branded as “YourMK”.

But as of last year, the scheme was dead in the water. In July 2018, the council said it was putting the regeneration deal “on hold”. In October 2018, whistleblower allegations emerged that Mears had been overcharging Milton Keynes for repairs by up to £80,000 a month, with overall some £15 million “unaccounted for”. When we looked at Mears last February, the YourMK website had gone dead, with a page announcing that further information would be coming soon.

The MK scandal still seems to be quietly brewing. In July 2019, the MK Citizen reported first of all that the regeneration scheme was definitively “scrapped”. But a couple of weeks later a second Citizen report corrected that YourMK was “not dead but dormant”, with the council and Mears “in discussions about whether it will remain the right partnership structure in future”.

In May 2020, we haven’t seen any new announcements. The YourMK website is still down, and there is no official word on that supposedly missing 15 million. Where are the budding investigative journalists of Milton Keynes to get to the bottom of this?

Booted out of Brighton

Mears’ ten year housing maintenance contract with Brighton and Hove council finally came to an end on 31 May. Again, customer complaints came together with whistleblower revelations – and, yet again, the apparent disappearance of large sums of money.

A council investigation found it had been overcharged by £500,000 by a plastering subcontractor hired by Mears. A second investigation was later opened into overcharging for electrical work.

Mears will not be missed in Brighton. And just before they left, in February 2020 their workers were balloting for strike action over pay and Mears’ plan to combine holiday and sick pay.

Newham: Mears Cats

In East London, Mears run 250 homes which are set for demolition as part of Newham Council’s “Regeneration Zone” in Canning Town and Custom House, E16.

Like Milton Keynes, this is another overlong saga of a failing regeneration project leaving people stuck in poor housing. Back in 2011, Newham handed the properties to a private management company called Omega to let out on short term commercial tenancies. This was supposed to be a “temporary” arrangement before the bulldozers came in. Mears bought out the contract in 2014, and six years later are still in place. While the buildings are still owned by the council, Mears collect the rent and do the repairs – in theory.

In reality, Custom House tenants speak of conditions that would be very familiar to anyone in Mears’ asylum accommodation in Sheffield or Glasgow. Months overdue repairs, water leaks, exposed asbestos, rat infestations and a “war” to get anything done – all whilst paying average rents twice as high as in directly run Newham council properties.

Tenants have set up a vocal campaign group called Mears Cats, part of the Peoples Empowerment Alliance of Custom House, pushing to get their repairs done and for Newham Council to take direct responsibility. Boglarka Filler, one of the Mears Cats, told Corporate Watch:

“Schemes such as the partnership between Mears and Newham Council have brought further misery to people already on the receiving end of austerity and insecure employment. Mears Cats are campaigning for better quality, cheaper housing for Mears tenants struggling to cope with disrepair and debts caused by high rents. We will take action to ensure that the Mears contract will not be renewed in Newham when it runs out in 2021, and that we get a fair deal next time.”

Steady profits, feisty shareholders

On a business front, Mears continues to turn a decent profit and pay out to its shareholders. Its last year (2018) annual results clocked operating profits up 4.7% (though revenue was 3% down), and shareholders pocketed a dividend up 3% on the year before.

Mears has kept up its strategy of honing in on its “core” housing maintenance business. After buying up Mitie’s property division last year, it sold off its own home care wing.

Most recently, Mears has said that it only expects a modest impact from the covid crisis. Housing is what is called “non-discretionary” spending – unlike foreign holidays or consumer fads, there is still demand for essential repairs in a downturn. The bulk of Mears’ income is locked in from long term contracts, largely with the public sector. As the company explained, 90% of its order book comes from public bodies and “the government has made a clear commitment that invoices will be settled quickly”.

Through the lockdown, Mears has said it is only carrying out only emergency repairs. Although workers complain they are still being sent on unnecessary jobs without “social distancing” in place, or called in just to sit in company offices.

Less positive for management, there are new rumbles from rebellious shareholders. Back in 2018 one of the two biggest shareholders, a German investment manager called Shareholder Value Management (SVM) successfully pushed out the company’s long-term chairman. At the latest AGM in June 2019, the other big investor also threw its weight around.

PrimeStone Capital, a Mayfair based investor which owns over 13% of Mears’ shares, tried to get two new nominees on the board of directors against management’s wishes. The shareholder rebellion was narrowly defeated. In a statement, PrimeStone explained it was unhappy that “the company’s revenues and profit have remained flat despite its strong market position and growth prospects [while] average net debt has doubled”.

It argued that:

“Mears’ underperformance is predominantly due to a lack of strategic, commercial and financial experience on the board. The current board has a strong concentration of directors with a background in social housing, health & safety and charities.”

Mears’ profit-hungry management guarantee shareholder payoffs by squeezing their repair costs to the bone. The outcome is the lived experience of their tenants across the UK. But, for some shareholders, they’re still not doing enough.

Students and shirts

Despite its well documented failings, Mears continues to win new contracts – for example, a new housing development project in North Lanarkshire, and a housing maintenance and repairs contract with Crawley council.

Another sideline is its student housing offshoot Mears Student Life, so far with just two complexes in Dundee and Salford.

Mears also likes a bit of football. In May 2019 the League One side Rotherham United confirmed it had extended its contract to emblazon the company’s classy red and black logo on its away kits for the 2019/20 season.

The post Mears Group 2020 update: scandal-ridden landlord under fire from Glasgow to Gloucester appeared first on Corporate Watch.

In December 2017 the High Court ruled the Home Office’s policy of detaining and deporting EU rough sleepers unlawful. The Gureckis judgment, named after a rough sleeper affected by the policy, was the result of more than a year of research, litigation and campaigning by the Public Interest Law Centre (PILC) and activists from North East London Migrant Action (NELMA).

Earlier that year, a Corporate Watch report had exposed how local councils and homelessness charities were collaborating with the Home Office to arrest, detain and deport European nationals found sleeping rough in London. [1]

As it becomes clear that the border regime has made it impossible for the government to ’bring in’ all rough sleepers during the corona crisis, evidence published here for the first time suggests that the government, still working with its charity and council ‘partners’, is developing new and subtler strategies to remove homeless migrants from the UK.

This report, based on leaked documents and Freedom of Information disclosures, reveals that local authorities and charities are continuing to collaborate with the Home Office to enforce immigration controls.

The Fallout

Since 2017 many of the actors involved in rounding up rough sleepers have distanced themselves, in public at least, from policies that involve locking up or deporting homeless people. Openly attacking ‘vulnerable’ migrants has become less palatable after the Windrush scandal and the success of activists in highlighting the effects of the ‘hostile environment’.

But the bureaucratic and commercial drive to make rough sleepers disappear has not abated. Rather, a period of retrenchment has given way to renewed enforcement efforts.

St. Mungo’s

St. Mungo’s reputation—and fundraising—took a hit after their involvement in deportations was revealed. In November 2019, after previously denying its true role in immigration raids, the charity published the findings of an internal review into its collaboration with Immigration Compliance and Enforcement (ICE) teams between 2010 and 2017.

Buried in the review are a number of grudging admissions: that the charity shared information without consent; that rough sleepers were detained and deported as a result; and that St. Mungo’s misled campaigners about information sharing with the Home Office.

The review reveals that until 2016 working with ICE teams ‘was considered to be good practice in the sector [if] other efforts to engage the individual to find routes off the streets had failed and/or there was a risk of significant harm’. Charity managers saw collaboration with the Home Office as part of an ‘assertive outreach’ approach.

The spurious logic behind this strategy was that being threatened with deportation would ‘encourage’ homeless people to leave the streets.

The St. Mungo’s review shows how, in July 2016, charity managers decided to switch from direct to ‘arms-length’ information sharing: ‘information [to] be provided to the Home Office by local authorities (not St Mungo’s & thus self-safeguarding). The local authority [to] provide the lead in information-sharing.’

The review admits that the change in policy was not communicated to frontline staff, and that at least one outreach team continued to share information directly with the Home Office until 2017.

St Mungo’s collaboration with the Home Office has aggravated the existing grievances of frontline staff, who voted for strike action in January 2020. The striking workers have demanded concrete reassurances that homeless people’s personal data will never again be shared for the purposes of immigration control.

A leaked email recently revealed that St. Mungo’s has been working with the reputation management firm BLJ London in an attempt to recover the charity’s image and weaken union opposition.

Thames Reach

Thames Reach was the most zealous charity participant in rough-sleeper removals. In one bid for an outreach contract, it marketed itself as having an ‘enforcement approach that cannot be replicated by other organisations’. The same document boasts ‘our links with the Metropolitan Police […] and UKBA [Immigration Enforcement] are excellent, having enabled successful hotspot operations and joint patrols’.[2]

Yet Thames Reach escaped much of the negative publicity around the Gureckis judgment, partly because their then chief executive, Jeremy Swain, adopted a different PR strategy, asserting the alleged necessity of charity collaboration with ICE rather than seeking to deny it. Thames Reach went so far as to invite a BBC journalist along to an ICE raid that led to at least one rough sleeper being ‘sectioned’ under the Mental Health Act.

In 2020 St. Mungo’s and Thames Reach continue to dominate the commissioning landscape for rough sleeping. The bosses who facilitated the Home Office’s unlawful policy have either been promoted or remain in place. Jeremy Swain, CEO of Thames Reach, left to become a government adviser on rough sleeping. Petra Salva, Director of Rough Sleeping, Migrants and Criminal Justice Services at St Mungo’s was given an OBE in 2019.

Petra Salva OBE

The Greater London Authority

The Greater London Authority (GLA), which was instrumental in bringing together ‘stakeholders’ to design rough sleeper removals policies between 2010 and 2017 [3], has cleaned up its act somewhat since the Gureckis judgment.

It has expanded its ‘Social Integration’ team and cultivated links with migrants’ rights organisations. But, as we show below, the GLA’s Housing and Land team has continued to work with central government to develop policies targeting homeless migrants.

Local authorities

Local authorities have been instrumental in sculpting an enforcement-based approach to rough sleeping, with Westminster council providing ideological leadership.

Westminster hosted Operation Adoze, the 2015 pilot project for rough sleeper deportations. The council then ‘intensely lobbied’ for the policy to be rolled out nationwide to send a ‘firm message that rough sleeping is not acceptable to those foreign nationals who […] choose to sleep rough’. [4]

The response of councils to the Gureckis judgment was one of consternation. In 2016 a number of local authorities had successfully bid for money from the government’s Controlling Migration Fund. The fund was designed to ‘mitigate’ the effects of migration on ‘resident populations’. More than £80 million has been paid out to councils through the fund, and many early bids were for money to fund enforcement against migrant rough sleepers.

A Newham council monitoring report from early 2018 shows council managers scrambling to change their approach ‘from enforcement to support’ in light of the High Court ruling.

The monitoring report for another bid, submitted jointly by Islington, Enfield, Haringey and Barnet councils, illustrates the frustration of council officers that outreach teams could no longer work with immigration enforcement. The monitoring questionnaire asks:

‘How is the LA working with ICE on enforcement activity? Have there been any issues with ICE / police being unable to commit resources to the CMF activity, which has affected delivery? Have you been able to undertake the number of raids / inspections? Any case studies you can share?’

The reply, written by an unnamed council officer, states:

‘ICE no longer engaging in any meaningful way. No incentive for elective rough sleepers to find alternative accommodation. There is a possibility that the LA will unable [sic] to meet some of the initial targets set in light of lack of engagement from ICE’ [5]

Housing Ministry

The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government has been an overlooked but influential actor in policies targeting homeless people for deportation—not least in terms of framing.

The ‘impact summary’ PR kit issued by the ministry to councils in receipt of funding from the Controlling Migration Fund reveals the department’s commitment to playing up the ‘negative effects’ of migration.

‘Trafficking, children going missing, child sexual exploitation’ and ‘radicalisation’ are cited among examples of the ‘consequences of recent migration’ on ‘settled communit[ies]’. [6]

Collaboration Resurrected

The 2017 High Court judgment, combined with a backlash against ‘hostile environment’ policies after Windrush, forced the government and its allies to change strategy on migrant rough sleepers.

In this section we show how, in 2020, the same ‘stakeholders’ are relying on subtler approaches. These include the circumvention of consent-based information sharing and attempts to push removals under the guise of ‘support’.

‘A specific task in the public interest’: the Rough Sleeping Support Service

In August 2018, the government announced a new Rough Sleeping Support Service (RSSS) as part of its Rough Sleeping Strategy. The service sits within the Home Office’s Immigration Enforcement division and was initially overseen by the senior immigration officer who directed enforcement operations against rough sleepers until December 2017.

In public, the Home Office has been careful to frame the RSSS in terms of ‘support’ for migrant rough sleepers:

‘The team will help individuals to regularize their status where they establish a right to remain in the UK, and support them to return home as quickly as possible where this is appropriate.’ [7]

Internally, the scheme is described differently. In an email to officials at Westminster Council, obtained through an FOI request, the Home Office bureaucrat responsible for the scheme described it as a:

‘pipeline for local authorities to establish the immigration status of an individual rough-sleeper and consider whether there is an intervention which could be used to at least make some form of progress towards that individual being removed from the rough-sleeping scenario.’ [8]

In an early hint that the RSSS might have more to do with targeting ‘removable’ migrants than supporting homeless people, the official notes that:

‘practically, the service will have limited value in relation to EEA nationals [i.e. because they are more difficult to deport], excepting those who involved [sic] in criminality.’

Local authorities initially clamoured for involvement in the RSSS. The Home Office was forced to ask Westminster Council to stop telling other councils about the scheme for fear that meetings would be ‘oversubscribed’.

At a ‘roundtable’ meeting in early 2019, the Home Office told its ‘partners’ that rough sleepers would need to give their ‘informed consent’ prior to being referred to the service.

However, at a later meeting it was announced that a system based on consent had been deemed ‘unviable’, partly because of ‘the ability of rough sleepers to be able to withdraw their consent easily’. Instead, the service

‘would involve local authorities and their commissioned service providers, carrying out a specific task in the public interest which is laid down by the law. The task in question would be delivering immigration controls (and carrying out safeguarding responsibilities).’ [9]

The minutes of the April 2019 meeting, where this was proposed, clearly show attendees, including the GLA and St. Mungo’s, agreeing to the proposal: ‘Action: The group agreed the public task proposal would be developed.’ ‘Public task’ or ‘a specific task in the public interest’ refers to a legal basis for information processing under GDPR—in this case, ‘delivering immigration controls’.

Much remains unclear about the operation of the Rough Sleeping Support Service. Despite Freedom of Information requests, the government has refused to confirm data sharing arrangements for the scheme or to say how many rough sleepers have been referred. Among local authorities, only Kensington and Chelsea have admitted referring to the scheme.

‘Friendly officers from the Home Office’: infiltrating charities and faith groups

The Rough Sleeping Support Service, then, looks on close examination less like a ‘service’ for rough sleepers and more like a mechanism to circumvent consent-based data sharing. But the scheme is only one way in which the government is targeting homeless migrants.

For several years the Home Office has also been placing immigration enforcement officers in grassroots charities and places of worship, including temples and gurdwaras.

Religious sites and community centres have traditionally been places of refuge for undocumented migrants. Many are forced to sleep rough because it is illegal for them to work or claim benefits.

One community organisation, the Chinese Information and Advice Centre in Soho, advertises sessions run by ‘friendly officers from the Home Office’, noting that the ‘Home Office assures [sic] there will be no immigration enforcement during the surgery’.

It has also emerged that two Sikh community organisations — the Sikh Council and Sikh Youth and Community Service — have received hefty grants from the Home Office for helping to arrange over 400 ‘voluntary’ departures to India.

The Sikh Council has defended its involvement, saying ‘[there is no] conflict [of interests] in charities accessing government funds to alleviate poverty and suffering of the homeless’. But there is no evidence that any of the people who departed ‘voluntarily’ through these schemes received independent immigration advice about regularising their status in the UK.

The future

With the appointment in March 2020 of a new minister for rough sleeping who believes that ‘the number of rough sleepers has much to do with the very high levels of eastern European immigration over the last few years’, it looks likely that UK homelessness and border policy will continue to develop hand in hand for the foreseeable future.

Thousands of homeless EU citizens are likely to become undocumented after the end of the Brexit transition period. The protections from deportation and removal referenced in the Gureckis judgment will no longer apply to them. The ‘deportability’ of all EU citizens living in the UK will increase markedly from 2021, while the measures taken to clear the streets on ‘public health’ grounds as a result of COVID-19 risk turning rough sleepers into sitting ducks for enforcement once the pandemic is over.

Analysis: Understanding and resisting the deportation of homeless people

A close look at schemes targeting migrant rough sleepers shows how welfare, penal and border policies intertwine with each another in capitalist states. It also reveals the assimilation of charities into neoliberal governance structures, with the logic of ‘technocratic partnership’ undermining resistance to state oppression.

The disciplining of people seen as failing to engage in ‘productive’ work is as old as capitalism. But since the 1990s, social policy in the UK and elsewhere has been geared towards punishing, shaming or forcing into ‘workfare’ those whom the ‘fragmentation of labour’ under neoliberalism has left unable to secure steady waged work.

The same period has also seen a shift in the role of the voluntary sector. Where once charities filled specific gaps in an expanding welfare state, NGOs now compete to fill the gaping hole left by the welfare state in retreat.

Locked into a competitive process of tendering and contracting with government, charities’ autonomy and advocacy function is compromised by the imperative to meet specified ‘outputs’. The logic of commercial expediency has replaced the logic of care.

Legal challenge alone is not enough to resist these policies

Grassroots-led resistance has hindered efforts to deport homeless migrants. The Home Office’s rebranding of enforcement as ‘support’ betrays a recognition of the fact that ‘hostile environment’ policies no longer enjoy broad approval—if they ever did.

NELMA and PILC’s campaign against charity collaboration has influenced the homelessness sector. Where working with the Home Office was once seen as ‘best practice’, charities are now wary of the ‘reputational risk’ involved.

Activists concerned with holding the state to account must continue to pay close attention to the activities of NGOs. Charities should never be beyond scrutiny, especially now that many are forced to define the best interests of their ‘service users’ in terms amenable to their paymasters in government.

Campaigners need to monitor the relationship between charities, government and corporations. They must help homeless people, migrants and others to know which charities they can safely seek support from and which should be avoided. Alternative forms of solidarity must be elaborated.

But ultimately, opposing the deportation of homeless people means opposing the structures that underpin such policies. This means fighting the border regime writ large. Any system that assigns rights—and, implicitly, value—to human beings on the basis of what passport they hold must be resisted.

It also means taking action for housing. Now more than ever, in a time of pandemic, we must drive home the message that it is unacceptable for anyone to be homeless while homes stand empty.

Footnotes

1. In UK immigration law, ‘deportation’ refers to the enforced removal of a person ‘for the public good’, usually because they have committed a criminal offence. The enforced removal of a person solely on the basis that they have no leave to remain is referred to as ‘administrative removal’. Technically speaking, most rough sleepers forced to leave the UK under the ‘abuse of right’ policy were ‘administratively removed’ and not ‘deported’.

2. PDF 1: Agreement for the Provision of an Outreach Service to Rough Sleepers in the Borough of Tower Hamlets

3. Through the Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Group, later renamed the No Nights Sleeping Rough Taskforce. The group, now called the Life Off The Streets Taskforce, continues to direct homelessness policy in London.

4. City of Westminster Audit and Performance Committee Report, 30th June 2016, p. 26

5. PDF 2: NLP Monitoring Report_Redacted

6. PDF 3: 060218 Impact Summary Guide Final

7. PDF 4: Rough Sleeping Strategy Web, p.47

8. PDF 5: RSSS emails redacted

9. These three paragraphs are based on a FOI disclosure obtained by Liberty. The disclosure is not page numbered, but the documents referred to are: (a) ‘Rough Sleeping Support Service Guide and overview of issues for the Roundtable’, circulated by email on January 9th 2019; and (b) ‘Home Office Rough Sleeping Support Service Information sharing proposal’, circulated by email on 10th April 2019.

The post Rough-sleeper raids: how homeless charity deportations carry on rebranded appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Delancey is run by old-Etonian Jamie Ritblat, son of a powerful family of property tycoons who are also major funders of the Conservative Party and other right-wing causes. It has financial backing from billionaires including George Soros and the dictatorship of Qatar.

This is the story of UK property profiteering in a nutshell. The old British elites meet new global investors, united through a complex web of letterbox companies registered in offshore tax havens. While their deals are eagerly facilitated by politicians from all parties.

A few key points about the company:

• Olympic Village. Delancey is best known for its partnership with the Qatari royal family to buy East London’s former Olympic Village and turn it into private rental flats. The land was sold at a loss by the UK government. At the time of sale, Sir John Ritblat (Jamie’s father) was a member of the government’s Olympics “oversight” committee.
• Elephant One. In its earlier Elephant & Castle tower blocks development, Delancey managed to get out of all affordable housing commitments for a payment of just £1 million.
• Most Delancey schemes are partnerships with other investors, whose identities are often hidden behind offshore funds. But a few regular partners have come to light, including: billionaire speculator George Soros, the ruling family of the dictatorship of Qatar, Royal Bank of Scotland, and pension funds from Canada and the Netherlands.
• Delancey and Jamie Ritblat have funded the Conservative party to the tune of at least £345,000. The Ritblat family also support a range of right-wing “neo-conservative” think tanks.
• The Ritblats have a powerful network of connections in the UK’s political and cultural elites. They sponsor and sit on the boards of institutions including Kings College, the Tate Gallery, and the Royal Albert Hall.
• Recent Delancey’s schemes involve its joint venture company “Get Living”, a “build to rent” corporate landlord. Beyond London, Get Living is planning massive new rental apartment developments in Leeds, Glasgow and Manchester.

You can click the links below to jump to the following sections:

• Company structure: a network of offshore letterboxes
• Get Living: Delancey’s new “build to rent” corporate landlord
• Who profits?
• Who runs it? The Ritblat family and friends, and their cultural connections
• The Ritblats’ right-wing politicking
• A few notorious deals: Mapeley scandal, Olympic village, Elephant One
• Behind Delancey: meet the investors, from Soros and Qatar to Canadian pensioners

How Delancey works

Delancey was founded in the 1995 by Jamie Ritblat, an Eton-educated Conservative donor born to wealth and power. Jamie is the son of Sir John Ritblat, a well-known property tycoon worth an estimated £234m, who for decades ran Britain’s second biggest property company, British Land. Jamie learnt the ropes at his father’s company before striking out on his own with Delancey.

Delancey describes itself as a property investment “advisor”. That is, its developments don’t just use the company’s own capital, but bring in other investors from across the world.

In the last two decades, Delancey “has acquired, developed, managed and sold over £20bn of property” through its various funds and companies. It bulked up during the 2008 financial crisis – taking advantage of the dip in property prices to buy up ‘distressed’ assets from the Royal Bank of Scotland, and to take over another major London development company, Minerva.

The funds Delancey “advises” own buildings across London and the UK. Its investments reflect the big trends in UK property speculation: from corporate office developments in the 1990s and early 2000s, to today’s focus on “Build to Rent” housing. Delancey’s latest major venture is its Get Living rented apartment complexes (see below).

Delancey also has an educational sideline: a chain of elite private schools called Alpha Plus.

Alpha Plus promotional picture from Delancey’s website

Company structure: a network of offshore letterboxes ..

Delancey’s plush London headquarters are in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square. But the money is moved around a complex web of companies, many of them registered offshore in the British Virgin Islands tax haven.

In the early days, Delancey was a public company (PLC) listed on the stock exchange. But in 2001 Jamie Ritblat bought out the shares to turn it private – with the backing of his major investors George Soros, John Ritblat, and the Royal Bank of Scotland (which reportedly helped out with a £170 million loan).

As a private firm, the parent company for many years was Delancey Real Estate Partners (DREP), which is registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) tax haven. But in 2018, Delancey was restructured. DREP is now legally a subsidiary of another company called Cortx Holdings Limited (CHL), which until 8 May 2019 was called Cortx 1. Unlike DREP, Cortx is registered in the UK. Cortx has one controlling shareholder: Jamie Ritblat.

But Cortx’s latest accounts show assets of just £35 million, while the Delancey property empire is worth billions. How does this work?

Investment funds

First of all, Delancey sets up and manages investment funds into which different investors pool their money. These often have bland names – such as DV3, DV4, etc. As well as the initial investments, these funds can be ‘geared up’ by borrowing more money from banks and other lenders. Delancey then gets paid management fees for running these funds and “advising” them on property deals.

It’s not easy to find out who are the investors in Delancey’s funds. They are typically registered in offshore locations with minimal accounting transparency, allowing investors to remain anonymous.

Back in 2009 the Information Commissioner ruled on a “freedom of information” request from a campaigner asking for information on Delancey’s involvement in developments in Bury St Edmunds. After a battle, the local council finally released a letter from Ritblat naming some of the investors in the DV3 fund. As Private Eye has reported, these included Soros, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and various insurers and pension funds. Separately, it emerged that another investor was Conservative minister Andrew Mitchell.

It is not clear which funds remain active. The DV4 fund certainly is: it is described as an “open-ended” fund without a fixed lifespan, and continues to make new investments after more than a decade in operation. But there is no public information on who its current investors are.

Development companies

When Delancey has secured a site for development, it will often set up a specific company with its partners to manage this deal. These may be structured as “Limited Liability Partnerships” (LLPs) and, again, may involve offshore tax havens.

For example, for its Elephant and Castle shopping centre development Delancey has set up an offshore company called Elephant and Castle Properties Co Limited, based in the British Virgin Islands. This in turn is owned by Elephant and Castle LLP, a limited liability partnership registered in the UK. And this has a number of partners:

• DOOR S.L.P – a Jersey registered collaboration between Delancey’s DV4 fund and Oxford Properties, part of Canadian pension fund OMERS.
• Stichting Depository APG Strategic Real Estate Pool – a vehicle of the Dutch pension fund APG, registered in the Netherlands.
• Qatari Diar Real Estate Holding Company – a fund owned by the government of Qatar.
• QD UK Holdings Limited Partnership – a Scottish Limited Partnership vehicle also owned by Qatar Diar Real Estate Investment Company Q.S.C
• Kintyre Corp – a property investment vehicle registered in Panama, named in the leaked Panama Papers. (NB: it is not clear whether this vehicle is connected to the German developer Kintyre, which opened a London office in 2016.)

We look in more detail at some of these partners below.

Get Living site at former Olympic village, from Delancey’s website

Get Living

Delancey’s newest business focus is the booming “build to rent” property sector. Build-to-rent schemes are typically big developments with hundreds of flats in shiny tower blocks – but rather than selling them on to private buyers, the developer rents them out, becoming a corporate landlord. (See our recent profile of Grainger PLC for much more on this trend.)

Delancey first set up Get Living to rent flats in its East Village development on the former Stratford Olympics site (see below). It was then expanded to incorporate rental units at Elephant One (see below), and is now lined up for the Elephant and Castle shopping centre scheme too.

But these London developments are just the start of Get Living’s ambitions. The company says it has a current “development pipeline” of around 4,400 homes, and aims to build a portfolio of 12,500 properties. Outside London, it has acquired 800 homes in Middlewood Locks in Manchester, and lined up big sites at Globe Road in Leeds and in the centre of Glasgow.

The latter is a £200 million development with 727 flats for rent that will be “Scotland’s largest build to rent scheme to date” which will “completely overhaul a key area of Glasgow”. Work on the first phase of the development is expected to start in 2019, subject to building warrant.

The rent charged by Get Living does not come cheap. In Delancey’s Elephant One development, student rooms In Porchester House start at £279 per week for a ‘Classic’ room, or £349 for a ‘Supreme’. Private rented units are being advertised starting at £1,841 per month for a 1-bed flat.

Like other Delancey schemes, Get Living is a joint venture involving a number of regular investors. Again, the initial partners were Qatari Diar, and the Dutch pension fund APG. In 2018, Delancey also brought in another big investor – Oxford Properties, the property investment business of Canada’s Ontario pension fund (OMERS). They set up a new joint venture company called Delancey Oxford Residential (DOOR), owned jointly by Delancey’s DV4 fund and Oxford Properties, with stated plans to invest £600 million in UK residential property.

After Oxford Properties got involved, Delancey registered a new company called Get Living Limited. Its partners were:

• DOOR (Delancey DV4 and Oxford Properties): 39%
• APG: 39%
• Qatari Diar: 22%

And in another classic tax avoidance move, Get Living is now converting to become a “Real Estate Investment Trust” or REIT. This is a fully legal tax-dodging structure introduced into the UK in 2007, after concerted lobbying by the property industry. Unlike other companies, REITs are exempt from paying corporation tax.

The requirements for a company to register as a REIT are that they focus on property investment, distribute 90% of their profits to investors every year, and are listed on a recognised stock exchange. To meet this last requirement, in November 2018 Get Living re-registered as Get Living PLC, and was listed to sell shares on the Guernsey Stock Exchange.

Graffiti against Delancey development at Elephant & Castle

Who profits?

Because of the complex and secretive corporate structure outlined above, it is hard to trace how much profit Delancey’s developments make – or whose hands those profits end up in.

Cortx, Delancey’s new legal parent company, reported a turnover of £18.6m in 2018 – “advisory fees” from its funds and investment vehicles. However, the company’s accounts claim it made a loss of £4.6m, after paying out £22 million in “administrative expenses”.

These administrative expenses include: £1.2 million in interest and finance costs; £14.5 million in salaries to 55 staff; and £4.6 million in payments to its directors. Cortx has just two directors: Jamie Ritblat and Paul Goswell. So although we don’t know who was paid what, we know that between them they pocketed £4.6 million in 2018.ⁱ

As the company registered a loss in 2018, it didn’t pay out any dividend to its owner – also Jamie Ritblat. But with his share of the £4.6 million directors’ pay, that shouldn’t have bothered him much.

However, we shouldn’t get too fixated on Cortx’s figures. They don’t begin to capture the vast amounts of capital flowing in and out of Delancey’s multi-billion pound property deals, through a misty archipelago of funds and offshore vehicles.

For example, a business media article in August 2018 reported that Delancey’s DV4 fund had sold £1.2 billion worth of property in the previous 12 months. There is no way of knowing how much profit Delancey’s investors made on those sales.

Who runs it? The Ritblats, their entourage, and their cultural power

All Delancey’s network of companies trace back to one man: Jamie Ritblat. And Jamie got where he is today thanks to the support of his property tycoon father Sir John Ritblat, who continues to pull strings for his son’s business.

But the Ritblats, and the other directors around them, aren’t just businessmen. They are also heavyweight players in Britain’s elite cultural scene, sponsoring and sitting as directors on numerous national institutions. Of course this helps them keep up an impressive network of powerful connections which are great for business too.

The boss: Jamie Ritblat

Jamie Ritblat is Delancey’s founder and CEO. He has a London address at 24 St Petersburgh Place in Bayswater. He also built and owns a fake 18th Century stately home in Winchcombe in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds.

When he’s not busy donating to the Tories, stashing millions out of sight of the taxman, or getting plebs to serve him in his mansion, Jamie lends his name and elitist credentials to prestigious London art institutions and universities. In the past, he’s been a member of Kings College London’s College Council and member of the Southbank Centre’s Board of Governors. He also helps out other property financiers: he is non-executive chairperson of private equity real estate firm Mitheridge Capital Management.

But, according to his bio on the Mitheridge website, he has now stepped down from his voluntary roles except for one: he remains an “active Trustee” of the Bathurst Estate – an 8,000-acre estate in Gloucestershire where he helps out the Earl Bathurst and the rest of his ‘barmy’, hunting enthusiast family.

Sir John Ritblat (wikimedia commons)

Big Daddy: Sir John Ritblat

Ritblat senior has provided backing, advice and crucial connections through the years. After stepping down from British Land in 2007, he became chair of Delancey’s advisory board.

Now formally retired, Sir John and his wife Lady Jill have been directors or trustees of many top arts, education and sporting institutions. Their current and former positions include the boards of the Wallace Collection, Royal Academy of Music, the Design Museum, the Royal College of Art and the London Business School.

They are also big patrons of the arts themselves. John Ritblat has a room named after him at the British Library, “The Sir John Ritblat Gallery, Treasures of The British Library”. Jill has donated her personal dress collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and they once bought a Damien Hirst as a birthday present for Jamie.

Despite now being an octogenarian, Sir John is still involved with the following organisations:

• Although now retired as a governor, he remains a Special Advisor to Dulwich College, his old school.
• Chairman, Falcon Prep School for Boys and Falcon Girls School.
• Hon Fellow and Hon Trustee of the Royal Academy of Music.
• Vice President of International Students’ House – where Nigel Carrington, the Vice Chancellor of University of the Arts also sits on the board.
• Honorary Fellow and Patron of the Council of The Royal Institution.
• President of British Ski & Snowboard.
• Ritblat and Delancey sponsor the British Alpine National Ski Championships
• Vice President of the Tennis & Rackets Association.

Colin Barry Wagman: Delancey director and close Ritblat family associate

A specialist in business strategy and tax planning, Colin is likely responsible for many of Delancey’s best offshore avoidance schemes. He is a director of Delancey (DREP) and of its subsidiaries Alpha Plus and Minerva. Until March 2018 he was Delancey’s vice chair and chief finance officer. He is also chairman of the City of London Group, which includes a number of brands providing finance to property owners and SMEs. He is a trustee of the Sir John Ritblat Family Foundation, which funds neo-conservative and Zionist organisations (see below).

Outside of finance and politics, Colin is a Trustee of the Bryanston Square Garden Trust, where he lives at number 7; and also, alongside Sir John Ritblat, of the Gold Standard Charitable Trust which pays for the education of underprivileged kids.

Stafford Lancaster: investment director

Stafford often appears as a spokesperson for Delancey in the media, including on the Elephant and Castle project. He is invariably described as “investment director at Delancey”, where he has worked since 2000. According to one online bio, he has “particular responsibility for Delancey’s residential investment and educational portfolios”, and “his role is to oversee and implement the company’s existing, ongoing and future investment and development strategies, including the Elephant & Castle Town Centre redevelopment.”

He chairs the Reading Real Estate Foundation, a charity set up ‘to provide support for real estate and planning education’ at the University of Reading’ where he studied land management.

Paul Jonathon Goswell: Delancey managing director

The only other director listed alongside Jamie Ritblat of Delancey’s new parent company Cortx. He has a number of positions in London institutions. He is an independent member of the King’s College Council, and sits on the Development Board of the Royal Albert Hall.

Stuart Corbyn: chairman of Get Living

Until 2008 Corbyn was chief executive of the Cadogan estate, the property holdings of the Earl of Cadogan, one of London’s biggest landowners who basically owns Chelsea. Corbyn has also been president of the British Property Federation. He played a leading role in Delancey’s Olympic deal with the Qataris, chairing the initial joint venture company they set up.

With his aristocratic Chelsea connections alongside his Ritblat links, Corbyn is another paid up member of the London elite who has held directorships of institutions such as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Hospital Chelsea, Royal Parks Foundation, Chelsea Festival, and Somerset House Trust. He is a member of the council of the Royal Albert Hall, “sitting on the Fabric and Seat Rate Committees”.

Cartoon thanks to Southwark Notes

The Ritblats’ right wing politicking

The Ritblat family don’t just have the power to shape our built environment and our cultural life, they also dabble in political influencing. Delancey is a major funder of the Conservative party. Sir John Ritblat uses his “family foundation” and other charitable trusts to back think-tanks spreading neo-conservative, war-mongering ideas, and an arch capitalist pro-Brexit lobby group.

• Conservative Party. Delancey as a company makes regular donations to the Conservative party. Since 2011, the company has donated £335,000 – according to declarations in annual accounts.ⁱⁱ Jamie Ritblat also made a personal donation of £10,000 in 2015. Sir John Ritblat has not reported any cash donations to the party, but he was widely reported sitting with former prime minister David Cameron at a Tory party fundraiser.
• Henry Jackson Society. This right-wing think tank is described in a study by Spinwatch as a leading exponent of neoconservatism in the UK today: “grounded in a transatlantic tradition deeply influenced by Islamophobia and an open embrace of the ‘War on Terror’.” It is one of the main regular beneficiaries of the Sir John Ritblat Family Foundation. One recent Henry Jackson Society project is an organisation called Student Rights, which presents itself as “against extremism” and promoting “free speech” on campuses – but is accused by the National Union of Students of “fuelling Islamophobia”. Its director Raheem Kassam went on to become editor of “alt right” news portal Breitbart London.
• Weizmann UK. Sir John Ritblat is vice president of this UK foundation and supports it through his charitable trusts. Set up to support the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, in recent years Weizmann UK has taken a political stance in trying to fight boycotts against Israeli academic and cultural institutions.

• Open Europe. Right wing think tank, linked to neoconservative movements, that pushes for “economic liberalisation” in Europe. Described by the Economist as “the Eurosceptic group that controls British coverage of the EU”. Sir John has donated through his Family Foundation, and is listed as a “supporter” on Open Europe’s website.

A few infamous Delancey deals

The Mapeley scandal

Along with long-time backer Soros, Delancey was involved in one of the most notorious UK property scandals of the early 2000s: when no less an institution than the Inland Revenue sold its own offices to an offshore consortium based in the tax haven of Bermuda.

The deal, one of the most brazen examples of the last Labour government’s PFI mania, is called STEPS: “Strategic Transfer of the Estate to the Private Sector”. In 2001, three government departments – the Inland Revenue, HM Revenue and Customs, and the Valuation Office Agency – signed a contract selling their office buildings and other property to a private company for £220 million. The company then leased the buildings back to the government for 20 years, for a fee averaging £170 million per year. Altogether, the freeholds and leaseholds on 698 buildings were handed over.

The company was called Mapeley STEPS. It was a joint venture specially set up for the deal, and registered in Bermuda. It was owned by three partners: Soros Real Estate Partners (42.5%), Fortress Investment Group (42.5%), with Delancey as the junior partner holding 15%.

The government claimed it would save millions in property maintenance over the deal’s lifetime. But the deal became a national scandal when, in 2002, the Inland Revenue was forced to come clean about the buildings being sold to a company registered in a tax haven. It was reported that the Soros-Fortress-Delancey partnership could save some £170 million in tax through this offshore structure.

Olympic Village

London’s 2012 Olympic Games involved building an “Olympic Village” with athletes’ accommodation in Stratford, East London. While parts of the site were empty, others involved demolishing 450 homes on the Clays Lane Estate. The site was owned a quango called the Olympic Development Authority (ODA), which reportedly spent £1.2 billion on building the Olympic Village.

The ODA lined up developers to take over after the games. Part of the site, with 1,379 properties, was sold for “affordable housing” to a consortium called Triathlon Homes. The other 1,439 homes, known as “East Village”, were sold in 2011 to the partnership of Delancey and Qatari Diar. The Delancey-Qatar partnership also got six neighbouring development plots with planning permission for 2,000 more apartments.

All this cost them £557 million. With Triathlon paying £268 million for their bit, overall the UK government lost £275 million on the deal.

After widespread fears about the games’ costs going over budget, the government had set up an Olympics Oversight Committee of “business experts”. The committee’s remit specifically included the costs and finances of the Olympics development site. Its chairman was none other than Sir John Ritblat.

The Daily Mail has claimed Delancey and the Qataris could make as much as £1 billion on the Olympics deal. The bulk of the East Village apartments are now rented out by Delancey’s joint venture “build to rent” company Get Living. The village itself is an example of a pseudo public space that is basically fully privatised, patrolled by a private security army who move on anyone trying to sleep on the streets, or even set up a camera on a tripod without permission.

Elephant One development, from 35% campaign

Elephant One – how Delancey avoided any affordable housing

Delancey’s first development in the Elephant and Castle area was a “mixed use” scheme called Elephant One, next door to the Elephant and Castle shopping centre it is now planning to demolish. Completed in 2017, Elephant One features shops and tower blocks with 272 student rooms and 374 private residences managed by Get Living.

Research by the 35% campaign has revealed Delancey’s “dirty tricks” in the development – including how it managed to get out of commitments to build any affordable housing.

Summed up, Elephant One was a classic story of “development creep”: over the several years between first getting planning approval and the actual build, ever more profitable units were added into the scheme, while the promised “affordable” units or community facilities disappeared.

The once public land was originally sold by Southwark Council to Sir John Ritblat’s British Land. Then, in 2006, it was sold again to an Isle of Man registered company called Eadon Estates for £8.5 million. Eadon Estates was a joint venture owned by Delancey’s DV4 fund and another developer called Oakmayne. The development was originally called Oakmayne Plaza, then renamed Tribeca Square, before finally becoming Elephant One.

Then between 2006 and 2011 Delancey resold the land to itself twice via offshore companies, each time inflating the price considerably. The land’s value went from £8.5m in 2006, to £18m in 2007, then £40m in 2011.

And over this period Delancey submitted several new planning applications, using revised figures to change its “viability assessments”. These are the crucial documents in which developers argue they cannot provide the expected amount of affordable housing and other commitments because otherwise they wouldn’t make a profit.

According to the 35% campaign:

Southwark later accidentally published the confidential viability assessment submitted to justify these concessions. It showed that £18m had been used as the land purchase cost – not the £8m originally paid. It also claimed that the completed residential flats would sell for an average of just £525 per square foot. Flats on Lendlease’s neighbouring Elephant Park are selling for an average of over £1,000 per square foot.

As a result, Delancey got away with dropping any plans for “affordable housing” at all:

Instead of affordable housing an in-lieu payment was agreed, amounting to just £1m and justified by the ‘exceptional cost’ to the developer of providing the market square and the basement access area – estimated to cost £12.5m. […] Delancey should normally have paid £52.7m under Southwark’s tariff for commuted affordable housing payments.

Then, in 2013, Delancey got even more concessions from the council. These included being allowed to raise the height of its buildings to include more market rent student flats, while promised “affordable retail units” were instead sold for a Sainsburys supermarket.

If anyone is wondering how Delancey manages to get away with all this, the answer is that Delancey is very well advised. Delancey has employed former deputy Council leader Kim Humphries as its adviser and representative. Indeed, Kim was deputy leader when the planning applications were approved […] He has been for hire as a freelance development consultant since he stepped down as deputy Council leader and Cabinet member for Housing.

Behind Delancey: meet the investors

Pic: George Soros (photo by Harald Dettenborn)

George Soros

One of Delancey’s major backers has long been hedge fund billionaire George Soros – the man famous for crashing Sterling in 1992’s “Black Monday” currency crisis, and more recently as bogeyman for conservative regimes due to his Open Society Foundation’s sponsorship of liberal causes. Soros’ “progressive” values have not stopped him being a key ally of the Ritblats, who themselves fund right-wing causes.

The relationship goes back at least to 1993. Soros decided to diversify some of his multi-billion winnings into the London property market. He partnered with Sir John Ritblat, investing £250 million in a joint fund with British Land targeting high profile commercial developments in the City.

When Ritblat junior went his own way with Delancey, Soros became his biggest investor – as well as acting as a “mentor”. In 1998, Soros “helped pump £127 million” into Delancey from his Quantum hedge fund – also based in the British Virgin Islands tax haven. By 2000, Soros reportedly owned 40% of the company, and was instrumental in backing Ritblat’s move to take it private in 2001. In 2005, Soros reportedly invested at least another £300 million in London premium office developments through Delancey funds.

Since Delancey went private, Soros’ investments with Delancey have been made through offshore funds which publish no information about their investors. One scrap of information came out in 2009, after a ruling by the Information Commissioner named Soros as one of the investors in the Delancey DV3 fund, which controlled a property portfolio worth an estimated £3 billion in 2008.

It is not possible to make any estimate of Soros’ present investments with Delancey. But Delancey’s current corporate brochure include Soros Real Estate Partners in its list of “partners and joint ventures”.

Qatari Royal Family

The small gulf state of Qatar is behind some of the UK’s biggest recent property developments. According to the BBC, “it is now said that Qatar owns more land in London than the Queen”. Those London holdings include the Shard, Canary Wharf, Harrods, the former US embassy in Grosvenor Square … and much more.

Qatar is an absolute monarchy, ruled since 1868 by the Al Thani family. It is only half the size of Wales, but sits on the world’s third largest reserves of natural gas.

In recent decades the Thanis have funnelled much of this wealth through their sovereign wealth fund, Qatari Investment Authority (QIA). This owns assets across the world, with a total value around $335 billion. The UK is currently the single largest target for their investments, with £35 billion invested.

The QIA has numerous subsidiary funds specialising in different asset classes. One of these is its real estate investment company Qatari Diar, which claims to own global property worth $35 billion. Qatari Diar is the main Qatari vehicle used for holding property in the UK, although other Qatari state companies also have separate holdings, as do individual members of the Thani family.

Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, emir of Qatar

APG: enormous Dutch pension fund with a mixed “ethical” record

APG is one of the world’s biggest pension fund managers. Its total funds as of February 2019 were valued at €487 billion.

It is a subsidiary of the public sector pension fund ABP, which pools the pension contributions of government and education sector workers in the Netherlands. But it also now manages other pension assets as well. According to its website, it “works for over 21,000 employers, providing the pension for one in five families in the Netherlands (over 4.5 million participants).”

With its public sector focus, and a human and labour rights policy, campaigns have sometimes had successes in pushing APG to pull out from “unethical” investments. Its board includes a representative from the FNV trade union. In the past it has divested from Walmart, nuclear weapons and palm oil producing companies involved in deforestation. In January 2019, APG lost an appeal by trade unions against changes to military pensions. But these moves have not always succeeded: in 2014 APG was criticised for indirectly funding Israel settlements and again in 2018 ABP was criticised by environmental organisations for its investments in tar sands oil companies and pipelines.

Oxford Properties: Canadian pension fund with trade union representation

Oxford Properties is a global real estate company, which buys property across North America and Europe. It is based in Canada and wholly owned by a Canadian pension fund: the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS).

In 2018, Oxford Properties entered a new partnership with Delancey, setting up a joint venture company called DOOR, which has plans to invest at least £600 million in UK residential property. DOOR in turn is one of the main shareholders in the “Get Living” build-to-rent company (see details above).

OMERS is one of Canada’s biggest pension funds, with 496,000 members and assets of $97 billion in 2018. Like APG, its roots are in the public sector, it claims a commitment to “sustainable investing”, and has trade union representation on its board. The main union involved is the Ontario Public Sector Employees Union (OPSEU) which represents approximately 155,000 public sector across Ontario. They have shown willingness in the past to take on the OMERS pension fund over proposed changes and may not be aware of the damage their money is doing to communities in the UK.

Web page advertise Elephant & Castle properties for sale to Qatari investors

Notes

iThe accounts also state that the unnamed “highest paid director” received £1.95 million. This is a little mysterious, as there were only two directors and they received £4.6 million altogether.

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