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January 4th 2017
Nick Ramsay AM, Chairman, Public Accounts Committee. National Assembly for Wales.
Dear Committee Members,
Inquiry into Regulatory Oversight of Housing Associations
1. First of all, let me introduce myself: I am Royston Jones of the address given above but I blog as Jac o’ the North, and I have written about housing associations many, many times. 2. I suppose much of what concerns me about these bodies could be found in my most recent (at the time of writing) post: Housing Associations: Secret or Public? (02.01.2017). But I shall attempt to list my concerns whilst trying to adhere to your Committee’s terms of reference. 3. A good place to begin would be with the case that seems to have set the ball rolling, detailed in the letter from Adam Price AM to John Griffiths AM (01.09.2016) and the subsequent letter from John Griffiths to your chairman Nick Ramsay AM (15.09.2016). I’m referring now to the takeover by Wales and West Housing of Tai Cantref. Additionally, this case gives insights into wider concerns with the sector, so I shall focus on this very recent – indeed, ongoing – episode. 4. There seems little doubt that Cantref (formerly Tai Cantref) got into difficulties, possibly as the result of injudicious projects, such as the student accommodation planned for Aberystwyth, at a time when the local university, experiencing falling ratings, was finding it increasingly difficult to attract students. 5. Subsequently, the Welsh Government launched a statutory enquiry (the findings of which remain secret) and it seems that this enquiry was conducted by a London firm, Campbell Tickell. Then, on April 21st last year, it was announced, by Cardiff PR company PS Partnership, that Cantref had chosen Wales and West Housing as its “merger partner”. Page 1 of 4
6. A few observations: Greg Campbell, one of the partners in Campbell Tickell, is a staunch Labour supporter. More than that, he has in the past been an employee of the Labour Party. James Tickell is also a Labour Party supporter. Wales and West Housing’s CEO is Anne Hinchey, wife of Cardiff Labour councillor Graham Hinchey. And while I could find nothing (as yet) to link the eponymous Paul Shackson of PS Partnership to the Labour Party there certainly seem to be family links. 7. So we have one Labour connection after another that result in a housing body that may not have a single Welsh speaker among its senior management or its Board of Management being handed control of a housing association in a Welsh-speaking area that hitherto had conducted most of its business in Welsh. How crass and insensitive is that? 8. I have other concerns about Wales and West Housing. One being that on its own website – under the ‘our history’ tab – it says that in 2012, “We also rebranded and are known now as Wales & West Housing with a smart new logo”. Why drop ‘Association’? 9. Then in January 2014, it was announced that Wales and West Housing was to receive £25m from the Department for Communities and Local Government. This is the only instance I have encountered in which the UK government has given funding to a Welsh RSL. But why? 10. Let me conclude the Cantref saga with this emphatic statement: The Wales and West Housing acquisition of Cantref was a Labour Party stitch-up. And because of this, it should be reversed and a more sympathetic partner found for Cantref. 11. Staying in that general area I’d like to move on to Pembrokeshire Housing and its ‘subsidiary’ Mill Bay Homes. Again, I have covered this subject many times on my blog, I suggest that anyone wanting the story should just type ‘Pembrokeshire Housing’ or ‘Mill Bay Homes’ into the Search box at the top of the sidebar. 12. In a nutshell, Pembrokeshire Housing has a subsidiary, Mill Bay Homes, to which it has loaned millions of pounds to build homes for sale on the open market, to retirees, and even to ‘investors’. 13. I believe that this arrangement needs to be investigated thoroughly. I also believe that Mill Bay Homes should not be a RSL seeing as it does not build and rent social housing. The exact source of the funding Pemrokeshire Housing has loaned to Mill Bay also needs to be established. 14. Finally, it might be revealing to canvass the thoughts of independent builders in Pembrokeshire and adjoining counties to competition from Mill Bay Homes, a company that doesn’t have to worry about lack of funds, or having unsold properties on its hands. 15. Moving on . . . Page 2 of 4
16. My blog post, Housing Associations: Secret or Public? Dealt at some length with the recommendation made by the Office for National Statistics that RSLs become public bodies. 17. This has resulted in an outcry in Wales, we’ve seen public protests, orgies of breast beating, hunger strikes . . . I’m joking of course; the only objections to publiclyfunded bodies becoming transparent comes from Community Housing Cymru, representing the overpaid management of our housing associations. 18. But as I established with Wales and West Housing, our RSLs have influence with the Labour Party and the Welsh Government. So I was not surprised to read an item on the BBC website telling us that the Welsh Government had already decided to oppose the ONS recommendations. When was this decision taken? Was it debated? Was there any public consultation? 19. And who exactly was the “Welsh Government spokeswoman” quoted in that news item of December 29th? The Assembly wasn’t sitting, and the date suggests that the news may have been released in the hope that people would be too full of Christmas cheer to notice. So did this “spokeswoman” have the authority to make such a statement? And if so, who gave her that authority? 20. I ask because, while we know there are strong links between housing associations and the Labour Party, I am also persuaded that there are civil servants who believe in ‘light touch regulation’ when it comes to RSLs. That approach that served us so well with the media, MPs, bankers, etc., etc. 21. Another issue I unearthed recently was that a number of housing associations are leasing properties from companies based in tax havens. I dealt with it my post Link Holdings (Gibraltar) Ltd. I wrote to the Welsh Government asking for its views on this, and received a very strange response from a Mr Simon Fowler, Regulation Manager at Communities and Children. 22. Mr Fowler’s defence seemed to be that these leasehold arrangements I brought to his attention had been in place for some years, arranged by predecessor bodies to the current housing associations, and this made them perfectly acceptable. The fact that Welsh housing associations, in 2016, are using public funding to deal with offshore companies that could be fronts for the Mafia or ISIS seemed to trouble him not at all. 23. I was able to unearth only a couple of cases because Land Registry documents cost money that I can’t afford. But I guarantee that what I unearthed – following information received – is only the tip of an iceberg. Yet those entrusted with oversight and regulation of housing associations respond with, ‘Nothing to see here, move along’. 24. To conclude . . . Page 3 of 4
25. Welsh housing associations exist in a shadowy world that gives them the best of everything, to the extent that they behave like secretive private companies despite receiving vast amounts of public funding. 26. This is only possible because of the sector’s close links to the Labour Party, and the wider ‘Labour movement’ that dominates the Third Sector of which housing associations are a part. 27. This closeness results in favouritism manifest in an almost total lack of oversight and regulation – despite the vast amounts of public funding involved. 28. Wales has far too many housing associations, yet the predatory nature of the sector demands that they feel they must all keep expanding, using more and more public funding, lest they get swallowed up. 29. This results in a) funding being wasted and b) some housing associations importing undesirables simply to fill up their properties. The worst recent example of the latter would be the gang of paedophiles housed by Grwp Gwalia in Kidwelly. There have been far too many other cases. 30. The new, public status recommended for housing associations by the ONS is to be welcomed. The Committee should note that the only opposition comes from those vested interests benefiting from the current chaos and their defenders within the Welsh Government and its (or somebody’s) civil service. 31. It should be the duty of the Public Accounts Committee to insist on the reforms needed to make Welsh housing associations both more open and accountable and also less of a burden on the public purse. These two ambitions are linked. 32. I wish the Committee every success in this Inquiry and I hope that the information I have provided will be of some help in giving Wales a more transparent, more efficient, cheaper, and less politically partisan social housing sector.
Yours
Royston Jones
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