Weasel words

My latest attempt to persuade my fellow councillors to admit that council tenants were not properly informed (as required by law) of increases in rents when the de-pooling of service charges was introduced back in 2015 and 2016 suffered a setback at last month’s meeting of full council when an amendment I had put forward went down by 40 votes to 15.

Before council was a recommendation from the working group set up to look into the matter that:

“The De-pooling Working Group finds as its final conclusion that this Authority could have communicated more clearly with tenants when explaining rent increases and the results of the De Pooling exercises of 2015/2016 and 2016/17, and recommends to Council that this is the Group’s final findings and no further action is required.”

I put down an amendment that the weasel words “could have communicated more clearly with tenants” be replaced with “failed to carry out its statutory duty under S 103 Housing Act 1985 […] to inform tenants…”

Losing the vote was bad enough, but, to add insult to injury, the opposition was led by the member for Solva and deputy leader of the council’s Conservative Group, Cllr Mark Carter.

Cllr Carter, who was a member of the working group, has opposed me throughout this process, but I hadn’t given up hope of the sort of U-turn that seems popular with the Tories these days.

For those not familiar with this rather arcane subject, before 2015 service charges [grass cutting, estate wardens, communal areas, but not routine repairs to which all tenants are entitled] were pooled i.e. the costs were all lumped together and a proportion was added to every tenant’s base rent.

There was an element of unfairness in all this because people with no greenery in front of their houses were paying for grass cutting, and young families in three-bed accommodation were paying towards warden services.

Quite reasonably, Welsh Government (WG) decreed that the system should be reformed so that the cost of any particular service should be paid by those who received it.

In 2015/2016, because both costs and beneficiaries could be easily identified, wardens’ salaries were de-pooled, and the following year the costs associated with communal areas were de-pooled, while grass cutting and ground maintenance were put in the box labelled “too difficult” where they remain to this day.

For those not familiar with this issue a detailed account can be found at Superchargers

It was clear to me from the outset that there should have been a reduction in rents to compensate for the fact that some elements of what all tenants had been paying as pooled charge were now being paid for directly by those receiving the benefits.

When no such reduction occurred, I emailed the housing department pointing out that tenants were now effectively paying twice for these services, and I have also raised the matter at several meetings of the housing working group of which I am a member.

I have done a lot of research on this subject and, with the exception of Anglesey, all the other councils whose websites I have visited deducted the previously pooled amount from rents to arrive at a base rent onto which any further rent increases were imposed (see here)

And, as a matter of interest, this is not the only time that Pembrokeshire and Anglesey have been on the same page.

The issue had been rumbling away in the background until a couple of years ago a report came before the audit committee about the successful roll-out of de-pooling which gave me the opportunity to breathe new life into my campaign.

Eventually the statutory auditor, Audit Wales, was consulted and expressed the view that, while the council’s explanation to tenants could have been clearer, my claim that tenants were paying twice was wrong because the previously pooled amount had now been commuted to a rent increase and could, therefore, no longer be classed as a service charge.

I am not sure this accords with the facts, but one thing I do know for certain is that, whatever the auditor might say, the council has a statutory duty to inform tenants of any rent increases (Housing Act 1985 S 103) and that these supposedly commuted services charges – which have added roughly £1 per week to every tenant’s rent – have never been included in the annual S 103 rent increase letter the council is required to send out.

After a bit of toing and froing, I managed to persuade the council’s audit committee to recommend to full council that a seven member politically balanced working group be set up to look into my concerns.

It consisted of 2 IPG (Jamie Adams and A N Other*), 1 Plaid Cymru (Cris Tomos), 1 Labour (Paul Miller, later replaced by Tom Tudor), 1 Tory (Mark Carter) and two unaffiliated members (myself and Jacob Williams, the author of that other website).

Attendance was never very good (Jacob, Mark Carter and myself were the only ones with a 100% record) and the IPG failed to turn up at any of the three meetings held before the last election.

Perhaps understandably, because the initial miss-steps took place during the dog days of his administration, IPG leader Jamie Adams couldn’t even be bothered to appoint his group’s second member, hence the A N Other*.

Adams did turn up to the final meeting in September with Cllr John Davies in tow, and when I challenged him about his previous no-shows, he said he hadn’t attended because he considered the whole exercise a waste of his time – which probably means he didn’t bother to read the hundreds of pages of documents with which the working group had been provided.

Also, when we met after the May election, Plaid’s disastrous showing at the polls (down from six seats to two) meant it had lost its membership rights and Cllr Vanessa Thomas (unaffiliated) was appointed to the working group.

When it came to the vote, Cllrs Carter, Davies, Adams and Thomas voted down my suggestion that the council should admit its failure to follow the law with regard to informing tenants of rent increases and look to ways of making reparations, and opted instead for some slippery weasel words to the effect that the council could have been clearer in its communications with tenants.

I think I can say with confidence that at no time during several hours of working group meetings has anyone disputed that the council failed to inform tenants of the true extent of the rent increases.

Instead, the working group heard arguments about how much it would cost to rectify the situation; the difficulties in identifying which tenants were due a refund (some of them will be dead); the length of time that has passed since the original decision was made, etc.

What all these arguments have in common is that they don’t address the key question of whether the council fulfilled its statutory duty to provide tenants with an accurate account of rent increases.

Unfortunately, we were dealing here with people who prefer not to have their strongly-held opinions contaminated by facts.

And it was just the same at full council when the working group’s conclusions came to be debated.

First up was Cllr Mark Carter who came over all serious with “Fundamentally, we’re looking backwards to what happened in the past.”

Following that insight into the mysterious nature of time, we were treated to the full range of silly arguments [my comments in square brackets] including:

“…six years ago – time to move on…” [injustice isn’t cured by the passage of time]

“…we should let the officers get on with providing houses…” [a variation on the totalitarians’ mantra that ‘the ends justify the means’]

“…nobody has complained…” [perhaps because they were not aware of what was going on. After all, my whole case rests on the premise that tenants were never properly informed about these rent increases]

And the coup de grace:

“I admire Cllr Stoddart for his determination, but I’m afraid, in my view, he’s barking up the wrong tree.”

This reminded me of Cllr David Pugh’s famous speech during the debate on the Pembroke Dock grants caper, when he accused me of fabricating evidence and of tilting at windmills a la Don Quixote (as it so happens, this was the very first council meeting to be webcast so his intemperate rant and that of his leader Cllr Jamie Adams is still available for your delectation.)

Within a couple of days Cllr Pugh had to apologise for getting his building sites mixed up, and my subsequent enquiries revealed that almost every thing he said that day was untrue.

Within just a few weeks, immediately following on from the council’s criminal complaint to the police, the developer whose grant claiming activities I had exposed was writing to the council with the offer that, on condition that the whole business would be swept under the carpet, he would pay back all the grants he had received to date (£190,000) and forgo the £120,000 that he was due on another recently-completed project to which nobody disputed he was entitled.

In other words, the developer was prepared to take a hit of £310,000, despite the fact that only £60,000 of the cash he had received had been called into question in the council’s complaint to the police.

Soon after, Pugh was relieved of his Cabinet economic development duties.

Cllr Carter would be wise to tread carefully.

The nearest Carter got to a statement of fact was with regard to the “tenants’ letters that were put in front of us” which he claimed showed that I was wrong.

I will deal with these tenants’ letters in a separate blog, but if Cllr Carter thinks they support his case, I can only assume that he has failed to fully understand them.

Cllr Jamie Adams was all for “movin’ on” – he always is, and, given the hash he made of things when he was leader, who can blame him.

The council’s Monitoring Officer suggested that the matter might be deferred so that members could be presented with legal advice and other information, but this didn’t go down well with the council’s Leader Cllr David Simpson and the rest of the establishment assembled in the chamber.

They clearly felt they had enough votes in the bag to defeat my proposal, so why allow members to become better informed and risk a change of mind?

Cllr Pat Davies got herself into a bit of a tangle over this.

She banged on for what seemed like forever about all the seminars and meetings older members had attended on rent setting and service charges and concluded: “I’m sorry for those new members who haven’t had the opportunity to understand how the Housing Revenue Account (HRA) works” before voting against the proposal to defer the matter so that new members could have the opportunity to better understand how the HRA account works.

And it shouldn’t need me to point out that the number of seminars attended by members doesn’t speak to the question of whether the council fulfilled its duty under Section 103 of the Act to inform tenants of the true nature of any rent increase they were being subjected to.

Cllr Michael Williams threw in a patsy question about the cost to the HRA if my amendment was carried.

Director of Resources Jon Haswell had the figures to hand, and he told Cllr Williams that the cost to date was £1.8 million, and £4.8 million over the life of the HRA business plan.

The other way of looking at it is that, if I am right, this £1.8 million represents the amount the council has unlawfully overcharged its tenants over the past six or seven years, which works out at somewhere between £300 and £350 per tenant.

Cabinet member for housing Cllr Michelle Bateman was another who was in favour of “drawing a line” because, she said, if members went along with my proposal, the loss of this £1.8 million would mean she would be unable to carry out the HRA business plan.

Does Cllr Bateman really believe that this business plan trumps the law of the land?

How would the council’s environmental health department react if a restauranteur explained away his lack of proper record keeping by telling them that if he paid someone to do that sort of thing he wouldn’t have enough surplus cash to fund his expansion plans?

There was one ray of light in that every last Tory voted against my amendment, as did Cllrs Jamie Adams and John Davies.

With that lot lined up against you, the chances that you are right must be considerably better than evens.

I also noticed that among the 15 members who voted in favour were not a few who had taken the trouble to familiarise themselves with the complexities of the issue.

So I’ll be barking up this same tree for a good while yet, and in the next few days I will be posting an analysis of the letters sent to tenants in the years 2013-2017 which I hope will demonstrate that the truth can’t be established by counting votes.

As someone once said: “The majority decides what gets done, but not necessarily that the right thing gets done.”

And as Einstein retorted when told that 100 German scientists had written to a learned scientific journal to claim that his Theory of Relativity was flawed: “If they are right, one would be enough”.


Footnote: A N Other*

Back in about 1962, while home from university for Christmas, I had a trial for my local professional rugby league team, Workington Town.

This was in the days when being caught playing rugby league, even unpaid, inevitably meant banishment from rugby union.

I was playing in the centre and I was down in the programme as A N Other, while outside me on the wing was a Scotsman from Hawick who was also keen to preserve his amateur status and appeared under the name S O Else.

A week or two later, a letter appeared in my pigeonhole at college containing a five-pound postal order and a note that said simply: “From you know who!”

Beer was about half-a-crown a pint in those days – eight to the pound for the benefit of younger readers – so quite a profitable afternoon’s work (and I scored two tries).