Humiliated at tribunal

Published: 12 November, 2010

• AT a time when the government is pulling billions out of the social housing budget, yet more evidence emerges of the reckless spending engaged in by Islington Council’s hapless managing agent Partners.

This is the contractor, now majority owned by Lloyds Bank, which has been given a 30-year monopoly contract, and hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, to refurbish 6,000 street properties owned by the council.

A recently-published report of a hearing at the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal, adjudicating on a property at Crayford Road, Holloway, lays bare the squalid transaction in which the council is involved. The leaseholder represented herself, assisted by a friend. Partners turned up, armed to the teeth with a day’s worth of legal and technical talent at a probable cost of £2,000. Little good that this did it. 

The tribunal was self-evidently impressed with the leaseholder’s version of events. The virtues of Partners, which so impressed the Lib Dems when awarding the gold-plated contract, were not so apparent to the three-strong tribunal.

“The overall impression we were left with was the project was taken forward in a cheap and cheerful way,” it observes in its judgment released this month. Painting was undertaken “so badly that it was lifting in places”. Some work carried out was “inept”. The tribunal found that there were “limited inspections on-site to check quality levels”. Invoices are “not scrutinised closely to ensure accuracy”. 

The tribunal concludes that there was very little real control over the quality of works carried out and the cost incurred. Inspection reports prepared by Partners are dismissed as “meaningless and unreliable”. Its management is described as “poor”.

Partners had its claim for £3,000 knocked back to £2,000. In an unusual move, and one opposed, Partners was forced to pay the leaseholder’s application fee of £250. So in other words, it paid that latter figure for turning up to be humiliated.

Partners is currently the subject of an ongoing investigation by the council’s auditors, PWC. The final report will be presented to the Audit Committee in the new year. 

MIKE REID
Milner Square, N1