Forum Topic

Charity Commission report on Putney Common finally out

They published it yesterday. One public service journal says it has been toned down following legal threats by one of the conservators... https://www.thirdsector.co.uk/regulator-criticises-wimbledon-common-trustees-amid-claims-report-softened-legal-threats/governance/article/1688477 Full report here https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charity-inquiry-wimbledon-and-putney-commons-conservators?utm_source=8eb02820-8b14-49fc-aa78-102b293a39f7&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=govuk-notifications&utm_content=immediate
Long time Commons campaigner Nicholas Evans calls it a "whitewash" https://twitter.com/Ncsevans/status/1278664350102945792 This website's story on it is herehttps://new.putneysw15.com/#!home|page/shared:common:conwpccinquiry001

Adrian Pearce ● 2106d26 Comments

@ MichaelIf you don’t care for the cost of the WPCC using expensive barristers from KBW to bury the material re the sale, and losses of £3.6m, you could direct your concern to the current board.  It is the trustee’s decision to not publish the legal advice, agreements and valuations. And is it their decision to employ barristers to try and keep the material from being published.  If they were to simply provide the material, and thereby act transparently, there would be no cost.Nolan Principles etc etc

John Cameron ● 2099d

Is it the questions you object to Michael or just the cost?

Ed Robinson ● 2099d

https://www.wpcc.org.uk/downloads/wpcc-chronology-on-mill-house---september-2018-website.pdfThe headline figures in this sale would suggest to those that favour conspiracy and fraud theories that something is not quite right. But in all fairness the chronology and the 2 LVT decisions and the decision at Kingston Crown Court and the legislation regarding discounting for past improvements do bear out the sale price although the sell on price maybe something else completely. But that is beyond the control of the WPCC.Leasehold Valuation Tribunal decisions are all a matter of public record and available on the lvt website It is worth reading all the documents to arrive at an opinion rather than simply the potted history of the WPCC and Mr Cameron. My initial view was there was something dodgy going on but by reading ALL the available info I am reasonably content that nothing untoward occurred here in relation to the WPCC, although the sell on is a little intriguing.    The above link is the WPCC'S chronology of the events that led to the agreed sale price of £2.5m. note that the initial valuation was in excess of £4m but account had to be taken of improvements carried out by the lessee over the years which were rightly discountable from the sale price.Also note that this goes back to an initial lease agreement in 1934 that had been extended on a number of occasions.Finally, note the Leasehold Valuation Tribunals role in the final figure. also that the WPCC had initially objected to the sale but that Kingston Crown Court over ruled that objection and said that the Leasehold Reform Act trumped the 1871 commons Act.All in all there was little that the WPCC could do with regard to this sale and the fact that the tenant then sold it immediately at an inflated price is really a matter beyond their control when the LVT had rubber stamped the sale price (discounted for substantial improvements by the lessee). the real comparison figure is, I suggest between the £4m+ valuation and the £6m plus sale).I believe the eventual sale was to himself (ie his company) so could simply be an inflated price and sleight of hand in the book value for the company accounts.......possibly but of course that's not an accusation just a summizing.

Andy Pike ● 2099d

Well tell them to hold fire. As the questions about the sale of Mill House continue, rather than whitewash, they'll be able to afford 3 good coats in designer colours, courtesy of us levy-payers.

Michael Winstanley ● 2100d

In September 2014 I ask Lee in an letter...9. Can you please forward to me copies of all correspondence between the Conservators and the Charity Commission relating to the sale of the easement at Putney Hospital?He replied...I cannot disclose this information to you as it is subject to legal and professional privilege as it is between the Conservators' solicitors and the Charity Commission. I understand,however, that a little time ago the Friends of Putney Common formally complained to the Charity Commission with regard to the proposed easement. The Charity Commission in turn referred the matter to Gregsons who were able to show to the satisfaction of the Charity Commission that entering into the proposed easement was both lawful and that all the necessary statutory requirements had been complied with.

John Cameron ● 2100d

@ HughAny concerns about the lawyer’s fees should be directed to the trustees and Simon Lee who when entering into the easement, decided to ignore the charity law which the Commission specifically directed them to adhere to.And when questioned, by the Commission as to whether they had adhered, lied.

John Cameron ● 2102d

I'm not a lawyer but I do known that you did not answer the question Hugh!

Ed Robinson ● 2102d

It wasn’t incompetence.  The undersale was entirely deliberate. Lee and the then trustees lied to the Charity Commisson.

John Cameron ● 2102d

Clifford, in my opinion it was a bit of both corruption and incompetence. But there are no official “accusations” as the useless and toothless (TM Nick Evans) has swept everything under the carpet.Nick

Nicholas Evans ● 2102d

Are the accusations being made along the lines of corruption or incompetence?

Clifford Cowell ● 2102d

My father, my brother, his children,various neighbours are all lawyers,they wish to thank you all at this difficult time. Their second homes needed repainting and now it can be done.

Hugh Thompson ● 2103d

The cost can be measured in pounds and pence.But what is the cost if we do not hold those we elected or our institutions to account?

Ed Robinson ● 2103d

@ChantalThe Mill House sale is unexplainable, and once again the current board of the WPCC are hiding what went on. The simple reason is the WPCC did not follow the law.  The sale at £2.5m allowed the WPCC's purchaser as risk and tax free gross profit of £3.6m. The second sale, which the WPCC were fully aware of, was to a company registered in Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands.I served a EIR request on the WPCC in September 2018 asking for the legal advice and valuations.  The WPCC refused to provide the material so I appealed to the Information Commissioner. The Commissioner stated that the information was not environmental, and refused to order the material to be published. My view is the material is environmental, and I am currently appealing the ICO's decision through the General Regulatory Chamber.  The WPCC have instructed Christopher Knight of 11 Kings Bench Walk to defend their refusal to pony up the valuations etc.  Levy payers will be paying Mr Knight's fees.The WPCC could simply act transparently and publish the material. The WPCC today are not better than of old, no lessons have been learned. They operate as a cosy clique. The next elections are in early 2021.

John Cameron ● 2103d

Unless I have missed something, it still doesn't explain the curious sale of Mill House twice on the same day in July 2006 representing a loss of millions to the levy-payers, where the original price shown has been removed from the records.Sales History£6,100,000  27 July 2006.  "This is the only recorded sale for Mill House, Windmill Road, since HM Land Registry started publishing property sales in 1995".

Chantal Blake-Milton ● 2103d

Michael, I agree with you that spending £263,000 on legal fees is appalling.But unfortunately you’ve been misled by the Commission into believing that ALL the so-called “Subsequent Trustees” are to blame. In fact those eight trustees disagreed and all decisions on legal spending and everything else, including delays, were majority decisions by Keith Luck (Chairman April 2015 to November 2015), Prue Whyte (Chairman November 2015 to April 2018) and the three trustees, Whitehall appointed, who had carried over from the “Original Trustees”: Sir Ian Andrews, Derek Frampton and Ros Taylor. A minority of trustees fought every step of the way, but were excluded from decisions and ignored as well as muzzled.The possibility that some restitution could be made was still a possibility in 2015 after the Montagu Evans QSR was received. The plan to delay taking action for years, obfuscatIon on what had actually happened pre-2015 and spending on the disgraceful legal fees was all designed to cover-up and protect the guilty trustees. It succeeded. Incidentally, all those trustees on the board in 2014 and before were, in my view, legally liable for that loss.Needless to say that the useless and toothless Charity Commission failed to act in mid-2015 when they were told what had happened and what was planned.Nick

Nicholas Evans ● 2103d

The valuations are all irrelevant. The original "loss" (ie the gain by local council tax payers) could not be recouped. The relevant loss is all the money spent on professionals, plus total distraction of the trustees from doing anything useful.You should explain where any of you thought you were trying to get to with these various valuation bills and lawyers' bills. What is it any of you thought could practically happen to get any return on all that expenditure? You could have have all clubbed together and paid a third party advisor to tell you it was a lost cause from the outset, even if you could not work that out for yourselves. It would have cost a lot less.Even now this seems lost on you. What is it the Commission could have possbly said in its report that would make any financial difference to the Trust? At worst it might have censured some of the trustees involved and stipulated they have no future involvement in running charities (I would have done that with the lot of you). It didn't even do that - I suppose in that sense, it was a whitewash after all,

Michael Winstanley ● 2104d

Jim, I don’t accept your figures as they do not reflect a lot of the detailed caveats contained in the three valuations. But let’s not argue about that. The purpose of the prevailing Charity Law when selling rights over protected land was to ensure the charity commissioned a qualified surveyors report. It did not. In my personal view (and that of the WPCC’s solicitor at the time) the 2010 and 2014 deals should not be connected in the way they were, for example, in the Daniel Watney RVR.But let’s not worry about all the detail which is missing from the Charity Commission’s report. Let’s just take your figure of £430,000 and add in the legal costs (not subtract them) as they were not necessary. That adds up to a loss of £590,000. In my view money forfeited by not getting a fair value for property sold is a LOSS, even if the property is a right of access. And unnecessary legal fees is money wasted. That it happened is entirely down to incompetence, failing to follow the law and ignoring the Commission’s guidance. But heigh-ho, let’s ignore what happened and move on. Let’s allow the Commission to lump the whistleblowers, including myself, into the “subsequent” trustees and blame them for the dispute. Let’s ignore the wrongdoing by the previous Trustees. Let’s put aside that the board operated on a majority vote at all times and controlled events.I’m afraid I cannot ignore this state of affairs. The useless and toothless Commission has a lot to answer for.Nick

Nicholas Evans ● 2104d

Nick,I'm finding it difficult to reconcile your numbers with those quoted by the Charity Commission, and in fact it seems any generosity here actually exists in your somewhat  selective set of figures.1. The figure of a potential loss of £1,600,00 was not accepted by the Charity Commission: they state that this was the result of incomplete instructions being provided, and that when amended instructions were provided, a revised valuation range of £830,000 to £950,000 was given.2. I'm not sure where your estimate of a loss of £950,000 comes from? The VALUATIONS (not losses) quoted in the Charity Commission report are:£675,000, £775,000 and £830,000 to £950,000So it seems maybe you have included both the rejected valuation (leading to the loss you give of £1,600,000) , and the lower revised figure (and also used the maximum of the range of values). This is a significant double counting.I suggest a more reasonable set of numbers is:Potential benefit is the average of (675,000 + 775,000 + 890,000) [890,000 being the midpoint of the possible range of valuations 830,000 to 950,000] ie 780,000Thus the potential unrealised gain is £780,000; subtracting the actual gain of £350,000 gives a result of £430,000Now £430,000 is still a big sum of money, but given thata) that's just an estimate (and if I also subtract the additional legal costs of £175,000 you suggest, based no doubt on your privileged knowledge) it reduces to £255,000b) estimates of the costs of an action to recover this are £200,000 to £300,000c) any action would certainly be contested, and the outcome is far from certainThen really the position of the Charity Commission seems the only sensible outcome: why risk major additional funds for minimal potential gains?I appreciate that you have given considerable time, energy & emotional investment into this long-running saga, but I would respectfully suggest that now is the time to draw a line under this, and to step back and look for other ways to help the local community.Jim.

Jim Cleary ● 2105d

Always good to hear from you Andy. The sums that I think are relevant are rather different from yours.£263,000 - the cost of legal and advisory advice incurred by WPCC+£375,000 or £950,000 or £1,600,000 being estimates of losses from the under sale.That’s the cost to us levy-payers from the Conservators’ incompetence and, let’s face it, possible illegality. We should be generous and allow some legal advice costs were actually justified. So say £100,000 for necessary expenses if the new board in 2015 had acted immediately and excluded the three Conservators with conflicts of interest and set about finding out how much Wandsworth Borough Council should have paid.As there was no valuation at that point we need to look back and take an average of the valuations which were eventually obtained (2015-2018) less the £300,000 received. That comes out at £1,175,000.As I’m in an exceptionally generous mood this afternoon we could then round down the loss to a mere £1m by spending a bit more on legal advice: £175,000. As a levy-payer I’m not at all happy to have lost £1,000,000.Nick

Nicholas Evans ● 2105d

Scores on the doorsCameron/Evans.  1WPPC.          0Levy payers -£200,000+Lawyers.    +£200,000+That's a result then ?? As levy payers did we win? Yes .Was it worth it? No.

Andy Pike ● 2105d

Michael, thanks for your comments. Of course you have not seen the “final report” sent to me in February this year which has been considerably watered down in what was published last Thursday. As a matter of fact all the costs (professional fees etc), apart from the cost of the Retrospective QSR from Montagu Evans, were run up by the majority faction of the 2015 board and not the minority who uncovered both the losses and the cover-up and acted as whistleblowers. Ditto the delays.It certainly is an institutional whitewash. Dictionary definition - “an attempt to stop people finding out the true facts about a situation.”The WPCC continues to be as opaque as ever. Try asking for any of the supporting documents discussed at board meetings which you can’t attend.Nick

Nicholas Evans ● 2106d

It's good this report is finally published.It's by no means a whitewash - previous trustees are heavily and rightly criticised for their dysfunctional management of the trust.It appears from the report that more has been expended in professional fees (valuations, solicitors' fees, interim manager, and other costs) than was ever lost on a sale at undervalue.Moreover, under-valuation on sale only ever disadvantaged the trust to the benefit of the local authority (one public body to another). A levy-paying Wandsworth council tax payer was never disadvantaged by this transaction.Worst of all, past trustees have forced these costs to be incurred when there was never any realistic prospect of getting anything back from the original mistake - a fact finally validated by this report.The report also notes that the (revered) 1871 Act is not fit for purpose and needs updating. Let's hope this is achieved in a way that prevents future minorities forcing the rest of us to see such a large proportion of our Commons levy being squandered on the fees  related to pointless inter-necine disputes rather than being invested in upkeep of the Commons.I have friends who are lawyers, accountants and surveyors - they will weep and their children will have to wait a longer while for new iPhones - but it is for the best.

Michael Winstanley ● 2106d

They don’t like me asking questions. Could you?Thanks,Nick

Nicholas Evans ● 2106d

I'm not sure that I can answer your question Nick. I am a novice at these things. Perhaps it will be Zoom although I think that there are other ways of doing virtual meetings. Best to enquire at the Ranger's Office I think.

Caroline Whitehead ● 2106d

Caroline - here’s what the WPCC website says about registration for the Open Meeting:“This year’s Annual Open Meeting will be held virtually via electronic means.  Anyone wishing to “attend” will need to register in advance and details on how to do this will be available here in due course.  In the meantime, do please e-mail rangersoffice@wpcc.org.uk to register your interest and we will forward registration details as soon as they are available.“Do you know whether getting access is conditional upon emailing in advance, or can I wait for a registration form to appear on the website? Will it be ‘first come, first served’?Thanks,Nick

Nicholas Evans ● 2106d

I hope that a line can be drawn under this now and that the current Trustees can get on with their work in implementing the reccommendations.Their Annual Open meeting on July 29th will be held virtually this year. Registration is required. Details on the website.

Caroline Whitehead ● 2106d