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Notice of Final Order relating to the proposed merger between Hutchison 3G UK Holdings Limited and Vodafone Limited.

The Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator says about 2,500 of the 25,000 registered charities have failed to file their annual documents on time

The Southwark-based building provides workspace for voluntary organisations struggling to secure affordable office and meeting space

The charity was facing closure after being suddenly evicted from its old premises

The Denbigshire-based organisation have received over £1,000 to help it to repair fixable goods, reduce household waste and save locals money.

Although this café isn’t made up of coffee and baristas, it is full of conservationists who are working tirelessly to assist with the current climate crisis.  Ruthin Repair Café, a community based not-for-profit, has been repairing household goods for local residents since February 2020, in a bid to reduce waste.

Running once a month, its team of 24 volunteers have helped fix 963 items to date across 31 Repair Café events. The most common repairs are electricals, especially toasters and vacuum cleaners, followed by sewing repairs, such as soft toys and clothes.

However, the funding that has been announced by enfinium, the UK’s largest waste operator, will help take these events to the next level. The organisation is set to receive £1,500 which will cover running costs, including room hire and consumables, and enable volunteers to develop their skills. This will include first aid training, tool sharpening classes and PAT safety-testing certification, which is critical for electrical item repairs.

Arguably, this funding couldn’t have come at a better time. Data from the Öko-Institut – a non-profit, private-sector environmental research institute – shows that maintaining a single television for an additional seven years can save the equivalent of 657kg CO2.

Commenting on the news, Mike Maudsley, CEO of enfinium, said: ‘Repairing broken items is a critical part of reducing the amount of waste we produce. In turn, this leads to lower consumption, lower carbon emissions and less waste ending up in landfill. This is why we are delighted to be awarding Ruthin’s Repair Café with funding today, which has been helping local families to reduce waste and save money since 2020.’

In addition, Anne Lewis, Ruthin Repair Café organiser, has expressed her enthusiasm about being awarded the money.

‘We are thrilled to have been awarded this funding from enfinium. The funds will enable us to continue to help support the local residents of Ruthin repair their broken items, and provide training to our fantastic team of volunteers,’ Lewis added.

The funding from enfinium has come from the company’s Repair Cafés Support Fund, which was launched in March 2024. The total currently stands at £60,000 and it was established to supports cafés located within a 30-mile radius of one of enfinium’s facilities in Kent, North Wales, West Yorkshire or the West Midlands.

Cafés can apply for funding of up to £1,500 per annum before 31st May 2024.

The Ruthin Repair Café takes place on the first Saturday of every month at the Naylor Leyland Centre in Ruthin, North Wales, from 10AM to 3PM and is free and open to all.

Image: Ruthin Repair Café

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Sadiq Khan has been re-elected as the Mayor of London with the smallest mandate since the office was created 24 years ago, analysis shows.

On Thursday 2nd May it was announced that the Labour politician won 43.8% of the vote, which was enough to secure Khan a third term under the new First Past the Post system. However, new research from the Electoral Reform Society found the result means he is the mayor returning to City Hall with the lowest level of support among Londoners who voted when compared to results under the previous electoral system. 

All prior London mayoral elections used the Supplementary Vote (SV) system, which allows voters to indicate a first and second preference for two candidates. Under SV, if no candidate gets over 50% of first preference votes, the top two candidates continue to a runoff where second preference votes from eliminated candidates are allocated – ensuring winning candidates have a broad base of support.  

The mayor with lowest vote share under SV was Ken Livingstone, who received 44.4% of votes from voters giving him either their first preference vote or a transferred second preference vote in 2004.   

Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, has claimed that this new system is making it more difficult for the public to vote, but is lowering the bar for politicians.  

‘What we are seeing at these elections is the bar being lowered for politicians while being raised for voters,’ Hughes said. ‘The move to First Past the Post has lowered the bar for politicians to get elected by taking choice away from voters. The result is we have seen a Mayor of London elected with the smallest mandate ever as well as PCCs and a mayor win their races on around a third of the vote.’

Hughes added: ‘This is bad for voters, who now have mayors and PCCs the majority didn’t vote for; it is bad for elected politicians who have to do their jobs with less backing for their policies; and it is bad for trust in democracy.’

However, Hughes go on to say that ‘we are seeing the bar to voting being raised for voters as this was the first-time millions had to show ID to cast their ballot.’

‘We know that voter ID has already prevented at least 14,000 people from voting at last year’s local elections and this year we have again heard of voters – including a decorated ex-serviceman – being barred from exercising their fundamental democratic right due to not having an accepted form of ID,’ Hughes continued.

‘Our politics is headed in the wrong direction when we are making it harder for people to vote but easier for politicians to get elected by reducing voter choice at the ballot box. We need to set our democracy on a better course by scraping voter ID and improving access to voting, but also by moving to proportional and preferential voting systems that better represent how people voted.’

Echoing a similar tone, Dr Jess Garland, director of research and policy for the Electoral Reform Society, said: ‘These local elections have again seen a raft of highly disproportionate results under First Past the Post, leading to council chambers that don’t accurately reflect voters’ choices. In some cases, parties have taken over 90% of the seats on less than half the vote, while other parties received no seats despite winning sizable vote shares.

‘There is a clear alternative to the unfair results we have seen in England. Both Scotland and Northern Ireland use a fairer proportional voting system, avoiding the distorted and random results produced by First Past the Post.

‘Proportional representation would mean fairer results at local elections and would create council chambers that better reflect the way people voted.’  

Image: Nick Fewings

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Research from the UK’s biggest mortgage lender has revealed the price of properties are falling, but they could creep back up once interest rates drop.

Halifax’s house price index has found that average house prices rose by 0.1% in April after falling 0.9% in March.

According to the figures, a typical UK home costs £288,949 just slightly up compared to £288,781 last month.

Amanda Bryden, head of mortgages at Halifax, said: ‘The reality is that average house prices have largely plateaued in the early part of 2024.

‘This reflects a housing market finding its feet in an era of higher interest rates.’

However, the speculation around interest rates falling soon has begun. The rate-setters at the Bank of England are expected to keep rates at 5.25% when they meet on Thursday in a bid to keep inflation down, but Bryden has claimed rates will begin reducing later on in the year.

‘If, as is still expected, downward moves in Bank rate come into play later this year, fixed mortgage rates should fall, ’Bryden said. ‘Combined with the resilience displayed by the housing market over recent months, we now expect property prices to rise modestly over the course of 2024.’

Although, focusing back on current events, the new figures from Halifax display that as the housing market grows accustomed to higher borrowing costs, there’s been an increase in demand for flats and smaller homes.

Against this backdrop, Daniel Austin, CEO and co-founder at ASK Partners, said: ‘The property sector is in recovery mode. Rent values have seen sustained growth, positioning real estate as reasonably valued in comparison to gilts and presenting growth potential.

‘In the realm of commercial real estate, factors like physical condition, location, and age significantly influence a property’s value. Well-maintained properties boasting modern amenities tend to command higher prices, while neglected ones may struggle to attract tenants or investors. In the current market, the emphasis has shifted towards the importance of location and quality over the yield on debt or cost. We anticipate opportunistic acquisitions of prime properties in prime locations.’

As well as Austin expressing his concerns about people favouring location when it comes to buying a house, he also explains that the next government must prioritise the current housing crisis to help people in the UK.

Austin added: ‘A RICS survey uncovered that non-traditional market segments, such as aged care facilities, student housing, data centres and life sciences real estate are yielding the most robust returns.

‘With housing set to be a battleground point in this year’s election and as the sector moves to the top of the agenda for all parties, we hope to see a long-term plan for new homes, including social housing, however, we expect we will see more short-term fixes.

‘Stimulus will be welcome but can create unnecessary froth. For voters, a stamp duty holiday or reprieve may be a welcome sign. For developers, eased planning regulations for brownfield sites and conversions will be popular.’

Image: satheeshsankaran

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Campbell Tickell recently published the results of their work exploring the Housing Ombudsman Service’s (HOS) Landlord Performance data. Here, the organisations Sue Harvey and Catherine Romney, discuss their findings.

The annual landlord reports contain a wealth of information, but the nuances in the definitions and challenges of comparing different types of landlord and different years made for a long article with lots of technical footnotes.

For our busy or impatient clients, here’s the ‘TL;DR’ (too long; didn’t read) version:

HOS Maladministration Rate:

• The HOS uses a Maladministration Rate metric (‘MalRate’) to shine a spotlight on poor complaints performance. MalRate is ‘the number of findings of severe maladministration, maladministration and service failure, expressed as a percentage of the total number of considered findings’
• This metric shows where the landlord was found to be at fault in a higher or lower proportion of the complaints that received a HOS decision
• The MalRate is highlighted in each Landlord Performance Report and underlies the headline conclusion that a landlord performs ‘very well’, ‘similarly’ or ‘poorly’. It is also used to generate the list of landlords with the highest MalRates and, by implication, the poorest complaints performance

CT Incidence Rate

• To derive alternative or additional insights, we have developed the CT Incidence Rate. This calibrates performance to the scale of the landlord, by calculating the number of maladministration findings per 10,000 homes
• This provides a sharper focus on those organisations where the HOS has identified a higher proportion of a landlord’s homes and residents to be experiencing a poor quality of service
• This measure compliments the Regulator of Social Housing’s new complaints Tenant Satisfaction Measure, that calibrates the volume of internally resolved complaints to the size of the landlord

Small number of negative findings

• Our analysis shows that across all housing association and local authority landlords, the average incidence of negative findings sits at 6.8 per 10,000 homes
• While every maladministration finding represents an avoidable poor experience for the resident, fewer than seven negative findings per 10,000 homes per annum suggests that landlord maladministration, as defined by the HOS, is rare
• We recognise that the CT Incidence Rate has shortcomings of its own. A low incidence rate could indicate weaker awareness of and poorer signposting to HOS by that landlord, rather than lower overall service quality

Variation

• When we chart the distribution of the CT Incidence Rate, we can see that calibrated landlord performance varies enormously (see graph)
• By this measure, the worst-performing landlord by our measure had over eight times the average incidence, with 55 negative findings per 10,000 homes. Furthermore, off to the right of the chart there is a very long tail of more than 1,300 landlords with zero HOS findings
• We also find a weaker degree of correlation between the CT Incidence Rate and the HOS MalRate than we expected. The poorest landlord by the HOS MalRate measure sits in the best 30% of landlords by CT’s Incidence metric. Meanwhile the worst-performing landlord by the CT Incidence Rate has a HOS MalRate of 35%, and so doesn’t appear at all on the HOS’s worst performers list

Conclusion

The HOS landlord data undoubtedly provides a rich source of insights into the quality of both service provision and complaints handling. But in not calibrating complaints data by landlord scale, we believe an opportunity to highlight both good and poor performance has been missed.

You can read Campbell Tickell’s full analysis here.

Images: OleksandrPidvalnyi and Campbell Tickell 

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LONDON - May 7, 2024

LONDON - May 7, 2024