Cooke’s Cash Grab

Let’s be clear from the outset. This is not a personal grudge. This is not a vendetta. This is not a vexatious resident. This is about money. Public money. Your money.

GreenSquareAccord are my landlord. I see the failures first-hand. I hear from other residents every week through the GreenSquareAccord Resident Support site. And the same story comes up again and again.

Service charges keep going up. Services are not being delivered. Repairs drag on. Emergency response promises don’t match reality. Complaints go nowhere.

We are paying for things that simply are not happening. This isn’t opinion. It’s lived experience.

GreenSquareAccord’s rising service charges were raised in Parliament by MP Layla Moran. The Prime Minister himself used the word “fleecehold”. Shortly after, GreenSquareAccord told the BBC they always provide residents with a detailed breakdown of charges when asked.

That is not true.

Residents have repeatedly asked for the legally required evidence under Section 22. Deadlines are missed. Evidence arrives late or not at all. Invoices are replaced with screenshots. Proper documents are swapped for summaries. Costs are backdated. Section 20 consultation limits are worked around. And residents are often told to “just go to tribunal” rather than offered any real engagement or resolution.

We know the maths is wrong. We know the law is not being followed. We know services are being charged for but not delivered.

So I asked a simple question: how much public money paid by taxpayers is being paid to this landlord?

Housing Benefit is taxpayers’ money. It exists to stop people becoming homeless. It is collected and paid out by councils, who then hand it over to housing associations like GreenSquareAccord.

Once it’s paid, councils don’t deliver the services. They don’t clean the blocks. They don’t maintain the buildings. They don’t respond to emergencies. They just pass over the money and trust that the landlord — in this case, GreenSquareAccord — will uphold their end of the agreement.

And that’s where this falls apart.

Using Freedom of Information requests, I asked councils how much Housing Benefit they’ve paid to GreenSquareAccord over the last three years, how much of that relates to service charges, and whether they ever check or challenge those charges.

Across just eleven councils, the total paid was £41,008,098.36 over three years. That is not a national total. Several councils refused to answer or haven’t replied yet. This figure will rise.

Here’s what some of the councils said.

Walsall Council paid £18,023,602.19. Officers can separate rent and service charges when assessing claims, but the council keeps no records showing whether increases are ever challenged. No records of incorrect payments. No standard process.

City of Wolverhampton Council paid £10,910,597.58. Rent and service charges are split at assessment, but again, no records of challenge. No data on incorrect payments. No standard checks.

Coventry City Council paid £3,807,288.79. Coventry is the exception. It confirmed it has challenged GreenSquareAccord’s charges and even restricted proposed increases for 2025–26. It also identified 47 cases where Housing Benefit had been paid on incorrect or overstated charges.

Most councils did nothing.

Gloucester City Council paid £2,199,079.65 and confirmed it does not separate rent and service charges in its systems. No challenges. No reviews.

West Oxfordshire District Council paid £2,029,197.47. No challenges. One single overpayment identified in five years.

Swindon Borough Council paid £1,821,938.87. No records of checks. No records of challenges.

Cherwell District Council paid £1,419,057.13. Charges are split at assessment, but there are no records of challenge, and the council confirmed incorrect payments have occurred.

South Oxfordshire District Council paid £613,719.74 and refused to say whether any checks or challenges have ever happened.

Even councils paying relatively small amounts admitted they don’t really check.

The pattern is clear.

Councils are not checking. They are not challenging. They are not recording. They are simply paying.

That means when GreenSquareAccord puts up service charges, Housing Benefit goes up too. When the charges are wrong, public money still flows. When residents push back, the system closes ranks.

And who carries the risk?

Residents who can’t sell their homes because service charges are unpredictable. Residents trapped in properties they can’t move from. Communities destabilised by rising costs. And taxpayers funding services that aren’t being delivered.

GreenSquareAccord is too big to be accountable and too broken to be trusted. Five years after the merger, under Ruth Cooke’s leadership, the promised improvements haven’t materialised. Strategies come and go. Failures remain. At some point, you have to stop throwing good money after bad.

Service charges are no longer a technical issue. They are a crisis issue. And councils, who should be the last line of defence for public money, are asleep at the wheel.

On 29 January, GreenSquareAccord wrote to me and several of my neighbours admitting that there were errors in their service charge calculations. I am still working through what those errors mean financially and will return to this once that work is complete. More importantly, when residents push back properly under Section 22 and the figures are finally laid bare, we will be able to see just how much public money could be saved if councils simply checked the numbers and applied basic sanity checks before paying out. At a time when councils like Birmingham City Council say they can no longer afford to pay bin workers and are cutting essential services, every penny matters. The question is no longer whether councils can afford to scrutinise service charges — it’s whether they can afford not to.

A more in-depth investigation into this issue is available on the Housing Sector website: https://www.housingsector.co.uk/blog/the-taxpayers-burden

GreenSquareAccord were given a clear right to reply and, once again, chose not to engage — this is the GSA way.