Reading GreenSquareAccord’s 2026 annual customer report, I was struck by how often the language returned to improvement. Across the report, “improve” and its related forms — including “improved”, “improving” and “improvements” — appeared 63 times. Words associated with listening appeared seven times, learning twice and trust five times. These counts include headings, quotations and repeated text. They tell us how the organisation presents itself, rather than how well it performs, but they prompted a question. Where do listening, learning and trust fit into all this promised improvement?
For me, those three things belong together. Hearing someone is not the same as listening to them. Listening takes patience and sometimes the courage to accept something uncomfortable. What matters next is whether you learn from it, correct mistakes and change direction when necessary. When residents can see that happening, there is a foundation for trust.
Trust also needs to work both ways. Residents need to trust their landlord to act, and landlords need to take residents seriously when they report something wrong. These are human relationships, even when they are described through corporate strategies, performance measures and annual reports.
Improvement is a worthwhile ambition. But when assurances repeatedly outpace delivery, the word begins to lose its meaning. Residents need to see what has improved, how it has changed their lives and whether that change will last. Otherwise, each new promise risks becoming another version of the last.
A landlord can listen without repeatedly printing the word. The question I have been asking for years is what happens afterwards. When residents tell GreenSquareAccord something is wrong, what changes as a result?
I ask as a resident who tried reporting problems, escalating them and taking part in customer engagement before creating the GreenSquareAccord Residents website. My experience belongs in this account, but it cannot speak for every resident. To assess Ruth Cooke’s years in charge, we also need the organisation’s strategies, annual reports, accounts and the findings of the bodies responsible for scrutinising it.
Read together, they show improvements worth recognising. They also show ambitions repeatedly reduced, service problems resurfacing after apologies, and published figures that do not always allow residents to follow what has changed. The question is how much of the promised improvement became something people could rely on.
An experienced leader and an inherited problem
Cooke arrived at GreenSquare as interim chief executive in February 2019 and was appointed permanently that May. A chartered accountant and corporate treasurer, she had been finance director and then chief executive of Midland Heart. She subsequently led Clarion for a short period in 2018, resigning on 2 October. Contemporary reporting cited personal reasons. The material reviewed for this article establishes no further explanation for that departure.
Her outside appointments included a Harworth non-executive directorship, which ended at its 2025 AGM, and a place on the National Housing Federation board. Her experience spanned finance, housing management and governance.
GreenSquare was already facing safety problems when she arrived. Regulatory intervention in 2019 concerned fire, gas and lift safety. It would be unfair to attribute every inherited defect to a newly appointed chief executive. But don’t take my word for it — just listen to Keir Starmer’s responses to difficult questions about his government’s successes, or lack thereof!
Ruth’s record should be judged by what happened once those problems were known, how recovery was managed and whether improvements lasted. GreenSquare’s return to G1 governance status in 2020 is part of that record.
In Oxford, where I live, my concerns were becoming more urgent. By April 2019, I was escalating problems involving lifts, leaks, building security and communication. These were practical problems affecting daily life, and the correspondence began well before there was a residents’ website.
The landlord’s handling of those concerns was later examined by the Housing Ombudsman. Its decision provides an independent assessment of issues I had been raising for years.
What Cooke knew and promised back in 2020
On 19 August 2020, Cooke wrote directly to me, acknowledging my concerns about resident safety and outstanding repairs. That response followed a lengthy effort to get those problems addressed. I had first emailed the customer service team. When that email went unanswered, I escalated it, copying in members of the senior leadership team and the board. That prompted a flurry of responses from Julianne Britton, then customer service director. It was my first positive engagement with GreenSquare. There was a clear list of outstanding actions, alongside apologies acknowledging that the service had fallen well below acceptable standards.
But promises went unfulfilled, deadlines passed and agreed actions remained outstanding. I escalated again, bringing senior figures back into the correspondence whenever progress stalled or emails went unanswered. I wanted to make sure the problems reached people with the authority to resolve them.
When Cooke responded, her email set out a programme of inspections and target dates, including mid-September for gutters, CCTV and the weak magnets that allowed communal entrance doors to be pulled open. It set an end-of-October target for gaps above windows and doors, and problems with dropped windows.
In subsequent correspondence, she explained the effect of pandemic restrictions on repairs and said colleagues would use their expertise to resolve matters. She would, she wrote, “keep a keen eye on the progress”. That was a commitment to oversight, with operational work delegated to her team.
On 27 August, Cooke followed up about the proposed merger and corporate plan. She said lessons had been learned from the regulator’s recommendations and described plans to transform repairs, improve customer contact and put resident feedback at the heart of decisions. The merger, she said, could create a stronger and more resilient organisation with more resources for local services and existing homes.
These exchanges introduced me to the corporate plans that would become a familiar feature of Ruth Cooke’s leadership. GreenSquare’s Simply Brilliant strategy had been introduced in 2019, with objectives to be achieved by 2023. In August 2020, Cooke described a three-year corporate plan intended to refocus the organisation on being a great landlord.
Following the merger in 2021 came Simply Brilliant Together. By November that year, Julianne Britton was explaining to me that GreenSquareAccord was in the first year of a five-year strategy. I had already spent more than two years raising problems. The organisation had a new plan, but residents were again being asked to give it time.
Then, in April 2023, came Simpler, Stronger, Better — another five-year strategy, this time running to 2028. GreenSquareAccord acknowledged that its ambition remained the same but said its approach needed to change. Once again, the promises included better repairs, investment in homes and greater involvement for customers.
The names changed, but the basic expectation remained remarkably modest — a housing association that maintained our homes, responded when things went wrong and acted on what residents told it.
Some disruption can fairly be attributed to the pandemic, and the merger changed the organisation these plans were intended to serve. But from my side of the correspondence, it felt as though the clock kept restarting. We were always near the beginning of something: a new strategy, a renewed approach, another journey towards becoming the landlord we had already been promised.
Simply Brilliant. Simply Brilliant Together. Simpler, Stronger, Better. The names changed, but the basic expectation remained remarkably modest — a housing association that maintained our homes, responded when things went wrong and acted on what residents told it. As I write this on Sunday 25 October 2026, my question is how much longer those essentials can remain ambitions for the next corporate plan.
And here we are, discussing their latest annual report, with improvement once again dominating the language, while listening, learning and rebuilding that much-needed trust receive far less attention.
But for now, back to November 2020. By then, I had compiled a 71-page report bringing together correspondence, complaints, photographs and feedback from neighbours. On 24 November, I sent it to Cooke and GreenSquare chair Robin Bailey, copying in Councillor Ed Turner and MP Anneliese Dodds. My covering email offered them an opportunity to respond, asked for written agreements with firm timescales and offered continued support.
The report recorded improvements as well as failures. I thanked GreenSquare for work on paving, hedges, electrics, basement security and mailboxes. In the covering email, I also praised the efforts of a housing officer. I wanted the remaining problems resolved and staff doing good work supported.
On 3 December, following a meeting that afternoon, Cooke acknowledged in writing that the concerns should have been resolved sooner and should not have required escalation. She apologised and discussed outstanding windows, security doors, CCTV and how the proposed work would be funded. She then invited me to apply for the customer panel and help shape improvements to service-charge communication.
These exchanges establish direct engagement with the chief executive before the merger and before the website existed. They also set out what I was being asked to expect: completed repairs, better communication and an opportunity to influence services.
I was not, as my wife likes to joke, asking for the moon on a stick. I was asking for the services I was paying for through a service charge that would keep increasing over the following years, while the service itself seemed to diminish.
What the merger promised
GreenSquare and Accord merged in April 2021. The new organisation presented greater scale as a way to strengthen its finances, invest in existing homes and provide more housing. Its customer strategy, Simply Brilliant Together, gave residents a set of expectations against which to judge the merger.
These are phrases and expressions that anyone who has been through a merger will have heard repeatedly. They are promises and commitments that still rear their ugly heads every time a merger between housing associations is discussed. The bigger the organisation, the more money it will have and the better it will be able to respond.
Yet what actually happens is that we lose the commitment, the trust, the ability to respond and the local connection. What was once a small housing association working within a community and serving it well becomes an organisation operating almost nationwide. Staff are made redundant, offices are closed and services are centralised. The people left are expected to respond to residents across an ever-wider area. The same number of people, twice the number of customers.
This time, Ruth and the team laid out a strategy that promised locally based teams, quick resolution of problems and an ambition to fix issues first time. It said customers knew best how services should be shaped, and it presented their involvement as a route to genuine accountability. By 2026, its measures of success included high customer satisfaction, high external ratings and at least 1,000 new homes a year.
These commitments matter because they allow us to ask specific questions. Which were delivered? Which were revised? When did residents learn that the original expectations would change?
The merged organisation’s first year exposed major safety-record gaps in the former Accord business. Hundreds of homes lacked current fire risk assessments, more than 10,000 had never had an electrical inspection, and communal areas lacked asbestos surveys. The regulator found a breach of the Home Standard and a risk of serious harm to tenants.
The Regulator of Social Housing subsequently used GreenSquareAccord as a named case study in its Consumer Regulation Review 2021–2022, published on 14 July 2022. Under “Managing health and safety compliance when organisations merge”, paragraph 3.8 stated:
“The case study shows the importance of ensuring that appropriate due diligence is carried out ahead of a planned merger”
The GreenSquareAccord case follows immediately below. This was the regulator itself drawing attention to the importance of pre-merger scrutiny in the context of these failures. These were precisely the liabilities the merger checks should have identified and accounted for before the organisations joined together.
There is a financial context here too. In May 2020, before the merger, GreenSquare had completed financing arrangements involving around £350 million of existing debt, £140 million of new revolving credit facilities and £50 million of new borrowing. Trowers & Hamlins, advising on the property-charging aspects, reported “carrying out due diligence on over 6,500 properties within a short timeframe”. That statement concerned the financing work, rather than the subsequent merger checks, but it demonstrates the scale and speed of the financial activity taking place.
I suspect the prospect of a larger portfolio, with additional assets and rental income, formed part of the financial thinking behind the planned merger. We have not established whether the 2020 funding depended on that prospect. But the question matters because the homes subsequently brought into the organisation carried responsibilities and costs as well as financial opportunities.
With GreenSquare dominant on the merged board, identifying these as problems inherited from Accord could not absolve the leadership of responsibility for what it had agreed to take on. What had the merger checks established, what had they missed, and how much had been budgeted to put those homes right?
For GreenSquare residents, the consequence was another demand on the resources we had been told would improve our homes and services. How much of the financial benefit promised from the merger was absorbed by addressing the former Accord business’s safety failures? And what happened to the improvements we were already waiting for while those problems were being resolved?
The customer report acknowledged that safety recovery had displaced other plans, including some replacement kitchens, bathrooms and windows. The merger had promised greater capacity; its early operational reality required resources to be redirected towards bringing existing responsibilities under control.
What the Ombudsman found in my case and the overuse of empty PR
As time flew by and repairs seemed to slow, GreenSquareAccord took another approach. They brought in a communications director, Steve Hayes. Steve’s initial remit was to raise the profile of GreenSquareAccord, presenting the organisation and its people as experts in their field. Suddenly, we were seeing polished articles and commentary appearing in the housing trade press, including Inside Housing.
Among these stories was the celebration of a shipping container in a car park as the answer to delayed repairs. There was also support for Pride Month in June, followed by a backlash in which GreenSquareAccord was accused of pinkwashing and jumping on the bandwagon.
They also began putting themselves forward for countless awards. This would become a recurring feature of Steve Hayes’s tenure — nominations for himself or others, followed by celebrations of their success. Our later reporting on The Trials of Mrs Tranter would raise serious questions about the substance behind the claims being promoted. These were paid-for events, yet the resulting publicity was plastered across the internet as proof that GreenSquareAccord was not only a successful housing association, but one managed by experts.
As I continued to raise issues and ask questions, GreenSquareAccord, following the merger, took a different approach. They were no longer appreciating my concerns or acknowledging their shortcomings. Instead, I became the problem and was placed on a contact management plan.
At that point, I made my intention clear: if they restricted my contact, I would put the details of my unresolved issues online. Subsequently, the GreenSquareAccord Residents Support website was born.
It became a way to document problems and hear from other people experiencing difficulties. It also recorded work done well, including praise for a properly arranged fire-alarm survey visit and improvements to entrance doors.
The most significant independent assessment of my own case came on 31 March 2023. In complaint 202110891, the Housing Ombudsman found severe maladministration in the handling of repairs, maladministration in record keeping and complaint handling, and service failure in communication. It also found no maladministration in communication about scaffolding.
That distinction matters. The decision did not uphold every criticism of every aspect of the landlord’s work. It did, however, identify opportunities to address problems much earlier. Expressions of dissatisfaction in April 2019 and January 2020 should have been treated as complaints. When the formal procedure was eventually used, the Ombudsman found that the internal reason was to manage my communications rather than use the complaint as an opportunity to address my concerns.
The decision also examined an acknowledgement GSA had already made about communication, ownership and record-keeping problems between departments. The landlord had not explained how it would address those wider weaknesses. An assurance that lessons would be learned had not been accompanied by sufficient evidence of the changes needed to prevent recurrence.
The Ombudsman ordered £2,050 in compensation, an apology, an offer to meet, a specialist lift assessment and reviews of records and communication. It also required GSA to consider equivalent compensation for other residents affected by specified communal failures.
Chief Operating Officer Maxine Espley apologised on 12 May 2023 for the failings identified by the Housing Ombudsman and their impact on me. But the brief letter described those failures as matters the organisation “could have handled much better”. It identified no specific failing and set out no corrective action. To me, it read as an apology issued to satisfy a requirement, rather than a meaningful acceptance of responsibility.
At this point, I think it is fair to add that, as I understood it, all correspondence, including emails and letters, was being drafted jointly by Sophie Atkinson, head of governance, and Steve Hayes in PR. The focus was not on resolving the issues, but on downplaying them.
A meeting was subsequently offered, but agreement on its terms was not reached. GSA’s later Stage 2 response records an invitation on 19 September 2023, conditional on an undertaking about acceptable behaviour, and a reply from me the following day challenging that requirement and asking for Cooke to attend.
The conditions also prohibited recording and provided for the meeting to end if I became abusive. I objected to being required to give behavioural assurances when I was seeking discussion of service failures. For the record, I had never been abusive to their staff. I had highlighted shortcomings and challenged statements, but that is not abuse.
I wanted to record the meeting because GreenSquareAccord had a long history of failing to provide meeting minutes. Follow-up actions were lost and agreements failed to materialise. A recording would provide a reliable record of what had been promised, allowing me to demonstrate those commitments if they were not fulfilled.
GSA considered the conditions reasonable because of its concerns about my contact with staff and social media activity. The meeting did not take place. The Ombudsman had ordered an offer to meet; its order did not itself require Cooke to attend.
Wider warnings alongside genuine progress
In September 2023, the Ombudsman announced six severe maladministration findings across three other cases involving pests, noise and repairs, and announced a special investigation. Cooke apologised and said GSA had complied with the orders and strengthened its complaint handling. These were separate cases from mine.
There is a wider issue with Housing Ombudsman investigations here. The delays give organisations a ready-made get-out-of-jail-free card. With the Ombudsman facing an exceptional workload, investigations can take 12 to 18 months, sometimes almost two years. By the time the findings are published, a chief executive can say these are historical problems: procedures have since been streamlined, practices have changed and improvements have been implemented. What we are discussing, residents are told, has already been resolved.
Historical does not mean resolved, and a delayed finding should not mean the failure no longer needs addressing.
Yet, as we have seen, that is so often not the case. The same issues repeat themselves again and again. The passage of time allows failures to be presented as old news, even when the underlying problems remain. Historical does not mean resolved, and a delayed finding should not mean the failure no longer needs addressing.
Where is the accountability when an adverse finding results in little more than a spell of bad press? If an organisation can absorb the reputational damage through PR and marketing while residents continue to experience the same failures, what has actually changed?
Don’t take my word for it. Cooke’s response to the special investigation illustrates the point. In a statement published on 3 October 2024, she emphasised that many of the cases were “more than two years old” and said that “many of the challenges identified are now either resolved or are in the process of being resolved”. She described learning from complaints and sharing lessons with colleagues as fundamental to the organisation’s work. She also accepted that changes should have been made more quickly and acknowledged that further improvement was needed.
The same investigation, however, found that similar issues continued to cause dissatisfaction and complaints among residents surveyed. In its announcement accompanying the report, published that same day, the Ombudsman expressly warned against treating them as “historic issues that are now all resolved”. The cases may have been old, but the problems they exposed had not necessarily gone away.
In November 2023, GSA returned to G1 governance status. It was a positive regulatory milestone. In December that year, however, Michael Gove wrote directly to Cooke about the six severe findings and the special investigation. He criticised the delays and treatment of vulnerable residents and demanded better service. Governance recovery and serious criticism of resident outcomes existed within the same period; they concerned different aspects of performance.
The special investigation, published in October 2024, examined 30 cases determined between August 2023 and February 2024, mainly concerning events from March 2020 to January 2023. It reported maladministration rates of 93% for complaint handling and 79% for property condition in the reviewed findings. Those figures do not describe the proportion of all GSA residents receiving a poor service.
The report explained that the informal “resolve” stage distorted complaint reporting and could prevent leadership from understanding the extent of dissatisfaction. It also recognised GSA’s engagement and changes, including revised policies. In February 2025, GSA announced that follow-up monitoring had ended and the required actions had been completed. Those improvements belong in any fair assessment.
Yet in September 2025, responding to a further complaint from me, GSA acknowledged another gap between departments. Repairs staff had not notified the home ownership team about planned work. Some residents without email addresses had missed updates. GSA said it subsequently wrote to them and escalated the process problems. As recently as October 2026, GreenSquareAccord was still acknowledging possible gaps in communication between its Complaints and Finance teams.
This later admission does not prove that every reform failed. It does show why residents are entitled to ask how the organisation checked that its earlier learning had changed everyday practice.
The dispute over my conduct
During these years, my relationship with GSA became increasingly adversarial. There were contact restrictions, civil proceedings and an arrest. My position is that persistent communication arose from persistent problems. GSA says its restrictions and legal action were necessary to protect staff from conduct it considered unacceptable. Yet the examples it provided did not demonstrate that my behaviour was unacceptable. The witness statements of Julianne Britton and Sophie Atkinson, alongside my responses, warrant closer examination.
The witness statements and my responses were put before a judge. They presented sharply different accounts of the same history. GSA described my emails as excessive and “scattergun”; I explained that I had deliberately contacted people responsible for unresolved repairs and safety failures. It described my support for other residents as misdirecting complaints and creating additional work; I explained that those residents had already tried its own channels without getting their problems resolved. Britton said she had overseen completion of agreed actions, while my response identified continuing problems and the subsequent need for Ombudsman intervention. To me, the organisation was presenting the effort required to pursue its failures as evidence that I was the problem.
The proceedings also brought in objections concerning copyright, photographs, branding and the use of Ruth Cooke’s name. The judge was strongly critical of GSA’s approach, particularly the suggestion that Cooke should be shielded from being named and criticised as chief executive of a housing association. My argument was that I was holding the leadership accountable for services residents were paying for. GSA characterised that activity as targeting individuals and disrupting its work. That distinction — between protecting people from unacceptable conduct and using legal pressure to suppress legitimate scrutiny — would become central to my concerns about the proceedings and the wider issue of SLAPPs.
In November 2023, I gave undertakings containing restrictions on specified website content, contact and the naming of staff, with exceptions. The document stated an expiry in May 2025. Later enforcement proceedings were disputed. The undertakings and the subsequent disputed enforcement are distinct parts of that history.
GSA alleged that I had breached the undertakings, including by leaving historic material online. I disputed that interpretation. I had not undertaken to remove or redact all previously published pages. At the preliminary enforcement hearing, the matter was scheduled for a later hearing because the proceedings carried the possibility of a custodial sentence. The judge pointed out that the undertakings contained no requirement to remove historic pages. GSA’s barrister responded, “No, but there ought to have been.” That exchange captured the central problem. What GSA wished it had secured was different from what I had actually promised the court.
The allegations also changed as the proceedings progressed. The later schedule included claims concerning links to historic articles, LinkedIn profiles and replacement webpages. My view was that GSA was shifting its argument as weaknesses in its original allegations became apparent. At the subsequent hearing, its enforcement application was dismissed and the organisation was ordered to pay the costs.
Yet, as of 25 October 2026, GSA’s website still carried its article of 10 November 2023, headed “Successful court outcome protects GSA customers”. It presented the original undertakings as a success and blamed my activities for diverting resources from residents. The article contained no update explaining that the later enforcement application had been dismissed or that the undertakings had expired in May 2025. Readers were being shown GSA’s account of the original outcome without the subsequent history.
This was another example of how GreenSquareAccord, with Steve Hayes at the keyboard, presented failure as success. This costly legal action had not delivered the outcome they originally sought. They accepted my proposed undertakings before we even appeared before a judge. It was me who insisted that we should have our day in court. Once there, I felt it became clear that the judge was not going to give them everything they wanted, and I negotiated narrower undertakings.
Those narrower terms would become important when GSA later alleged that I had breached them. The strategy was to secure undertakings and then pursue me for an alleged breach, exposing me to contempt proceedings and the possibility of imprisonment.
Fortunately, I had kept my evidence and responses, and I had been careful to comply. My wife even stuck the undertakings on our fridge door. Whenever I had a question or was about to publish something, I could check the wording.
I was also confident I had not breached the undertakings because I had been careful about the terms I offered. For example, I had used the domain ruthcooke.co.uk knowing it could later become a negotiating point, so I was happy to agree to disable it.
When GSA wanted to limit the people I could name to those appearing on its senior leadership webpage, I pushed back. Anyone with “Director” in their job title should also be included. To me, this was not simply about Steve Hayes protecting GreenSquareAccord. It was about protecting his own reputation. He did not appear on the senior leadership webpage, but he did have “Director” in his title.
I maintained that I had not breached the undertakings. The enforcement application was dismissed, and the undertakings themselves expired in May 2025.
Meanwhile, the GreenSquareAccord Residents Support website continued to grow. What I called the Barbra Streisand effect brought more attention to the very material GSA wanted restricted. That included interest from ITV, more website traffic and greater support. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism would later take an interest in my case as an example of concerns about SLAPPs.
But before that, we need to turn to Steve Hayes and my arrest.
In August 2024, six officers arrived at my home at around 1 a.m. I was arrested on suspicion of harassment and taken to Abingdon police station because the one in Cowley was busy. I was held for several hours in a cell while a solicitor was summoned. My solicitor advised that, as I was telling the truth, we would answer the questions rather than respond to everything with “no comment”. That is what I did.
In my view, there was very little to support an accusation of harassment against Steve Hayes. GSA would later distance itself from responsibility for the arrest, saying that a colleague had complained personally and that the police had made their own decisions. Yet my bail conditions included a restriction on mentioning GreenSquareAccord. I objected to that restriction and immediately posted about the organisation after my release.
When pressed for evidence, the only email the police put to me was one I had sent to Hayes before the court action and the undertakings restricting direct contact. Under those later undertakings, I had agreed to use the customer service inbox. That was fine with me, as I already had an established website on which to publish and share material.
The email amounted to me saying that I could see he was attending an event and asking whether we could meet for a coffee and a chat. Through a subject access request, I later discovered that Hayes had contacted the event organisers to ask whether I would be attending and had been told that I would not.
The accusation that I was stalking him at events had narrowed to one event — and he already knew I would not be there. What had I actually done? Asked whether he fancied meeting for a coffee and a conversation. Hardly harassment.
The police subsequently took no further action. The enforcement proceedings had been dismissed, and the harassment allegation resulted in no further action. Meanwhile, the housing problems I had been raising remained the reason I had contacted them in the first place.
Pressure beyond the landlord
The wider sector’s response deserves scrutiny too. As documented in Does Housing Have an Events Problem? Part II, David Stevenson supplied screenshots of private exchanges he initiated with Cooke and NHF chief executive Kate Henderson. Henderson expressed sympathy, said she had blocked my account and offered to connect him with the NHF’s media team. Cooke referred to GSA’s court action, describing it as “a pretty imperfect solution all in all”, and offered to speak to the police if it would help. She also wrote that “most people have seen him for what he is”.
These are the exchanges as supplied by Stevenson. They do not establish what either woman subsequently did. Neither exchange showed an independent examination of what I had published or identified a specific factual error. Stevenson nevertheless used the messages to increase the pressure on me, making claims about their contents that went further than the screenshots supported.
Sympathy for someone reporting distress is understandable. But where was the same curiosity about the evidence? Where was the question about whether legitimate criticism was being presented as harassment? The chief executive of my landlord was discussing me as someone whose criticism could be dismissed, despite the independently documented failures I had been reporting.
The pressure extended to the local press. In an email to the Oxford Mail dated 19 February 2024, Steve Hayes challenged its reporting of residents’ fire-safety concerns and objected to comparisons with Grenfell. He said GSA would not seek a published apology on that occasion, but warned that it would consider a formal complaint to the press regulator, IPSO, if similar coverage appeared again. He also described residents as “troublemakers” and urged the newspaper to exercise greater due diligence before publishing their claims. To me, this shows how protecting GSA’s reputation extended beyond challenging residents directly to putting pressure on the newspapers reporting their concerns. Since then, I have received no response from the Oxford Mail when raising community problems affecting GSA residents. I cannot establish the reason for that silence, but the consequence is another closed door for residents seeking to have their concerns heard.
A smaller development programme
The post-merger customer reports show repeated development shortfalls. The 2022 report expected 932 completions in the following year; the next reported 451. A subsequent forecast of 655 was followed by 510. A forecast of 438 was followed by 355. The documents explain financial pressures and the need to invest in existing homes. Those are relevant reasons, but the resulting reduction in the programme is still an outcome residents should be able to follow.
The financial statements provide a separate, consistently described measure. Affordable additions fell from 686 in 2021/22 to 121 in 2025/26. That is an 82.4% reduction. Customer-report completions and affordable additions are differently described measures, so this comparison is separate from the customer-report series and the original ambition of 1,000 new homes annually.
LoCaL Homes offers another specific example of a changed strategy. The factory was once presented as a route towards delivering the whole development programme by 2028/29.
There was no shortage of publicity or political enthusiasm when LoCaL Homes opened its new factory in October 2018. Housing Minister Kit Malthouse performed the official opening, accompanied by Wendy Morton. Headlines celebrated a £1 million investment and a factory with the capacity to produce more than 1,000 homes a year. These were promises worth putting your name to.
The endorsements continued. In February 2024, GreenSquareAccord publicised another visit involving Morton and West Midlands Mayor Andy Street. Morton described LoCaL Homes as “shaping the future of housing solutions”. Eddie Hughes also publicly congratulated the business on gaining government accreditation, writing, “This is great news! Congratulations to all involved.”
Their voting records deserve attention alongside those endorsements. Malthouse, Hughes and Morton had all voted against publishing government analysis of Universal Credit’s effects on household incomes and benefit debts in October 2018. In October 2020, all three voted against extending holiday free school meal funding until Easter 2021. The speeches and photographs celebrating housing and opportunity sit alongside choices made in Parliament about support for the people living in those homes.
Then, in January 2026, GSA announced that the factory would close after it failed to find a viable buyer. The business was losing money, and 35 employees faced losing their jobs. The accounts say production ended in May 2026. GSA’s explanation was that it could not continue subsidising losses and had to prioritise existing homes. Where was the same political enthusiasm for explaining what had gone wrong? Who was asking what it had cost, what would happen to those workers and how the promises had unravelled? There had been plenty of people willing to associate themselves with the success story. Where were they when it failed?
The promise of community ownership
Stirchley provides a different test of the relationship between promises and decisions. GSA’s 2024 annual report celebrated progress on a development intended to provide 39 homes and three commercial units for co-operative ownership. That promise had already featured in its publicity around the June 2023 groundbreaking, attended by local MP Steve McCabe. GSA’s Carl Taylor promised homes “firmly in the hands of the local community”. In February 2025, McCabe’s successor, Al Carns, and West Midlands Mayor Richard Parker attended the topping-out ceremony. GSA again stated that Stirchley Co-operative Development would own and manage the building. Another council delegation followed that April, accompanied by more publicity about community ownership.
By March 2026, GSA had announced that it would retain ownership instead. Cooke said GSA could not absorb the £1.16 million gap between development costs and the co-operative’s offer without compromising investment elsewhere. SCD disputed responsibility for the increased costs. The ownership model was central to the project because it was intended to place long-term control with the residents and businesses. It was also central to the publicity GSA had repeatedly used to celebrate its involvement.
Some political supporters did return when things went wrong. Carns raised the dispute in Parliament, and Parker continued supporting co-operative ownership. In an August open letter, Birmingham council leaders questioned GSA’s social purpose and expressed serious reservations about future partnership working, while acknowledging the need to recover construction costs. This was substantial political criticism. GSA maintained that protecting its wider investment responsibilities required it to recover those costs. But the photographs and celebrations had already given the organisation its publicity. The community was left fighting for the ownership that publicity had repeatedly assured them would be theirs.
Who checks the service charges?
Whilst expressing reservations about future partnerships and working with GreenSquareAccord, Birmingham City Council had, as Freedom of Information responses revealed, paid over £43 million to GreenSquareAccord in housing benefit over the previous three years.
This was split between rent and service charges. The Freedom of Information request also asked whether there had been any interrogation of the figures. Had they checked them, done any sanity checking? Had they reviewed what they were spending and checked that it was correct? Birmingham City Council said it had not, and there was no record of it interrogating the figures.
As such, Birmingham City Council, a council that often claims it is broke and has been in an ongoing dispute over its inability to pay its bin men, paid £43 million over a three-year period in housing benefit to GreenSquareAccord.
When I interrogated my own service charge figures, we found errors. GreenSquareAccord admitted those errors once we challenged them, and there was a 3% reduction. This is noteworthy because 3% to us is a couple of hundred quid over a year. Apply that percentage to a larger sum over three years, and you have a serious chunk of change. That does not mean the same errors occurred in Birmingham’s payments, but it shows why the figures deserve scrutiny.
An open letter was sent to Birmingham City Council and published, asking whether, as it no longer had confidence in GreenSquareAccord, it would be checking those previous figures. Birmingham City Council failed to respond.
Can residents follow the figures?
There is also a problem with the consistency of the information used to describe progress. The 2025 customer report said 84% of repairs were completed within target. The following report used 78% as its previous-year figure, making its current 84% appear to be an improvement. Right-first-time performance was originally published as 87%, but the next report used 93% for that previous year and reported a current result of 87%.
We should not have to become forensic accountants to work out whether our repairs service has improved.
Repairs satisfaction similarly moved from an originally published 90% to a retrospective comparator of 92%, against a current result of 90%. These differences do not establish deliberate manipulation. They require an explanation of whether the figures were corrected, redefined or printed incorrectly. Residents cannot reliably assess a trend when its baseline changes without a clear reconciliation. We should not have to become forensic accountants to work out whether our repairs service has improved.
Some progress is identifiable. Capitalised investment in existing homes rose from £22.6 million to £31.3 million in the latest accounts. The customer report recorded more kitchens, bathrooms, roofs and heating upgrades than the previous year. Reported overall satisfaction improved, although survey changes and differing values between publications need explanation. Community Impact Fund awards also increased, with much of the latest funding attributed to suppliers.
Safety information requires equally careful labels. Completing a fire risk assessment is different from completing its remedial actions. The latest accounts still recorded approximately 300 overdue fire-risk actions at year end. A headline percentage needs to tell residents which part of that process it measures. Knowing what needs fixing and actually fixing it are two different things.
So whilst there may be some successes here, the message is lost through fumbled communication. Is it a success, or a different grading? Is it a mistake, or something worth celebrating? Or am I being overcritical?
And bear in mind, GreenSquareAccord wrote these reports. They weren’t written by me or some external third party. When writing the following year’s report, you’d expect them to check the figures they’d published previously. After all, we place a level of trust in those figures being correct. When the following report contradicts them without explanation, that trust is lost again.
And without that trust, these figures may as well have been plucked from the air. I’m not saying they were. I’m saying the confused reporting once again throws a cloak of mystery over what might be successes, or what could be construed as failures.
Financial strength and the board’s responsibility
The 2026 accounts report a £47.642 million operating surplus and a group deficit for the year of £745,000, before other comprehensive income. Gains on property disposals contributed £24.859 million to operating surplus. Excluding non-recurring costs and disposal gains, operating surplus fell from £30.508 million in the restated comparison to £26.680 million. The operating surplus includes those disposal gains; the deficit also reflects financing and other costs.
The accounts also disclose a £3.976 million prior-period accounting error involving costs incorrectly recognised as recoverable from tenants through service charges. The correction increased the previous year’s group deficit from £13.603 million to £17.579 million. This does not establish that residents actually paid £3.976 million too much. GSA needs to explain which services and homes were affected, whether incorrect demands were issued and whether any credits are due.
On 7 October 2026, the regulator downgraded GSA to G3 for governance and V3 for viability. It identified weaknesses in financial governance, information, risk management and internal controls, alongside insufficient evidence of sustained improvement. Its viability assessment highlighted dependence on social-home disposals and future savings. The existing C2 consumer grade was not reassessed.
Cooke and GSA accepted the findings, described an improvement plan and said services would continue as normal. GSA remained compliant with lender covenants, but the regulator warned that continued compliance depended on significant disposals, cost reductions and transformation programmes. The downgrade was not an insolvency finding.
The board’s accountability belongs alongside the chief executive’s. Average group staffing fell from 2,823 full-time equivalents in 2022 to 1,486 in 2026, partly reflecting changes in the business. That is not a redundancy count. Over the same period, disclosed chief executive emoluments, excluding pension contributions, rose from £275,327 to £336,785. These figures are not basic salary. The accounts reserve decisions on chief executive remuneration to the board.
What listening would need to show
The record contains substantial work on homes, reported satisfaction gains and recognised improvements in complaint handling. It also shows recurring failures, reduced ambitions and a serious deterioration in regulatory standing. The leadership question is why improvements were not sustained across the organisation. Cooke’s record includes inherited problems, recovery work and decisions made over more than seven years. The relevant boards approved strategies, assessed risks and judged executive performance throughout that period.
It is often said that success has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan. We have seen plenty of people willing to celebrate the promises. Yet the failures are also well documented. The regulator’s latest judgement explicitly states that challenges arising from the merger remain and that the actions taken over the past five years have had limited effectiveness. At what point does that record require the board to question whether Cooke remains the right person to lead the organisation, given her performance, her response to criticism and the failure to deliver lasting change?
For me, listening means being able to trace what happened after a resident raised a concern. How was it recorded? Who took responsibility? When was the work completed? What changed if the same failure recurred? Cooke’s emails from 2020 show that those questions reached her directly. The later findings show why residents continued asking them.
What I want is effective governance, independent scrutiny and a board that holds Ruth Cooke accountable for her failures. While she remains chief executive, someone must exercise meaningful oversight of her decisions, her performance and her response to criticism. The board has the responsibility and authority to do that. It needs to use them.
Without that accountability, I see no reason to believe the pattern will change. Residents have heard enough assurances about improvement. We need leadership that delivers, a board that intervenes when it does not, and consequences when failures persist.
Still trusted with more
While GreenSquareAccord works to address its regulatory downgrade, Walsall Council is proposing to award it a domestic abuse accommodation contract worth up to £1.4 million. As our reporting explains, cabinet members are due to consider the proposal on 28 October. It would provide £700,000 for an initial two years from January 2027, with the possibility of a further two-year extension.
This is a service for people escaping abuse, including families with children. The existing provision comprises eight refuge units and 19 dispersed accommodation units across the borough. For those who need it, the quality and reliability of that support can make an enormous difference to their safety and their ability to rebuild their lives.
Walsall’s report acknowledges GreenSquareAccord’s G3 governance and V3 financial viability grades. The council says it has considered the findings, undertaken due diligence and is satisfied about this particular scheme. It points to enhanced contract management, including monthly performance and safeguarding reviews, monitoring of property standards and complaints, and financial assurance.
The council also makes a reasonable point about continuity. Changing providers could mean transferring accommodation arrangements, specialist support and active cases involving vulnerable people. Its report says the market is limited and argues that a full competitive procurement could create disruption. These considerations deserve to be taken seriously.
But so do the regulator’s findings. Weaknesses in governance, financial information, risk management and internal controls concern the organisation responsible for keeping services running. They raise legitimate questions about its ability to withstand further pressure, maintain staffing and investment, and deliver the assurances on which commissioners rely.
GSA’s published response accepts the findings and promises further improvements. The difficulty is that the regulator had already considered its reviews and improvement programmes and found insufficient evidence of sustainable improvement. That makes evidence of delivery particularly important when another public body is considering a commitment lasting potentially four years.
The proposed award would increase the annual contract value from £300,000 to £350,000. The council attributes the additional spending to children’s therapeutic provision and associated costs. There is a clear public interest in properly funding that support. There is an equally clear public interest in knowing how the council has tested the provider’s financial resilience and what arrangements would protect residents if its position deteriorated.
The council says it will monitor performance and financial standing, escalate significant concerns and make the optional extension dependent on satisfactory assurance. Those commitments should be capable of scrutiny. What evidence will demonstrate that the service remains protected? What would trigger intervention? What alternative arrangements could be put in place if GSA could no longer deliver?
Continuity matters. But what evidence is sufficient to keep entrusting public services to an organisation whose earlier improvement efforts have not demonstrated lasting results? And what would have to happen before those commissioning decisions changed?
Time for accountability
We are leaving Ruth Cooke in charge of an organisation that does more than provide homes. It provides care and support. It provides refuge for people fleeing domestic abuse. It is responsible for services relied upon by older members of our communities.
I know from working with one such community close to me that residents there have also faced unreliable lifts, unsafe garden paths, inadequate garden maintenance, problems with washing and drying machines, and antisocial behaviour. Their concerns too often go unheard. How many others go unheard? How many people, unlike me, buckle at the first threat of legal action? How many think they are alone in raising these issues, or that the problems affect only them? How many are bullied, threatened or falsely accused of harassment?
And why does the wider sector support this response to criticism? The Chartered Institute of Housing supported Steve Hayes and his version of events. My arrest resulted in no further action, yet the portrayal of him as a victim and me as the problem continued.
During these years of failure, Ruth Cooke also held a place on the National Housing Federation’s board. I struggle to reconcile the conduct described in this article with the standards its own code of conduct promotes. She has now formally stood down. The NHF’s announcement does not attribute her departure to GSA’s failures, and I cannot claim that it was a consequence of them. But her departure does not answer the question of how the sector scrutinises the people it elevates.
My case did not remain a private dispute between a resident and his landlord. GSA’s treatment of me was raised in the House of Commons, and I attended a parliamentary discussion about SLAPPs, the use of legal action to silence public participation. ITV also took an interest. Outside the housing sector, people were prepared to examine whether the actions taken against me were attempts to suppress legitimate criticism. Within it, Ruth Cooke, Steve Hayes and Sophie Atkinson presented my conduct as the problem. That contrast matters. Why were people outside the sector prepared to question the organisation’s actions while people within it appeared more willing to dismiss the resident challenging them?
The organisation’s failures recede into the background, while the person reporting them becomes the problem.
The contrast with the public language about listening and learning is stark. What else is said about residents behind closed doors? How far does the private response to criticism depart from the image promoted by communications teams? Who challenges that response when the resident is not in the room?
To me, this is the DARVO playbook in action. Deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. The organisation’s failures recede into the background, while the person reporting them becomes the problem. And when sector relationships are built around contracts, purchase orders and opportunities to work together, who is prepared to challenge the organisation signing the cheques? Who holds it accountable when others stand to profit from this not-for-profit?
Promises cannot keep outweighing the record of what actually happened.
I believe this article gives a balanced assessment of Ruth Cooke’s tenure at GreenSquareAccord. It recognises inherited problems, genuine work and improvements alongside the failures. Having read that record, do you think the sector still has a place for her leadership? Do you think it has an accountability problem? Can it change while remaining so attached to old behaviours, so resistant to criticism and so willing to celebrate intentions before outcomes?
Aspirations have their place. We are allowed to dream. But failures must count too. Promises cannot keep outweighing the record of what actually happened.
For me, this is why Cooke survives and housing continues to fail. A sector too invested in protecting its own, and in profiting from the not-for-profit, keeps treating the people reporting failures as the problem. If you cannot address those failures, it is time to go, get out of the way and let someone else do the job.
Time’s up, Ruth Cooke. Time to go.
Right of reply
Housing Sector invited the organisations and individuals discussed in this article to comment and identify factual corrections before publication. The following responses were received.
Regulator of Social Housing
Asked about board accountability and how it assesses whether improvements have become embedded, the regulator said, “The board is responsible for making sure a landlord meets the expected standards and delivers safe, well-managed homes for tenants.”
It added, “When we assess whether improvements are embedded, we look for evidence that changes are delivering sustained results in practice.” The regulator said the board remained accountable “not just for delivering an improvement plan, but for ensuring weaknesses are properly understood, addressed and prevented from recurring through effective governance, risk management and assurance arrangements”.
Al Carns, MP for Birmingham Selly Oak
Carns, whose constituency includes the Stirchley development, supplied a statement about housing associations’ commitments to communities. He said, “Housing associations have a responsibility to be accountable to the communities they serve. When commitments are made to residents, those commitments must be taken seriously and followed through. Communities deserve transparency about decisions that affect their homes, clear communication when circumstances change, and meaningful engagement when disputes arise.”
He added, “I will continue to support the Stirchley community in seeking clarity over the ownership arrangements at the Stirchley Cooperative Development, and in ensuring that the commitments made to residents are properly addressed.”
Richard Parker, Mayor of the West Midlands
A spokesperson for Richard Parker said the mayor wanted the project transferred to Stirchley Co-operative Development as originally agreed. The spokesperson said, “The Mayor believes Green Square Accord must fulfil its obligations. His view is that it’s not acceptable for a large housing provider to walk away from its commitments because it failed to manage the costs and budgets of a project it was responsible for and then expect a small community organisation to carry the consequences.”
The spokesperson said Parker had called on GSA to agree a reasonable fixed purchase price, absorb a meaningful share of the cost overruns and help close the remaining funding gap. The mayor was also exploring whether West Midlands Combined Authority resources could help find a way forward.
Birmingham City Council
The council emphasised that its comments about GSA were specific to Stirchley. It said it supported community-led housing, wanted the original scheme to proceed and was providing financial and operational support to the co-operative in its negotiations with GSA.
A spokesperson said, “We will continue to act as an enabler whilst these issues are ongoing with a view to reach a resolution. This will require all organisations to act in a flexible and reasonable way to provide the best possible outcome for the local area.”
In a further response concerning housing benefit, the council stressed that this was a means-tested benefit claimed by residents and could not be withheld because the council disagreed with a landlord’s handling of a particular situation. It said failing to pay benefit lawfully owed could breach its statutory obligations and leave residents in debt. Payment should not be interpreted as support for GSA’s approach to Stirchley.
The council also said it did not govern local providers’ service charges and pointed to the Regulator of Social Housing’s role in addressing breaches of the Rent Standard. Its response distinguished the administration of residents’ benefit claims from the separate dispute over the development.
Harworth
Responding through its communications representative, Harworth confirmed that Ruth Cooke joined its board as a non-executive director in March 2019 and retired at the company’s AGM in May 2025. This confirmed the biographical information included in the article.
Stirchley Co-operative Development
The co-operative, which is seeking community ownership of the development, responded to the invitation but declined to comment further at this time.
No substantive response had been received from GreenSquareAccord, Steve Hayes, the National Housing Federation or the Chartered Institute of Housing at the time of writing.