GreenSquareAccord tenants in Biddestone fought to keep their homes, and although the landlord withdrew its plans to sell them, one resident says the uncertainty drove her family away.
Housing Sector has reported on this before. In an episode of our podcast called The Human Cost, I spoke to Clair Southgate, a volunteer vicar and teaching assistant. GreenSquareAccord had told her it intended to sell the home she’d lived in for more than 20 years, and the prospect of losing it put her hopes of staying in her parish in doubt. Watch the interview
I’ve met GreenSquareAccord chief executive Ruth Cooke once, in a meeting with Rachel Crownshaw. I remember telling Cooke that she might call the properties her stock, but to the people who live in them, they’re their homes. She seemed genuinely taken aback, and that conversation came back to me as I read what residents in Biddestone had been told about theirs.
I wondered then, as I do now, how much Ruth Cooke’s background in finance shaped the way she saw those homes. She had been finance director at Midland Hart, and what stayed with me was the language of stock, assets and price tags.
But of course, it isn’t stock to residents. It’s where we educate our children, where we love and where we grow our family. It’s where we live, learn, eat and breathe, and more than that, it’s where we rest from the sometimes cruel and wicked world.
It is our home.
A letter saying her home would be sold
In April 2024, people in Biddestone began talking about the possible sales, and one resident said people had started asking her whether she’d been given notice to leave. On 4 April, one resident wrote to the housing association, telling GSA that another property on her street was already up for auction after the person who lived there had died, and asking what it planned to do with her home.
GSA told then MP James Gray that it had let her family down through unacceptable delays and poor service.
It was hardly an unreasonable request, and it brings us back to the issue of communication, because when there’s no communication, there is worry.
She’d already spent more than a year chasing repairs. In January 2023 she’d reported damp and mould. A surveyor recommended mould treatment and work to the drainage and guttering, but the landlord later upheld her complaint and acknowledged the jobs hadn’t been raised. Her MP’s office took up the case. In March 2024, GSA told then MP James Gray that it had let her family down through unacceptable delays and poor service. Some work was still outstanding in April.
On 10 April, GSA wrote to tell her it had decided to sell her home. The landlord said a survey of its properties had informed its long-term investment plans and that the cost of bringing some homes up to standard could make further investment unsustainable. She could stay “until further notice”. The letter offered help finding somewhere else to live, payment for removals and £8,100 for tenants who transferred to another GreenSquareAccord home or a home with another housing provider.
The same manager emailed the next morning to confirm that GSA had no immediate plans to sell her home and that residents could stay unless they wanted to move. The tenant wrote back asking whether the house was going to be sold and, if they were staying, whether GSA would put it back into a fit, habitable condition.
Our resident had considered moving, but in May she told GSA that a property it had suggested didn’t meet her household’s needs.
The residents fight back
By the end of May, another resident had written to Wiltshire councillor Nick Botterill. She said GSA staff had approached residents individually and told them their homes would be sold and they would have to leave. She questioned the explanation she’d been given about older homes. Her own home was comparatively new.
Botterill took the issue to Wiltshire Council. In July 2024, councillors unanimously backed a motion to challenge the loss of rural affordable homes. Botterill also took residents’ concerns to GSA’s leadership. He told Housing Sector that Cooke argued the cost of meeting higher energy standards made some sales necessary. Councillors asked for the figures. GSA later supplied some information, he said, but in his view it failed to show that selling was the only realistic option. Wiltshire Council minutes, item 51
Residents checked energy ratings themselves. In June 2025, the parish council recorded research that found some of the buildings examined were already rated band C. An energy rating can’t tell you everything about the repairs a home needs. It did give residents a concrete question to put to their landlord. How had it decided which homes were too expensive to keep?
After the May 2025 election, councillor Jon Atkey took up the issue. He told Housing Sector he worked with the parish council, raised it with Wiltshire’s housing cabinet member and involved South Cotswolds MP Roz Savage. By late August, GSA had written to withdraw its decision after a further review. “This means there will no longer be a requirement for you to move out of your home,” it told one resident. The same letter said GSA might still consider selling a property once it became vacant.
What the uncertainty cost
One resident told me that her son and his family had moved away because they could no longer bear living with the uncertainty. And who can blame them? With a young family, a home is where you put down roots, and you have to think about everything that goes with that, from preschools, middle schools and secondary schools to bus routes, shops and friends.
Our resident decided to stay in her home, while her son and grandchildren are no longer nearby. That’s part of the cost the village bears.
In October 2025, Savage took the wider issue to Parliament and called for a pause in rural disposals by GSA and similar landlords. Hansard For people who grew up in small villages and want to stay, finding a home they can afford is already hard enough, and demand for second homes and holiday lets, alongside the freedom more people now have to work from home, can push prices further out of reach. So where does that leave the people whose families have lived in these villages for generations?
What GreenSquareAccord told its lenders
In October 2026, the Regulator of Social Housing downgraded GreenSquareAccord to G3 for governance and V3 for financial viability. It found the landlord was relying on sales of social homes to maintain its financial resilience. GSA was still meeting the terms of its borrowing, but the regulator said it depended on significant sales, cost cuts and improvements to keep doing so. Regulatory judgement
it reported £24.9 million in gains from strategic property disposals.
In its 4 November presentation to lenders, GSA said it aimed to reduce its reliance on disposals. It also told them its property sales programme was ahead of plan. For the year to March 2026, it reported £24.9 million in gains from strategic property disposals. Those gains helped lift its operating surplus to £47.6 million. Lender presentation, slides 7, 10 and 11
Those figures show what disposals mean to GSA across the group. In Biddestone, residents wanted to know why their homes had been chosen in the first place. On 2 November, Housing Sector asked GSA how it selected them, how it accounted for repairs it had already accepted it failed to arrange, what prompted the withdrawal and whether any of the homes had since been sold. As of 10 November, we had received no substantive reply to those questions.
“Living in October with no heating is not only cruel, but is potentially dangerous to their health – especially in the midst of a respiratory pandemic.”
Biddestone’s residents fought for more than a year to get that assurance in writing. If GSA sells one of those homes on the open market when it falls vacant, there will be one fewer social home in the village for the next family that needs one.
When GreenSquare and Accord merged, the new landlord promised better services and more investment in existing homes. Residents already knew what it meant to wait for repairs. Before the merger, during the pandemic, people in Chippenham were left without heating and hot water, and their MP, Michele Donelan, said, “Living in October with no heating is not only cruel, but is potentially dangerous to their health – especially in the midst of a respiratory pandemic.” I later reported on a GreenSquareAccord resident who spent Christmas 2023 without heating or hot water, relying on an electric heater in one room. Chippenham heating failures · How Was Your Christmas?
Now the regulator has stepped in, and there’s some relief in seeing it take action, but as GreenSquareAccord tries to put its finances right, who’s picking up the cost this time? Under Ruth Cooke, the association was able to tell lenders and investors that its sales programme was ahead of plan, while in Biddestone residents had to fight for more than a year to be told they could stay, and one family moved away because they could no longer bear the uncertainty.
None of us knows where we’ll be this time next year, but most of us know where we’d hope to be. For many in Biddestone, that means another Christmas at home, in the heart of the village, among friends and family. That a letter from their landlord could make them wonder whether they were spending their last Christmas there leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Does it leave one in yours?