Crowdfunder Special
The House Girl
As previously reported – Local Housing Co-op to Purchase Gensing Manor? in HIP 230 – Hastings Rental Health (HRH), a longstanding campaign group involving renters, compassionate homeowners and ethical landlords, have formed a housing co-operative and are raising funds to buy the one-time language school premises of Gensing Manor. Obviously such an undertaking requires a lot of money, maybe £3 million by the end of it, both to buy the increasingly derelict building and to get it in a fit state for habitation.
Any big undertaking has to start somewhere, and the start here is a crowdfunder with a target of £10,000 to meet the co-op’s initial costs.
“Despite the prices going up and shiny new businesses opening their doors, the housing market in Hastings is broken,” says HRH member Jess Luby. “The most in need of affordable housing can’t get it, or have to make do with smaller spaces for their families, mould for their children, while meeting rents that take a huge chunk of their monthly paycheck often leaving them short for essentials like food or electricity. This is our solution, even as Hastings Borough Council abandons its attempts at a proper social housing policy.”
As reported in Walking Home (HIP 232), Sarah Gomes Harris, a co-founder of HRH, has undergone a transformation to help raise the profile of the crowdfunder and of housing co-ops around the country. She has become: Housegirl. Now she roams the land, part human, part purple HRH house, spreading information about the benefits of housing co-ops and communities buying back buildings, giving a little hope to those struggling to find homes and raising a little funding along the way.
Sarah set off on Monday 7 August, and has so far travelled through Lewes, Brighton, Binsted, Southsea, Southampton, Glastonbury, Bristol, Cheltenham, Worcester, and Birmingham in her portable purple house, revisiting some of the inspirational co-ops she met earlier in the year and new co-ops of all sizes and set-ups. Last weekend she attended a gathering of the Radical Routes co-op network near Sheffield, before carrying on her march north to the Yorkshire Pennines.
“Housing issues are the same all over the country,” says Sarah. “And they’re affecting people of ALL ages, from those in their 20s, and middle-aged people who have been working and renting for decades, to pensioners struggling to cover rent as well as energy bills.
“Everyone is struggling with the same issues, rent increases, fear of their landlords, and evictions. We need a robust response to such an enormous problem. We need groups of people to buy back buildings to keep them in the community, affordable in perpetuity, as the alternative is an utterly broken society with councils going bust and mass homelessness.”
Housegirl has been travelling through all terrain in her house structure. Sometimes there’s no one around for miles, which has felt painful and lonely with no one to talk to and promote the work. Arriving at co-ops has been so welcoming and, even though it’s often late and she struggles to get her paid work done, being in a community again always lifts her spirits.
In the first week the crowdfunder raised £4,000, almost half its goal, but it still has 17 days to run, and Sarah has another half of the country to walk through.
For more info, see www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/hrh-co-op—walk-for-homes. Hashtags for social media are: #buygensingmanor #helpbuygensingmanor #housegirl #hastingsrentalhealth #walkforhome
The Aggrieved Creditors
In 2018 Sheikh Abid Gulzar bought Hastings Pier for a knockdown price of £60,000. Until last month he managed it through a company of which he was sole director, Lions Hastings Pier Limited.
Peter Wheeler and Francesca Hill were former pier engineers whose employment contracts were taken over by this company. Gulzar conducted an immediate campaign of harassment of them, resulting in constructive dismissal. Nearly four years on, in May 2018, after a long and tortuous legal process, which they financed at least partly through crowdfunding, they obtained judgments against the company in the Ashford Employment Tribunal for compensation totalling over £74,000 plus accruing interest.
Neither Gulzar nor his company made or offered any payments in respect of this debt which now stands at over £82,000. But this was hardly surprising. He has a long track record of avoidance and prevarication in respect of both personal and corporate debts.
In particular, he presided over the insolvency of a previous company Chatsworth Hotels Limited in 2017, with over £30,000 left owing to ‘Trade and Expense’ creditors and over £56,000 to the Inland Revenue, as well as a paper debt of £577,000 to ‘Intercompany Creditors’, i.e. other companies of which he was also sole director and shareholder.
The liquidators of an insolvent company have a statutory duty to investigate and report to the Department for Business and Trade in respect of the conduct of its former directors. Evidence of their dishonesty or financial recklessness can – indeed should – lead to disqualification. In their final report to creditors made in December 2022, the joint liquidator of Chatsworth Hotels Limited confirmed that he had investigated and reported accordingly, but concluded that “my report and disclosures are necessarily confidential and are not available to creditors”. So the outside world is none the wiser.
Be that as it may, Peter and Francesca started a fresh crowdfunder appeal with a stated target of £7,000 for the purpose of “bring[ing] Lions Hastings Pier to book…Companies and Directors which behave so badly time and time again must not be allowed to get away with their fraudulent activities”.
A little over half the target sum – £3,876 – was raised from 105 supporters within the month to 4 August. However, on the day before closure of the funding appeal, 3 August, Gulzar put the company into voluntary liquidation.
The balance sheet of the company, which was revealed at the creditors meeting (calculated as at 21 July), put its net liabilities at £283,299 with ‘fixed assets’ (probably some trade fixtures on the pier) valued at £11,439 and no other significant assets at all. The overall debt level had almost doubled since March 2022. According to Peter, approximately £82,000 of this debt is owed to himself and Francesca, there is around £45,000 owing to a bank, and £8,000 to an energy company; however, Gulzar claims that the rest is owed to himself, giving him an effective majority and enabling him to select his own liquidator.
Will that protect him from any further effective pursuit? Not if Peter has his way. He told his crowdfunder backers after the meeting: “Lions Hastings Pier Ltd went into liquidation today. The next step is to pick apart the accounts and intercompany relationships to prove fraud and trading whilst insolvent.”
It is clearly not easy to penetrate the murky world of insolvency practice, and any further legal process along the lines that Peter has envisaged will surely cost considerably more than the sum raised by this summer’s crowdfunder. But what else might bring change in the way the pier is being operated?
The Crowdfunder appeal for “Legal fees to expose Lions Hastings Pier Ltd fraud” ended on 4 August. There has been no formal indication of whether it may be revived.
The Community Litigant
Jeff Newnham is not a lawyer nor a politician. He describes himself as having lived and worked in the Bexhill area for 35 years whilst bringing up three children and operating a farriery business. But in June this year he announced that, under a campaign entitled Save Northeye, he would be bringing a legal challenge against the Home Secretary “to stop the inhumane housing of asylum seekers” in the former prison site.
Newnham is aware that other campaign groups have also been demonstrating locally against the government’s plans for Northeye –the No to Northeye movement led by independent Bexhill town councillor Nigel Jacklin is one: Bexhill Stand Up To Racism is another. But this issue “will be won or lost in court,” he says. “The Home Office won’t be interested in people with banners. Legal proceedings are the only method the Home Office will respond to.”
Public law solicitors, Duncan Lewis, have advised him that there are reasonable prospects of winning a judicial review claim on the unsuitability of the Northeye site for the housing of up to 1200 single male asylum seekers – adjacent to residential properties but otherwise isolated from any community infrastructure or networks, and potentially contaminated. The decision of the Home Office to circumvent planning laws by applying Class Q emergency planning powers, compounded by failure to give any prior notification of their plans to local authorities, or to consult with other local stakeholders, will be the basis of the legal challenge.
The solicitors recommended that he appeal for crowdfunding support on the Crowdjustice forum which channels money directly into their client account. They set an initial target of £5,000, which is the maximum amount that he could be ordered by a court to pay personally in costs to the Home Office if his application for judicial review were rejected. Since that sum was raised within 24 hours, the target was stretched, first to £10,000, then to £20,000 to cover the solicitors’ own fees. At the time of going to press, total pledges have reached nearly £18,000.
Armed with these funds, Duncan Lewis have prepared and served a pre-action protocol letter on the Home Office, explaining the nature of Jeff’s prospective application and requesting further information relevant to the decision complained of. Initial replies confirm that the site has not yet been purchased by the Home Office and, to most requests, a response was given that “we don’t hold any of this information” – potential ammunition in itself, Jeff suggests, for argument that the government plans have not been properly researched or thought through.
He and the solicitors now wait, armed with the balance of Crowdjustice funds, to see how the government department proceeds further. “We’re ready when you are,” is his warning message.
Donations may be made to Save Northeye, Bexhill-on-Sea via the crowdjustice.com website
The Good Neighbours
Leighton Goobie set up his timber reclamation business The Old Wood Works at The Yard in Waterworks Road behind Morrisons six years ago. It grew exponentially. Starting in one of the smallest units, he expanded to take the largest space as his workshop, and was busting out of the additional showroom he took on. He supplied the oak planters for Trinity Triangle and Hastings town centre, the benches in the Country Park at Fairlight, and his garden furniture and tables feature in the Cuprinol catalogue.
But on 10 August an extractor fan within the workshop premises caught fire. Within minutes the entire building was ablaze. It took ten hours to put the fire out, by which time the whole of his machinery, tools and stock, worth on his calculation at least £200,000, was destroyed.
The building itself was insured by the family company which owns and manages The Yard. But Leighton had no contents insurance. He had no cash savings to re-invest. He was literally destitute overnight.
Enter Lucy Gastall, manager of The Yard. She saw the devastation and thought that he deserved a second chance. She launched a crowdfunder appeal on the JustGiving website under the title help-leighton-rise-from-the-ashes with a target of £50,000. She says that £7,000 was raised in the first two days, mainly from fellow traders at The Yard. She is “blown over by the support we’ve been given.”
The amount pledged at the time of going to press was nearly £9,000 clubbed together from over 300 supporters.
Leighton says: “I can’t change what’s happened. That’s happened, and it’s about turning it into positive motivation. We’ve pulled the boards back off, we’re looking in at the unit and the devastation. Everything’s just destroyed and gone. But I’m absolutely positive now, I’m motivated. That’s mainly down to the people, the community.
“I’m passionate about what I do there, making furniture and working with wood, I’ve got to know a lot of people, and I’ve always had time for talking to people about what I did. So now I’m on this crowdfunding page … and see the comments and what people give and what they can do and their time.
“I just want to make sure that I say thank you to all the people in the community. And there are people that have anonymously donated and commented. I can’t go to those people direct because I don’t know who they are, so a massive end-of-the-day, thank you.”
For further donations, go to justgiving.com/crowdfunding/helpleightonrisefromtheashes
The Would-be Film-maker
Marguerite MacLean, a teacher and author from Africa now settled in Hastings, plans to make an educational movie from her published book GustoSinga. It highlights the decline of the world’s wildlife over the last hundred years – “I was compelled to write the story when I walked seven years ago where the last tiger was shot in Singapore,” she says. “GustoSinga shares our necessity to practise a different kind of listening learnt from the wisdom of the matriarch elephant. This intuitive listening brings harmony and hope to our common home as opposed to poaching, pirates and prejudice.”
She has teamed up with her editor and local story-teller Ben Fairlight Edwards to offer voice-overs in the enactment of a magical realism adventure script. Professor Robin Broadhead (of the University of Malawi) describes it as a “transformative” story, involving an orphaned East African lion cub being taken down the Limpopo river and across the Indian ocean to Singapore in the 1930s. Characters include Albert Einstein and Nelson Mandela. Marguerite is looking for prospective animators and multimedia artists to help create a movie, and has launched a crowdfunder GustoSinga Movie Project – Environmental Education with a stated target of £33,800.
“I taught for 30 years internationally. This project has been reviewed and is highly recommended by many educationalists, “ she says. “It has also been directed as a school production. The movie-making would be my passion – my gift to education, offering deserving actors from the third world rewarding opportunities in filming, It harnesses areas of timely change in our educational curriculum to encompass respect for all living things, bravery, kindness, compassion, heroism, risk-taking.”
A special Crowdfunder “Reward” offers any donor of £800 or more a “credit recognition” in the movie production plus a “signed copy” and free ticket to the premier. Marguerite feels that the link needs to be shared “with humanitarians who have the means to make it possible”.
For donations see crowdfunder.co.uk/gustosinga-movie-project; for further info on the book see www.gustosinga.com or email [email protected]
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