A second chance for Brum's most controversial exempt accommodation provider?

Dear readers — welcome to another week and to your Monday briefing. Supported exempt accommodation is big business in Birmingham — we’ve long been the flagship city for this controversial type of housing, intended to support vulnerable adults, with an estimated 30,000 people in the city residing in SEAs. Now, one of the city’s most recognised councillors, Waseem Zaffar has launched a project to improve the sector, involving partnerships with a diverse range of organisations. One of those, The Dispatch can reveal, has close links to Reliance Housing, Birmingham’s largest provider of supported accommodation which raked in just over £1.3m in profit between 2023-24. Last year the Housing Ombudsman fined Reliance for severe maladministration and concluded it had “systemic issues”. More on that in your Brum in Brief.

Catch up and coming up:

• At the weekend Samuel took readers on a tour of rubbish-strewn Small Heath, which is in stark contrast with sparkling-clean Sheldon next door. His piece examined the different impact of the ongoing bin strikes on these neighbouring areas — and why that is. 
• This week, Kate’s writing about The Close at Westhill in Selly Oak where seven Arts and Crafts cottages sit empty. Have thoughts on how they should be used, or any special memories there? Think they’re unattractive? Email her at kate@birminghamdispatch.co.uk
• Samuel is keen to pick up more sources for his Wing Yip story. He’s interested in the history of the company, which was founded in a Digbeth warehouse in the 1970s. Know anything about its new leadership? Its relationship to Nechells? Help him out at sam@birminghamdispatch.co.uk. 

Photo of the week

Photo by @photography_birmingham. What do you think about the constant funfairs, rollercoasters, and markets in Birmingham’s squares? A chance for entertainment in the city centre, or an annoying disruption to public space? Let us know in the comments. 

Brum in brief

🏚️ Labour councillor Waseem Zaffar — whose former house was turned into an unsanitary HMO after being taken over by his sister — has launched a new initiative called Creating Second Chances, to support tenants living in temporary and supported accommodation. Interestingly, however, a partner in the project has links to one of Birmingham’s most controversial providers of supported exempt accommodation. After the launch event on 4 June, Councillor Zaffar took to Facebook to thank his attendees, including Dawson Housing, a provider headed up by a man called Amer Ijaz. Between 2020 and 2024, Ijaz was the CEO of Reliance Housing, a provider established in 2018. The company was the driving force behind the boom in exempt accommodation in Birmingham — by 2022, Reliance oversaw 38% of supported exempt accommodation in the city. Ijaz is joined at Dawson by a trustee who is another Reliance alumnus: Mohammad Sajjid Sarwar, who served as a non-executive director of Reliance between 2019 and 2024. The company has faced intense scrutiny from watchdogs and politicians and in 2021, the Regulator of Social Housing concluded that Reliance did not conform to the government’s most basic financial and governance standards in the sector. In 2022, Ladywood MP Shabana Mahmood called out Reliance for not providing effective support for tenants and accused them of thinking that they were “too big to fail”. Last year, the Housing Ombudsman ordered Reliance to pay £5,600 in compensation to two vulnerable tenants who were ‘pressured’ into signing contracts and whose complaints about repairs and a drain that pumped out raw sewage weren’t addressed for weeks. Speaking to The Dispatch, Councillor Zaffar said the core mission of the Creating Second Chances initiative is to “offer a consistent point of contact and referral for those in need”, and that the project is “entirely reliant on the invaluable contributions of our partner organisations”. He said that he has “leveraged my network” to bring them together and no public money has been spent on the project. Other partners include the Aston Villa Foundation and Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust.

🗳️Following The Dispatch’s reporting on absent Labour Allens Cross councillor, Jack Deakin, The Birmingham Mail have done some digging of their own — and allege that Deakin has been actively prevented by the Labour party from standing down from his position. Sources told the paper that “he was urged by multiple people - including MPs - not to quit now 'for the sake of the party',” and won’t be standing for election next year. Deakin has been maintaining his stipend and preventing a by-election by signing the council attendance book, once every six months, in addition to briefly attending a scrutiny committee he was not a member of in the council house. Last week, the council’s Conservative group moved to issue a formal complaint to BCC’s Standards Committee, branding Deakin a “ghost councillor.” It’s been reported that legal officers at Birmingham City Council have confirmed that the politician’s signature alone in the attendance book does not count as proper attendance. 

However, Deakin has briefly attended a scrutiny meeting of which he is not a member. According to emails seen by The Dispatch, legal officers at the council consider his presence as a non-member at this meeting as ‘attendance.’ Consequently, a by-election has been prevented. Independent councillor for Harborne, Martin Brooks has been very vocal about Deakin’s absence, telling The Dispatch that: “[Labour] have contrived to get him to pop into a meeting of a Council committee that he’s not even a member of solely to avoid a by-election…There is a strong legal case for the City Council to call a by-election.”

💰 A leaked audit report has suggested there was a “pervasive fraud environment” in trade union Unite. The review was commissioned by general secretary Sharon Graham in 2021, after questions were raised about how much the organisation spent on building a hotel in Birmingham city centre.  Global tax advisory firm BDO found there had been a culture at Unite that “did not challenge the appropriateness of transactions” and failed to ensure appropriate financial reporting. It concluded “dominant personalities and a weak control environment facilitated opportunities to commit fraud” at the union. 

Quick Hits: 

🚨 A man fell to his death from luxury apartment building The Cube, next to The Mailbox in Birmingham City Centre, on Sunday. West Midlands Police were called to the scene just after 6.30pm and residents and businesses were evacuated.

🏊‍♀️ Plans to host a pool party in a car park on Lower Tower Street have been scuppered by the city’s licensing committee. West Midlands Police said the location was “not in a fit state to stage a safe event of this nature”.

🐂 In true Brummie style, an unaccompanied bull was spotted running through the streets of Digbeth and Small Heath on Friday. In a statement, Birmingham City Council said “Council staff weren’t fazed” and they “helped corral it into the old Dunelm site” where it was looked after by park rangers. Sadly, the bull has left the ring— it’s been rehomed to an animal sanctuary in Norwich. 

🌮 Local chef Matt Wilden (who used oversee  dough spinning at now-closed pizzeria, Poli) is launching a new restaurant in Kings Heath later this month. Perro will serve Mexican inspired small plates paired with cocktails designed by Katie Rouse from award-winning bar Couch.

⚖️ A cocaine smuggling gang leader from Oldbury laundered his money by claiming to be a male escort. Kulvir Shergill, 43, was sentenced to 21 years in prison at Birmingham Crown Court on Thursday.

🚊Coventry is leading the nation in tram innovation, with a new very light rail (VLR) system, which is halving the cost of tram lines down to about £10m a kilometre from typically £25m per kilometre. 

Media picks

💉 As we reported in early 2024, Birmingham is at the centre of a worrying rise in deaths by synthetic opioids. This relatively recent article by new international title (with a very familiar name) Dispatch, recaps the origins of the boom in nitazenes — lab created drugs, 40 times stronger than fentanyl. They found that last year, Birmingham had the highest number of suspected opioid overdoses (720) in the UK,. Glasgow was second (615) and Leicester third (507). Is it because Birmingham has the largest local authority by far in the UK? Partly. But, according to local doctor Judith Yates, who first raised the alarm on the spike in opioid deaths in 2023, other factors may include the fact that heroin sold here is often highly impure and that 60% of residents live in the three lowest levels of deprivation, where opioid usage is significantly more common.

🏎️ Birmingham is the UK capital of street racing, despite a High Court ban  across the West Midlands on the pursuit. In a recent investigation, ITV has entered the world of illegal racing to try to understand why so many —predominantly young men —dance with danger. They discovered that the meet ups provide a sense of community and the police are rarely a deterrent, with one driver saying, “it’s better than going clubbing”. ITV also spoke with the parents of two teenagers who were killed in 2022 when a car slammed into their group of friends. “Two and a half years now we're still looking for him to come through that door,” said the father of the late Ben Corfield. West Midlands Police say they have conducted 300 prosecutions for racing, as well as carrying out additional work around dangerous driving and anti-social behaviour.

Our to do list

🎸 Five-time Grammy winning blues guitarist Robert Cray is considered one of the best strummers of his generation. He takes to the Town Hall stage on Wednesday night. 

🧵 Sitting in Nechells is a vast treasure trove of items belonging to Birmingham Museums Trust including lace and embroidery from as far back as the 16th century. Have a look on Wednesday, at the Textiles Through Time workshop.

🥂 Pick your own elderflower and turn it into bubbles with CanEat cafe’s crash course in British Champagne making on Thursday. Clink, clink.

🚀 If you can’t afford to go to space a la Bezos, let space come to you. The Space Vault Exhibition contains historic objects brought back to Earth from the Moon, including a rare Soviet pressure suit. Catch it at ThinkTank from Saturday.

🌲 Last but not least, this free family festival in Sparkhill Park on Saturday has performances, storytelling and free bike repairs for all — plus much more. 

9/6/2025: An earlier version of this article referred to the seven cottages at West hill in Bournville. This has been corrected to read: Westhill at Selly Oak.