Are Wolverhampton’s top political family lying about their address?
The Dispatch stakes out a former mayor
By Jack Walton
It's a Wednesday morning in the middle of October, and I’m crouching behind a bush outside the residence of the former mayor of Wolverhampton. This is a stakeout of sorts, and the property I’ve got eyes on is an impressive one, sitting on Grotto Lane in Wolverhampton’s middle-class Tettenhall village. I left my binoculars at home.
Indeed, this is the sort of property you can imagine a family like the Jaspals residing in, with its spacious double garage and position within the catchment area of high-performing local schools. After all, the paterfamilias, Milkinderpal Jaspal, who served as the city’s mayor between 2013 and 2014, is a successful businessman. He chairs the local pension fund. Until recently, I’m told, he drove a Bentley. His wife, Jasbir Jaspal, is a cabinet member for public health and chair of the West Midlands Police and Crime Panel. According to Zoopla, lesser-looking houses on this road have fetched just shy of £500,000.
But after an hour of crouching, a slight cramp in my hamstrings and one confused homeowner telling me I’ll wind up with muddy jeans if I’m not careful, there’s no sign of any member of the Jaspal family. Undeterred, I resolve to come back later.
From Grotto Lane, Tettenhall, it takes about 55 minutes to walk to Victoria Road, which sits in the Heath Town ward, where the Jaspal family holds all three council seats for the Labour Party. This is a very different end of town. I find myself standing outside a much smaller property than the one on Grotto Lane; an end-of-terrace house next to what appears to be some kind of scrapyard. I hear from a neighbour that for a long time the garden was overgrown, prompting complaints.
Curiously, until they sold it this March, Milkinderpal and Jasbir Jaspal claimed this property was their primary residence. It’s where they were listed on the electoral roll since 2014 (although they do disappear from the list at random points). At a hearing into the matter last year, Milkinderpal Jaspal said he spent “50-60%” of his time here, and it was where he “kept [his] knickers”. What’s more, Labour Party membership records seen by The Dispatch show eight members of the wealthy Jaspal family at this three-bedroom address at one stage. It must have been a tight squeeze.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve become obsessed with the Jaspal family’s place of residence. The hypothesis I have formed is simple: I think the Jaspals have been pretending to live on Victoria Road for electoral reasons, and actually live on Grotto Lane. I have gone to great lengths to try to prove this — including crouching on a grassy verge next to their family home in the cold.
While prospective councillors don’t have to live in the ward they are seeking election to, in order to vote at Labour Party meetings where candidates are selected, you do. If the Jaspals didn’t live in Heath Town then they couldn’t be members of the Heath Town Labour Party, which they control. Having eight members of the family registered in the ward would have given them a big block of votes.
Since his election as a councillor, Milkinderpal Jaspal has become a powerful figure in the city. Alongside Greg Brackenridge and Stephen Simkins, he’s long been one of the major players in the ruling Wolverhampton Labour Group. This is important: Wolverhampton is a city with big challenges. It needs effective leadership. What’s more, Brackenridge is now out of the picture, having been exposed in the press a couple of weeks back for seriously exaggerating his military record. Brackenridge’s chickens came home to roost, and he was suspended by the party, pending investigation. Ostensibly this was a win for Jaspal, a major rival was out of the way. But some wondered whether the spotlight of scrutiny would soon shift in his direction.
On Victoria Road, I make a breakthrough. A resident whose property has a clear line of sight to the house owned by the Jaspals remembers being baffled to learn, during council elections one year, that the former mayor was saying he lived on the road. He says he’s “certain” it wasn’t the case. Then another man says he remembers visiting the property repeatedly to try and get Jaspal, his ward councillor, to take up a case he was having issues with, only to realise he was never there.
A third long-term resident of the road also says he’s certain Jaspal has never been his neighbour. It’s apparent that if they did live here for many years, the Jaspals must have kept themselves to themselves. No one seems to remember them.
Returning to Grotto Lane in the afternoon, I soon have similar luck, with residents’ accounts seemingly supporting my theory. A man who asks not to be named speaks matter-of-factly: “I’m a simple man, so I’ll put this simply,” he begins from his porch. “I have lived on this road for two decades, and so has he.” The man adds that Jaspal wouldn’t touch the Victoria Road property “with a barge pole”. The ball now rolling, I get in touch with another Grotto Lane resident, Cyril Randles, who says he remembers the city limousine coming to pick Jaspal up every morning at 7:30 during his tenure as the city’s mayor. Evidence was stacking up.
The problem is, much of this evidence isn’t new. Last year, after a half-decade or so of rumour, the matter of the Jaspals' home address finally went to an Electoral Registration Hearing, hosted by the City of Wolverhampton Council. The complainants brought 10 signed witness statements, seen by The Dispatch, from residents of the two streets testifying that the Jaspals were (Grotto Lane) or weren’t (Victoria Road) their neighbours.
There was also the simple fact that Grotto Lane is listed as Milkinderpal Jaspal’s address on Companies House for 16 different directorial roles he’s had over the years. Or the former governor of a local girl's school who said that while Jasbir Jaspal was a governor, she had listed Grotto Lane as her address so the other governors would know where to send her Christmas card. Or the fact Milkinderpal’s Bentley was always parked on Grotto Lane.
At the hearing, Jaspal successfully argued that the residents of both Grotto Lane and Victoria Road who’d testified hadn’t been inside his property. So how could they be sure — to a degree of absolute certainty — where he was living? Unlikely though it seemed that eight members of a wealthy family had decided to cram themselves into a boxy property on Victoria Road for many years, despite owning a lovely big house on the other side of town, I would need stronger evidence to prove it categorically. Then Ron Homer appeared.
Until 2022, Ron Homer says he lived alone at the Victoria Road property. Mr Jaspal was his landlord, sure enough, but “he never stayed there at all,” Homer insists when I phone him up. Then he tells me something interesting: “When I first moved in, [Milkinderpal Jaspal] said if anyone comes from the social, or wherever, tell them I live there”. Allegedly, Jaspal was requesting that Homer tell the authorities he lived in the house.
Jaspal’s cryptic remark struck Homer as odd, but he soon forgot about it. And though he has no recollection of the former mayor’s “knickers”, he does recall occasional visits (maybe once a month or once every two months, he estimates) from Jaspal to collect his post. This contradicts Jaspal’s testimony at the hearing, where he insisted he was at Victoria Road 50-60% of the time.
During the hearing, Jaspal referred to Homer as a lodger. However, The Dispatch has seen bills paid by Homer for the TV license at the address between 2020 and 2022, suggesting that if Jaspal’s account is correct, he was making his lodger pay for the TV license at his own residence.
Paul Darke, the leader of the Wolverhampton Green Party, tells me this has all been an open secret for many years. He says the regional Labour Party had “been informed” and contends that the notion of the Bentley-driving Jaspal cramming his family into an end-of-terrace semi was taken seriously by few. But it was in 2021 that a man called Ranjit Sahota finally raised a formal complaint with the council, unwittingly entering himself into a tedious bureaucratic process that would span the next few years. It was Sahota who gathered the initial witness statements and carried out a personal investigation.
Initially, the council claimed they had “investigated” Sahota’s complaint. When, that same year, West Midlands Police (WMP) decided to take the matter no further, they referred to the fact that the council had already conducted its own investigation. However, when asked by The Dispatch what this investigation consisted of, they told us this was “confidential” but assured us “the matter was fully and properly considered”. Regardless, it appears they didn’t contact anyone on either street or Ron Homer at this stage.
What’s more, in April this year the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) upheld an application for a review of WMP’s findings. "DS Akhtar [the officer who worked the case] does not provide much detail about how the determination was made that there is no election fraud beyond stating that the council have investigated and determined that there was no fraud," the report stated. We asked WMP if they had any intention to investigate the matter further, in light of the IOPC’s findings. They said they were “currently reviewing all of the available information in this matter and so it would not be appropriate to comment further at this stage.”
Sahota kept pushing, but in November 2021, the council wrote to him to say the matter could be advanced no further. The Jaspals had suddenly and surprisingly been removed from the electoral roll at Victoria Road. What Sahota wasn’t aware of was that while his attempts to expose Jaspal were being frustrated, Ron Homer had received bad news. He was being evicted.
After allegedly receiving a letter from a legal firm asking him to leave the property, Homer dug his heels in. Eventually, the council found him a new flat at a different location, so he agreed to move. He had been happy at Victoria Road, though. “I didn’t want to go; I told him I didn’t want to go,” he tells The Dispatch. In 2022, the Jaspals reappeared on the electoral register. Once again, they were listed on Victoria Road.
In March this year, the house on Victoria Road was sold for £158,000. As he isn’t currently on the electoral roll and refused to answer when we asked him, it isn’t clear where Milkinderpal Jaspal actually lives or where he claims to live. He also didn’t respond to the rest of the extensive list of questions we sent him and Jasbir Jaspal. Similarly, the Wolverhampton Labour Group didn’t respond to the questions we sent them.
At the hearing, the complaints laid out very clearly why they believed Jaspal might be using the Victoria Road address. The allegation was that registering lots of his family members as Labour members in the area allowed Jaspal to win votes at selection meetings — thus establishing his wife and daughter-in-law as Labour councillors. Had they not lived in Heath Town, they couldn’t have been members of the Heath Town Labour Party or voted at these meetings. With three family members as councillors, Jaspal in effect had three votes at council meetings, affording him considerable power within the group. From there, the Jaspals have secured their positions on various panels and established themselves as important players in the city’s governance.
There’s an even more curious element to this. Ron Homer alleges that multiple members of his family, who lived at a different address on Victoria Road, another property owned by Jaspal, were signed up as members of the Labour Party without their knowledge. “I’ve got these letters through the door about the Labour Party,” he says, saying that he, his ex-partner, his daughter, his daughter-in-law and his son had all been signed up as members. “He never even asked [them] if they wanted to,” he says, alleging that Jaspal signed them up. We asked Milkinderpal Jaspal if this was his doing, and he didn’t respond.
To the Greens’ Paul Darke, two elements of this story really stand out. Firstly, the fact that a man representing one of the poorest wards in one the UK’s worst-ranking cities for child poverty was driving to council meetings in a Bentley. Secondly, that the many complaints against Jaspal have led nowhere. He’s concerned that the slowness of the process that began in 2021 allowed Jaspal to evict Ron Homer and get himself re-registered at the address the following year. The council told us it doesn’t “accept that there has been any delay in dealing with the objections and remains satisfied that due process was followed, in line with legal requirements, in determining this matter.”
They also said this:
With regards to this matter, the objections were independently assessed and considered in detail at an internal hearing, as required by legislation. The objectors were afforded the opportunity to make and present evidence at the hearing. The objections were not upheld. External legal advice was sought in respect of this matter, and the Electoral Commission and Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman both engaged, along with the Council’s Internal Audit. The Council’s decision not to uphold the objections was subsequently the subject of an appeal before the County Court; however, the appeal was withdrawn in its entirety.
Apparently, Milkinderpal Jaspal has stopped driving his Bentley, but he is still a significant figure in Wolverhampton’s politics. He continues to wield huge sway in the ruling Labour Group, and it's possible that after the fall of Greg Brackenridge, he might soon be even more powerful: the whispers in the party are that Jaspal fancies himself as a possible deputy council leader. Not bad for a man from a humble house in Heath Town.
The stench of corruption around these people and the Brackenridges is very strong indeed.
Terrific - It does make you wonder what the Labour group whips and the regional Labour Party have been doing