Exclusive: Huge profits, unsafe housing - and funded by £2.4m of taxpayers' money

There are major questions over why the West Midlands Combined Authority invested in a property fund that went into business with Gurpaal Judge

Good morning Patchers — welcome to Friday! And apologies for publishing a little later than usual. Today’s investigative story contains some serious findings and we wanted to give it a final check over.

The piece focuses on two properties just five miles apart: one in Walsall and one in Sandwell. We think the story of their ownership in recent years, including huge profits for a London developer, aided in one instance by a £2.4 million investment from the West Midlands Combined Authority, illustrates a broader and very important story.

Both properties were supposed to be turned into sanctuaries for the vulnerable and homeless, linked to organisations run by the property entrepreneur Gurpaal Judge, who we investigated last year. Did it pan out that way? It doesn’t seem to.

We’ve heard one alarming story about police being called to an attempted rape at one of the buildings — and Judge’s organisation ignoring warnings from staff that vulnerable men and women should not be housed together. “They didn’t listen of course,” a source says, “and within the first two or three weeks a woman was seriously sexually assaulted.”

Why did the local authority that governs the West Midlands spend millions of taxpayers’ money on a property fund without checking whether the vulnerable tenants in its buildings were being properly looked after? A spokesperson for the WMCA — now run by newly-elected Labour mayor Richard Parker — says it will now “urgently” investigate the points raised by today’s story, in order to “understand the issues in detail”.

To read this story in full, you will need to be a paying Dispatch member. Why do we do this? Because this kind of journalism isn’t free to produce. It takes weeks of work, examining dozens of documents at Companies House, buying files at the Land Registry, consulting the HMO register and then finding sources who can corroborate and add context to our claims.

This kind of work can only be funded by a business model that is based on reader subscriptions — if we were funded by online ads, there would be no incentive to do all this work because a celebrity story that takes 45 minutes to write would get much more online “traffic”. All of our journalism is funded by our 673 paying subscribers, but we need hundreds more in order to become financially sustainable. So if you think this kind of reporting is important and you’re not already a Dispatch member, please join up now using the button below and you’ll instantly be able to read today’s brilliant piece.

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Brum in brief

🗣️Parting words: Stratford-on-Avon’s Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi has announced he won’t be standing for parliament again in a very expressive and detailed statement. In a letter that contains the phrase “every morning as I shave my head in the mirror, I have to pinch myself” the one-time minister — who was sacked as party chair by Rishi Sunak last year amid an HMRC investigation into his tax affairs — soliloquises on how lucky he is to have served in government. He even manages, very briefly, to acknowledge he has made a few “mistakes”.

🥊Selly Oak showdown: Former chair of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign Professor Kamel Hawwash — who quit Labour last October accusing Keir Starmer of “blind support for Israel whatever it does,” — has announced he will stand against Steve McCabe MP in Selly Oak. He says the new Reliance political group he leads will unveil more candidates in coming weeks. The University of Birmingham academic and colleagues have had conversations with George Galloway, "but not more than that". Reliance will put up professionals with life experience as candidates, Hawwash says, and is seeking registration as a political party but won't be whipped. "We're not out there to be exclusivist - we've had enough of that in British politics".

🎨Art attack: One for next week — The Arts Society Birmingham has a fascinating series of public lectures coming up. Next Wednesday morning, settle in to learn about Grace Darling, the first woman to be awarded a medal for gallantry after she rescued steamship passengers off the Northumberland coast in 1838. It starts at 9.45am at the CBSO.

🛍️Bric-a-brac: If you’re on an interior design kick like me, check out this vintage sale in Tamworth on Saturday for interesting items to brighten up your home. Entry is just £4 from 11am-3pm or pay £12 to get there at 10am and have first pick. Tickets at a click.

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Exclusive: Huge profits, unsafe housing - and funded by £2.4m of taxpayers' money

By Kate Knowles and Joshi Herrmann 

According to the internet, the most famous person from Walsall is Slade lead singer Noddy Holder. But a hundred years ago, the answer might have been Jerome K Jerome, celebrated author of the comic 1889 travelogue Three Men in a Boat. Even if no one reads Jerome much any more, he was once one of the most popular writers in England and not long before he died in 1927, he was given the Freedom of Walsall. 

Jerome was born at 30A Bradford Street, which forms part of Belsize House, a row of nine whitewashed townhouses built in the early nineteenth century in the Tuscan Classical style. Constructed on land owned by the Duke of Bradford, the area was described at the time as a “handsome and commodious” approach into Walsall, which was becoming rich thanks to growing trades in saddles, buckles and limestone quarried from local mines. 

As prosperity drained away from Walsall, Belsize House was converted to commercial uses in the 1930s, becoming a row of shops and offices. By 2023, a council document complained about “insensitive shopfront signage” along the row of buildings and a “general state of repair.”

‘A fashionably Pastoral mid-19th Century view of the newly-built Belsize House’. Picture: Walsall Council.

30A Bradford Street, Jerome’s birthplace, is the rightmost unit of the row — sitting on the corner with Caldmore Road, on the approach to Saddlers Shopping Centre. Until the mid-2010s a firm of solicitors used Belsize House as offices, but when these last office occupants moved out, the building needed a new purpose.

A black iron sign that reads “Jerome K Jerome Birthplace and Museum” still protrudes from the front of the building, but these days it attracts few tourists. There are several doors but no knockers or doorbells, and the many sash windows are frosted. 

One has pillows stuffed against the glass as if to keep the light out. A man working in the corner shop next door tells me there are “about 18” people living there. He says despite the large number of residents, things are generally quiet at 30A, except when a fire broke out there a couple of months ago.

What does this formerly grand Georgian building tell us about the provision of housing in the 21st century? Almost 200 years ago, Belsize House was built for Walsall’s wealthiest citizens. But in recent years, 30A has been bought and sold several times as part of investment schemes that feel emblematic of how Britain looks after its most vulnerable citizens. 

It’s a tale that emerges in Land Registry files and public company documents — and it’s one that even the comedic talents of Jerome K. Jerome would struggle to make light of. 

A sudden jump in value 

In April 2016, a Nottingham developer called James Lawer bought the property. At some point, he engaged a local planning consultant to help him submit an application to convert it into a 19-bed House of Multiple Occupancy or HMO. In July 2018, Walsall Council wrote back, giving its permission. 

But for whatever reason, Lawer didn’t want to rent out the HMO himself. Three months later, records show that he sold the property on, complete with planning permission, to a West London-based developer called Sunder Kripalani, a man who has no meaningful online presence and who we haven’t been able to get hold of for this story. Kripalani seems to have got a good price: through his company Lemon Properties, he paid £350,000 for 30A Bradford Street.

The building’s listed status probably complicated the work it needed, so it was another couple of years before Kripalani in turn found a long-term owner to buy his converted HMO. But in that time, the property seems to have experienced a scarcely believable uplift in value. In December 2020, a property investment company called Fundamentum Social Housing REIT paid £1.4 million for 30A Bradford Street, four times more than Kripalani had paid for it back in 2018. 

What was going on here? The public filings give us further clues — and they also provide a direct link to one of the Dispatch’s most popular stories: our two part investigation into Gurpaal Judge, the former lettings agent from Wolverhampton who says he had an awakening on a Buddhist retreat and decided to try to solve homelessness.

A Belsize House window today. Photo by The Dispatch.

What’s the connection? Well, the same day that Kripalani’s company sold the property, the new owners of 30A Bradford Street – Fundamentum – signed a lease with an organisation that agreed to pay a fixed level of rent for the next twenty years. This organisation’s name will be familiar to regular Dispatch readers: Lotus Sanctuary CIC. 

As our story late last year explained, Lotus Sanctuary was Judge’s “community interest company” that had “the pure and simple intention of housing and empowering vulnerable women who are facing homelessness.” It would sign very long leases on properties like 30A Bradford Street and then fill them with vulnerable people who were eligible for “exempt” housing benefit from the government. These houses were mostly owned by companies like Fundamentum and a much larger fund called Home REIT. 

Interestingly, Walsall Council says that 30A Bradford Street “has never been licensed as an HMO to Lotus Sanctuary CIC.” A spokesperson went on: “It is Walsall Council’s policy to inspect all HMOs and check that the licence holders and managers (where applicable) are fit and proper ‘persons’ to hold a licence.  Walsall Council has never recognised this property as ‘supported’ exempt accommodation.”

Last year, Judge’s companies collapsed owing just over £13m. But ever since we published our investigation, we’ve been trying to work backwards to examine how this strange world of dilapidated properties, huge sale prices and claims to be solving homelessness really worked. We decided to focus on two buildings that sit just five miles apart.