An Open Letter to the King on the 2026 Honours

By David Wood · Written 15 June 2026

Sir,

I write in a personal capacity as a Peabody resident and leaseholder, drawing on my experience as Chair of a recognised residents' association. I do so respectfully, and with full recognition that honours are awarded on advice and through the constitutional process, rather than by Your Majesty's personal investigation of individual nominees.

I am writing because I am concerned that the award of a CBE to Ian Jeffrey McDermott, Chief Executive Officer of Peabody Trust, "for services to Social Housing", risks sending the wrong public signal at a time when many residents experience the social housing sector as remote, defensive and insufficiently accountable.

My concern is not that social housing should go unrecognised. It should be recognised. The work of good housing officers, repairs staff, community workers, resident advocates and others often goes unseen. My concern is that the honours system appears to have recognised senior institutional leadership while the lived experience of residents points to serious unresolved failings in transparency, accountability, complaint handling, repairs, service-charge administration and meaningful resident influence.

Peabody has recently been assessed by the Regulator of Social Housing as G1 for governance and V2 for viability, but only C2 for consumer standards, with improvement needed in areas including Safety and Quality and Transparency, Influence and Accountability. The Housing Ombudsman has recorded findings of maladministration in Peabody's handling of service-charge matters, including failures to pursue managing-agent information proactively and to communicate properly with affected residents, findings that corroborate what residents in my building have experienced directly in relation to statutory disclosure compliance.

I should note that I wrote directly to Mr McDermott to bring to his attention that Peabody staff had made inaccurate statements to the Housing Ombudsman and to Rushanara Ali MP, then the constituency Member of Parliament, by asserting that Peabody had met its statutory obligations under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 in relation to service-charge disclosure, when it had not. Mr McDermott did not respond. A response was received from Peabody's Chief Operating Officer, who took the concerns seriously enough to commission a review by an external consultant. That review, completed in November 2025, confirmed the position in terms: it found that "Peabody has made inaccurate statements related to this case to Rushanara Ali MP, the Housing Ombudsman and Mr Wood, by saying it had met its legal obligations," and that "Peabody have not yet fulfilled their obligations under s.21 and s.22 of the LTA." I note for completeness that the review found the individual members of staff concerned had acted in good faith; the institutional failure, however, is not in dispute.

Peabody subsequently wrote to the MP and the Ombudsman correcting the record, advising both that statutory disclosure would be completed by 15 December 2025. That deadline was missed. Neither the MP nor the Ombudsman was informed that it had been missed, nor that disclosure remained outstanding. As of the date of this letter, more than six months after that deadline, residents' position is that the statutory disclosure obligations remain unfulfilled. The proceedings now before the Magistrates' Court arise directly from that continuing failure. The bodies whose role it is to provide oversight, the MP and the Ombudsman, remain, so far as I am aware, unaware that the position they were told had been resolved has not in fact been resolved.

The question of whether honours vetting adequately accounts for unresolved legal and regulatory failures is not new. Public debate following the Post Office scandal raised a wider concern: that institutional reputation, as perceived within a sector, may diverge sharply from the experience of those the institution is supposed to serve. I do not draw equivalence. I rely only on the principle that honours scrutiny should be capable of identifying active legal proceedings, unresolved regulatory concerns and serious resident-facing failures before public recognition is conferred.

These concerns extend beyond my building and beyond Peabody. Parliament is currently scrutinising the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, published in January 2026, which exists because successive governments have acknowledged that the leasehold and service charge system has failed the people it should protect. The Government's own consultation documents describe opaque service charges as "the single biggest subject of enquiry" among those seeking advice from the Leasehold Advisory Service. In parliamentary debate on the Bill's publication, Members named the managing agent responsible for my own building as an example of companies making "opaque calculations" of service charges and "prey[ing] on powerless leaseholders". That agent is the subject of our ongoing Tribunal proceedings.

In London specifically, the Greater London Authority has recently begun investigating why service charges are rising, prompted by a London Assembly finding that the average household in the capital pays nearly £4,000 per year in such charges, high enough, the Assembly concluded, to make some shared ownership homes unaffordable. Peabody is one of the largest housing associations operating in that landscape. Its core business is publicly regulated social housing, and its income is therefore closely connected to a sector shaped by public subsidy, statutory regulation, housing benefit, Universal Credit housing costs, rents and service charges.

In my own building, residents have had to rely on statutory rights, formal complaints, tribunal proceedings and even criminal enforcement routes simply to obtain basic service-charge transparency. The problem is not merely one of individual inconvenience. It is that shared owners and leaseholders in mixed-tenure developments can be trapped between housing associations, superior landlords and managing agents, with each body pointing to another while residents remain liable for charges they struggle to scrutinise.

I do not ask Your Majesty to intervene in an individual dispute. I recognise that would be constitutionally inappropriate. I ask only that this correspondence be treated as a public-interest concern about the honours process and, if appropriate, referred to the Cabinet Office Honours and Appointments Secretariat for consideration.

An honour "for services to Social Housing" should not merely recognise institutional scale, seniority or sector standing. It should also be capable of withstanding scrutiny from the residents whose homes, finances and safety are affected by that leadership. Where a landlord's own commissioned review has found inaccurate statements made to a Member of Parliament and the Housing Ombudsman, where a remediation deadline communicated to both was subsequently missed without either being informed, where statutory disclosure obligations remain unfulfilled more than six months after that deadline, where criminal proceedings are before the courts, and where Parliament itself is legislating to address the systemic failures of the sector in which that landlord operates, public recognition of its chief executive risks appearing premature, institutionally self-referential, and disconnected from the resident experience that the phrase 'services to Social Housing' should surely include.

I have the honour to be, Sir, Your Majesty's obedient servant,

David Wood
Peabody resident and leaseholder
Chair, a recognised Residents' Association