Peabody Broke the Law. A Resident Had to Prosecute It.
Substantively updated : restructured, Rushanara Ali MP's response to our request for comment incorporated into the article, and a closing section on what would give the law teeth.
After nearly two years of unanswered requests, failed complaints and inaccurate assurances to an MP, a leaseholder took one of England's largest housing associations to court. Peabody pleaded guilty. Some of the information is still missing.
In this article
On 11 August 2026, one of England's largest housing associations admitted breaking the law.
Peabody pleaded guilty at Thames Magistrates' Court to failing, without reasonable excuse, to provide legally required service-charge information. It was fined £1,000, plus a £400 victim surcharge.
The certified court record and the summons are published in the evidence log.
The prosecution was not brought by a council, regulator or government agency. I brought it.
I did so after nearly two years of requests, complaints, promises and missed deadlines. Peabody had even admitted that it gave inaccurate information to my MP and the Housing Ombudsman about whether it had complied with the law.
The conviction is real. So is the failure behind it: some of the information first requested in 2023 is still missing.
This is not really a story about a £1,000 fine. It is about how many parts of the housing system can fail before a resident is forced to enforce the law himself.
Peabody told an MP it had followed the law. This was not true.
The section 21 request that led to conviction was sent in January 2026. Peabody acknowledged it the next day. The one-month deadline passed with nothing compliant provided. Peabody's Stage 1 complaint response, three weeks later, admitted the deadline had been missed and apologised for the frustration. A summary did not arrive until April, two months late. It concerned the 2024/25 year. It did nothing for the November 2023 and December 2024 requests, which remain unanswered to this day.
This was not a one-off. An earlier request went in during November 2023. Requests under both sections followed from multiple residents in December 2024. Most of 2025 passed with Peabody investigating, apologising, and making commitments it did not keep.
Peabody's own review (which Peabody has called independent, though it was carried out by a Peabody employee) found, in terms that leave little room for interpretation, 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."
An admission of that seriousness should have triggered visible board-level scrutiny and a clear account of how it happened. No visible consequence followed. Peabody then missed its own deadline for putting the record right, and simply set a new one, which it also missed.
After the conviction, I told Ali's office, in writing, that the organisation which had misled them was now convicted of a criminal offence for the same underlying failure. Her response amounted to three lines: thanks for the update, I have passed it on, I have added it to our records. When asked to comment for this article, her office said that "Rushanara has made a series of representations on your behalf, and has expressed her dissatisfaction with the issues you have raised." She did not answer the questions I actually put to her. No comment on whether she regarded Peabody's inaccurate assurance as serious, whether she would pursue it further, or whether she considered the existing enforcement system adequate.
The council did nothing. Then the court got the law wrong.
Local authorities have the power to prosecute section 25 offences. I asked Tower Hamlets Council to consider it. Nothing came of that.
So I applied for the summons myself. The court refused it, citing a law that only applies in Wales and a legal category that was repealed in 2008. For a lot of people, that would have been the end of it; there is no obvious reason to doubt a court's legal adviser. But I wrote back setting out why the refusal was wrong, and the court finally accepted its reading of the law was eighteen years out of date.
On the day my case was finally heard, two much smaller cases went through ahead of me: a market stall that had strayed past its pitch, and a café bench placed too far into the street. The resulting fine was similar to Peabody's. Parliament set the same ceiling for failure to provide residents with service charge accounts covering over £1 million as it did for a wonky bench.
Parliament set the same ceiling for failure to provide service charge accounts covering over £1 million as it did for a wonky bench.
The information Peabody was legally required to provide
Sections 21 and 22 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 allow leaseholders to obtain a summary of service-charge costs and inspect the documents behind it. Section 25 makes failure to comply without reasonable excuse a criminal offence.
Those rights matter on my estate because residents do not pay only for their own block. Costs are pooled across the wider estate and apportioned between buildings and flats. The estate-wide charges exceeded £1 million that year. Without the summary and supporting records, leaseholders cannot properly test either the costs or how they were divided.
The basic regime is still rooted in the 1985 Act. Parliament tried to strengthen service charge transparency in 2002, including a right for leaseholders to withhold payment when information was not provided, but those provisions were never brought fully into force. The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 again promises stronger transparency, but those reforms still depend on implementation. Parliament legislated for the right that might actually change a landlord's incentives more than two decades ago. Successive governments never brought it fully into force.
Peabody created the evidence against itself
This did not take a legal loophole or a clever manoeuvre. It took two things anyone can do: being willing to stand up for your legal rights when a landlord tells you, one way or another, to go away, and keeping a proper record of everything that happened. The evidence that convicted Peabody was Peabody's own documents: the request, the acknowledgment, the missed deadline, the written admission, the late response. Peabody wrote the evidence itself.
Put requests in writing, and say plainly they are made under sections 21 and 22 of the 1985 Act. Keep proof they were sent and received. Diarise the deadline the moment the landlord acknowledges the request. Do not accept a verbal promise as a substitute for a document. Use the complaints process for what it is for: a Stage 1 admission that a deadline was missed is evidence, not a remedy, and should not be mistaken for one.
Do it together where you can. A landlord managing hundreds of leaseholders can rely on the practical reality that most residents will not keep every record, pursue every missed deadline and organise collectively. A residents' association changes that calculation. Private prosecution should stay a last resort, not because it does not work, but because it is a lot of hard work. The lesson is to organise early, keep records, understand your rights, and not assume that complaints alone will enforce them.
A fine small enough to ignore
In mitigation, Peabody's representatives told the court two things. First, that Peabody had provided the information in the end. Second, that Peabody is a not-for-profit housing association. Both are true. Neither changes the offence. The law does not care whether a landlord makes a profit; the duty to provide the information applies either way. And providing the summary two months late was the whole problem, not a defence to it.
Producing certified service-charge accounts reportedly costs in the region of £4,000 to £5,000. The financial consequence imposed in this case was £1,400: a £1,000 fine and a £400 victim surcharge. Those figures are not a complete cost-benefit calculation. They do, however, expose the weakness of the deterrent. The court could not order future compliance, and the statutory maximum fine was only £2,500. For an organisation managing around 93,000 homes and borrowing on the financial markets, that is unlikely to change behaviour.
Peabody can write a cheque for a fine. It cannot write one for reputation.
Peabody can write a cheque for a fine. It cannot write one for reputation.
Will the housing sector look the other way?
The consequences should not depend entirely on whether Peabody chooses to discipline itself. The organisations that confer standing and respectability on Peabody were also asked what they intended to do.
Peabody is a member of the National Housing Federation, which was asked directly whether a section 25 conviction engages its Code of Conduct, whether it will ask Peabody to account for how the conviction arose, and whether the matter bears on board accountability. As of publication, it had not responded.
Peabody is one of 11 organisations in the G15, the collective of London's largest not-for-profit housing associations. Its CEO, Ian McDermott, has chaired the G15 since 1 June 2025, and received a CBE for services to social housing in the 2026 Birthday Honours. Whether this conviction affects his standing in either role remains to be seen.
Peabody had also been accredited by the Good Business Charter, a voluntary accreditation covering ten components including a commitment to customers. The Charter had already opened an investigation into Peabody's conduct before the conviction, and had told me weeks earlier that Peabody's accreditation was "on hold" while the issues were investigated. By early August 2026, Peabody's listing had been removed from the Charter's public directory. When the conviction was reported to the Charter, its Head of Operations replied that the concerns raised were "being fully investigated at a senior level."
Peabody was also invited to comment. No response had been received by publication. Its own published service standards promise to be "honest and accountable," to "be upfront about what we can and can't do," and, when something goes wrong, to "explain what's happening and how we'll fix it." The same standards promise to respond to residents within five working days.
Peabody's conviction is a genuine result. It is also an indictment of everything that had to fail before it happened.
Residents asked for the information. They complained. They went to their MP, the Ombudsman and the council. The court initially refused the summons using law that was eighteen years out of date. Only after a resident corrected the court and pursued a private prosecution did Peabody plead guilty.
The fine cannot compel future compliance, and some of the information requested in 2023 is still missing.
Residents should not have to become prosecutors to make one of England's largest housing associations obey the law.
Four changes that would give the law teeth
- Councils need a real process for section 25 prosecution requests. At minimum, they should acknowledge and assess requests where residents provide evidence of non-compliance. A criminal offence is not meaningful if the body expected to enforce it does not act.
- Leaseholders need a meaningful civil remedy, including the right to withhold service charges where required information is not provided. Parliament already attempted that kind of mechanism in the 2002 reforms, but it was never brought fully into force. A fine months later does not make a landlord comply on time. The incentive has to bite when the landlord demands payment.
- Section 21 and 22 compliance should be monitored and reported by the Regulator of Social Housing. Registered providers should have to report how many statutory service charge requests they receive, how many they answer on time, and how many are overdue. The problem stays invisible unless residents document it themselves.
- MPs, the Ombudsman and regulators should not have to rely solely on the landlord's own account of compliance. Where a resident alleges failure to comply with sections 21, 22 or 23, the landlord should have to produce the actual request, response, dates and documents relied on.