Peabody Was Convicted. It Took a Resident to Make That Happen.
On 11 August 2026, a representative of the Peabody Trust stood in Thames Magistrates' Court and pleaded guilty to a criminal offence: failing, without reasonable excuse, to provide a leaseholder with a written summary of service charge costs. The court fined Peabody £1,000, reduced from £1,500 for the guilty plea, plus £400 in costs.
No council brought this case. No regulator brought it. A leaseholder at Goldpence Apartments in Tower Hamlets did, as a private prosecution, because every other route had already been tried and had not produced compliance.
The fine isn't the point. The point is that it took two years, a criminal prosecution, and I still don't have the accounts I first asked for back in 2023.
What Peabody Was Actually Required to Show Me
Leaseholders on the estate don't just pay for their own block. Like most developments this size, some costs are pooled across the wider campus (grounds, shared staff, buildings insurance) and apportioned out block by block, flat by flat. My share of the total costs is a little over half a percent.
The section 21 summary is supposed to show the costs behind the service charge. Section 22 then gives leaseholders the right to inspect the receipts and other documents supporting that summary. Together, those rights are meant to let leaseholders understand the full costs across the scheme and the basis on which those costs were divided up. That is the only way anyone can actually check whether the split is fair. Service charges across the wider estate came to a little over £1 million in the same year.
Section 25 turns non-compliance with sections 21 and 22 into a criminal offence, or at least it would if it was ever enforced, and almost nobody ever does.
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. Not even an apology. Peabody's Stage 1 complaint response, three weeks later, admitted the deadline had been missed and apologised for the frustration. A summary didn't 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 wasn't 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 didn't keep.
Told an MP It Was Following the Law. It Wasn't.
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."
In most regulated industries, formally admitting that you gave a Member of Parliament and an Ombudsman false information about your own legal compliance would end careers. It would trigger a regulatory referral, board-level scrutiny, and possibly personal consequences for whoever signed that assurance off. At Peabody, the organisation absorbed the admission and carried on. Non-compliance with the law was treated as an everyday occurrence.
Having admitted it in writing, Peabody then missed its own deadline for putting the record right, and simply set a new one, which it also missed. It offered no explanation, and faced no consequences.
That last point is the one that shocks me most. I told Rushanara Ali's office, MP for Bethnal Green and Stepney, 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've passed it on, I've added it to our records. Nothing about a national housing association saying it had complied with the law, when it hadn't, seemed information to note, at least, not by the date of publication. Whether intended or not, the effect of that inaccurate assurance was to make a constituent's complaint go away.
The inaccurate information traces back to advice given, apparently in good faith, by an unnamed member of Peabody's service charge team. The staff passed that advice on to the MP, the Ombudsman and me, without checking it. As far as anything in the record shows, whoever gave that advice faced no repercussions for it. Does giving inaccurate information to an MP carry any consequence at Peabody?
The Council Wouldn't Prosecute and Neither, At First, Would the Court
I do not think it unreasonable to expect that when a law has likely been broken, someone investigates and prosecutes. I see fly-tipping, I report it. I see a smashed car window, I report it. I expect both to lead somewhere. Local authorities have the power to prosecute section 25 offences, and I asked Tower Hamlets Council to consider it. Nothing came of that, so I applied for the summons myself.
The court refused it too, 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's 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 service charge accounts covering over £1 million as it did for a wonky bench; the statutory maximum here is £2,500, under a quarter of one per cent of the sum Peabody was supposed to account for.
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. Peabody is a charitable housing association. It is also one of the largest in the country, owns around 93,000 homes and borrows on the financial markets. An organisation that size is perfectly capable of providing one leaseholder with the accounts the law says they can see. It simply did not.
The basic section 21 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, including clearer service charge accounts and more standardised information, but those reforms still depend on implementation. The right that would actually change a landlord's incentives has existed in law for more than two decades and has still not reached residents in practice.
Persistence and a Paper Trail
This didn't 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.
That's the practical lesson for anyone who wants to follow my example. Put requests in writing, and say plainly they're 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. Don't accept a verbal promise as a substitute for a document. Use the complaints process for what it's for: a Stage 1 admission that a deadline was missed is evidence, not a remedy, and shouldn't be mistaken for one.
Do it together where you can. A landlord managing hundreds of leaseholders is betting that most of them won't keep records, won't chase, and won't organise. A residents' association changes things. Private prosecution should stay a last resort, not because it doesn't work, but because it's a lot of hard work. The lesson here isn't "prosecute your landlord." It is to organise early, keep records, understand your rights, and not assume that complaints alone will enforce them.
Will the Housing Sector Treat This as Serious?
Do the sums. Producing certified service charge accounts costs something in the region of £4,000 to £5,000. Getting caught not bothering, once, cost Peabody £1,400 (the £1,000 fine plus £400 costs). On those numbers, non-compliance is the cheaper option. That means the fine was never going to be what changes Peabody's behaviour. Government scrutiny, industry standing and reputation might. Peabody can write a cheque for a fine. It can't write one for any of these.
For any other organisation, admitting it had misrepresented its compliance with the law, in a way that led to a criminal prosecution, would be a serious problem for exactly those reasons. Will the housing sector still treat Peabody as respectable regardless?
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, prompted partly by a judgment from the Regulator of Social Housing, 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 itself was reported to the Charter, its Head of Operations replied that the concerns raised were "being fully investigated at a senior level."
Peabody itself has, of course, also been asked to comment, and no response has been received so far. It has not said how a criminal conviction sits alongside its own published service standards, which 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.
What Would Stop This Happening Again
- 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.
This was a win for leaseholder transparency, but it also shows how broken enforcement is. I didn't bring this prosecution because I wanted to be in a courtroom. Residents asked for the information, complained, went to our MP, went to the Ombudsman, and asked the council to act. None of that produced the summary. What's true is that it arrived the day after I applied for a criminal summons, two months after it was legally due. You can come to your own conclusions.
Be clear about what the conviction actually did, though. Section 25 only allows a fine, imposed after the fact, for a duty already breached. It orders nothing for the future. And as the numbers show, the fine is cheaper than doing the job properly. For an organisation the size of Peabody it changes nothing: comply, or treat the fine as the cost of doing business.
That is the charitable reading, the one where Peabody at least put some thought into it, though I am not sure it did. Harder to stomach is the likelier explanation: that an organisation this large simply could not, across three years and repeated requests, organise itself to obey a one-month deadline written into a forty-year-old law, and faced nothing that made it worth learning how. A right nobody can enforce isn't really a right. Neither is a duty a landlord can shrug off for a piddly fine.
Peabody's conviction is a genuine result. It should also be read as an indictment of everything that had to fail first for it to happen. It shouldn't take a two-year paper trail, a residents' association, an MP, the Ombudsman, a council that declined to act, and finally a private prosecution to get one of England's largest housing associations to do something it was already required by law to do.
Residents shouldn't have to become prosecutors to make landlords follow the law.