BRIAN
DEER: NOTTING HELL Page 3
After a short
battle with cancer and a longer struggle with the
trust, Mrs Kelly died on February 1. And she didn't
get a quiet old age. She told me how she ventured out
in her nightie onto the walkway at the front of her
flat and pleaded with Subterania's customers to let
the neighbourhood sleep. "It's the cars' nose,
the language, the arguments," she explained.
"It's really terrible, really bad."
She
had campaigned since 1994, when the charity applied
for a 6am licence for the club, and in October she
led a dozen people to West London Magistrates Court
to resist an appeal by the charity against a council
order to cut the opening hours. She won that battle,
after a two-day hearing, when District Judge Terry
English awarded £13,000 costs against the charity on
the grounds of its "unreasonableness". The
trust's swift response to keep the extra hour for
Power's business was to appeal the appeal - to
Blackfriar's Crown Court (in an action now abandoned)
- despite Judge English hearing from an angry witness
parade of the very people the charity was meant to
help.
But
if all this wasn't bad enough, I soon found another
story that said even more about this
"charity". For not only was the nightclub
wrecking the community's peace, but since the trust
handed over the old community hall to Power, it had
been running a scheme to dodge business rates and
licence fees, to the public's considerable loss.
People such as Mrs Kelly were not only suffering,
they were also paying for the privilege.
According
to my calculations, based on council staff figures,
at least £118,000 due to the council on the
nightclub has, for reasons unknown, been avoided.
Power was the beneficiary, although all he seems to
have done is accept the trust's arrangements. The way
it worked was simple: Matland told council officers
that the premises (merely described as "12
Acklam Road") were mainly used by charitable
community groups - and for years the paperwork was
rubber-stamped by unwitting junior clerks.
Strangely,
Gordon - who lives in a Georgian square two miles
south - told me he didn't personally know what was at
"12 Acklam Road", but was sure that council
staff knew all about Subterania. This is in spite of
the trust failing to mention the premises in annual
reports and of council officers having been in a
five-year battle to get the charity to set out the
facts about the club. Although senior Conservatives -
including mayors, committee chairs and deputy leaders
- had sat on the trust's management committee, a mass
of paperwork reveals that council officers were
repeatedly frustrated or fed with half-truths.
Matland,
meanwhile, was filling-in exemption claims in an
attempt to cover his tracks. In at least four
documents, he certified that the club's licensed use
"will be solely for entertainment which is of an
educational or other like character, or is given for
charitable or other like purpose." When asked of
the premises (100% of the profits from which go to
Mean Fiddler) "Who will receive the proceeds of
these functions?", Matland replied: "North
Kensington Amenity Trust." Asked, "Are the
premises ever rented out to a third party for any
public or private events? If yes, does the third
party receive the profits from the event?",
Matland's answer was: "Yes. Local charities.
Yes. Local charities."
The
thinking behind these answers was never squarely
explained, but the loss of income as a result of this
mysterious wheeze is only one example of how the
public purse has lost out to the charity's
operations. After an intervention by the Prince of
Wales with the transport department, for instance,
the land around the Westway - some prime Notting Hill
brownfield - was handed to the trust at a paltry
£10,800 an acre, obscuring comparison between the
value of its assets and any good work it does.
And
what of its good work? Undoubtedly there had been
some, as both Matland and Judge Gordon stress. It
maintains a small garden near the trust's offices,
last year distributed £85,000 to local beneficiaries
and spent a notional £76,000 subsidising the rent of
non-commercial tenants. There may also be some
"trickle-down" if users of its luxury
facilities spend money in local shops and pubs.
But
since 1989 it has relied on loans and grants from
other charities and funding bodies (the latest is
£8m from Sport England Lottery Fund) to prop up a
leisure empire that is otherwise sustaining colossal
deficits. Nearly £1.2m has been lost running the
fitness club (despite a £400,000 sports lottery
refurbishment grant), another £500,000 on the indoor
tennis club, and it spent an estimated £500,000 from
the City Challenge urban regeneration scheme
[earmarked in plans for an employment centre]
building the cocktail bar - also leased to Mean
Fiddler. With staff costs running at £1m a year,
it's hardly a balance sheet that glows with financial
control. Were it a public company, its board would
most likely have been fired.
*****
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