BRIAN
DEER: NOTTING HELL Page 4
So where does
the money go? It's hard to say, since after the trust
established the nature of my inquiries it refused to
speak to me. "I am more than happy to be
co-operative and straightforward," Gordon
initially wrote to the editor of The Sunday Times.
"However, I would ask that reconsideration is
given to my request to have advance information on
the complaints made." Later, Gordon required any
questions to be put in writing, and hung up when I
called him at home.
Was
the judge too busy? Unaware of any misconduct? What
did he know? Did he turn a blind eye? In an interview
before he broke off contact, he confirmed that his
committee was running the Hardy-Smith pursuit, but he
said only to collect money due under a "consent
order" agreed before he took the chair in 1993.
He refused to comment on the "red Golf"
deception, since, he said, it was subject to official
investigation. He denied that the trust was
litigious, and said the carnival floats had been
evicted from unused ground because they posed
insurance risks. The carnival organisers were banned
from trust land, he said, because of the state in
which they had left it in the past.
Although
he is a former chair of the borough's town planning
committee and received detailed guidance in Charity
Commission booklets on this subjects, he said that he
didn't know the position on charitable rate and
licence fee exemptions, which had never been raised
at any management committee since 1993. "As a
trustee," he said, "I would not see it as
my role to review every single premises in the trust
every year in respect of every aspect of its
operation." He undertook to investigate the
"intent" behind Matland's dealings with
council officers, but in the event released no new
information. "The question of whether the
council was misled and whether or not rebates were
allowable are, in the first instance, matters for the
council," he wrote later. "I have therefore
written to the leader of the council informing him of
your allegations and inviting him to initiate an
investigation with which the trust will co-operate
fully."
In a
conversation the following day, Matland denied
misconduct of any kind. He said he didn't know the
legal position on the rates and licence issue and
refused to comment on the red Golf incident.
Astonishingly, he said he didn't believe Hardy-Smith
had even libelled him in the first place, and later
wrote to me, as if this helped: "It was not
until my trustees were legally advised of the
seriousness of it all that it dawned on me."
Both
Gordon and Matland suggested that the land inherited
30 years ago had been well and wisely used. Because
the trust was a charity, it could bring funds to the
area that the local authority couldn't. And, unlike
the council, it had an innovative structure, flexible
and responsive to needs. "The members of the
management committee give up a lot of their time
during the year because they happen to believe in the
trust," Gordon said.
Their
critics say they will now go to the Charity
Commission, but they don't plan to hold their breath.
When Hardy-Smith complained to this body about
charity money being spent on suing him for libel, it
replied in May 1999 refusing to tell him anything,
declaring that its investigations were "not
necessarily handled in a different manner from a
charity support issue", and stating that after
three months, "for financial and practical
reasons," his "correspondence will be
destroyed."
And
so that's how I left the war that Sunday morning at
Subterania, with a quick toast to the late Mrs Kelly.
At 2.01am, the music stopped and I joined the crowd
on Acklam Road, wondering how on earth the charity
could get away with this stuff. And I couldn't help
asking what else like this was happening across
Britain in such unaccountable, unsupervised bodies.
It seemed to me that here was a perversion of the
very meaning of "charity", only brought to
light by a quirk of geography - that its victims see
each other in the street.
"They
treat us like dirt," said Pat Mason, 50, a
Labour councillor for the Golborne ward and a former
trust employee. "People round here have been
fighting them for years. It's like they think they
can blow us away."
In July 2002,
Judge Gerald Gordon finally resigned after nearly
nine years as chair, and the enterprise renamed
itself Westway Development Trust. Real gluttons for
punishment can select from a Westway Development
Trust
index by Brian Deer. Your own home study course.
Read more by
Brian Deer on charity in Voluntary Service
Overseas, VSO
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