Chapter 23
The Building Preservation Trust
As the building contract approached completion I addressed myself to the matter of managing the building. I had many contacts and was approached by several parties interested in renting space in the building. By the time the building was completed I had almost fully let it at commercial rents.
As no help whatever was coming from other members of the Trust or community I did it all myself. I bought and fixed the individual door locks that had not been part of the contract but were necessary for management of a shared building. I arranged electricity suppliers and the alarm system fitting and maintenance contract. I arranged for the fitting of a multi-point telephone cable that brought ten lines directly into the building in an underground cable.
I arranged the fire extinguishers and maintenance contract and supervised the final inspections and certifications by building control. I arranged the rating inspections and helped negotiate the reduced rates applicable to charitable organisations.
I completed all the details for all the funders together with the quantity surveyor and architect and ensured that every detail was completed. I produced accounts for the year 2001 and submitted them for, and achieved, audit. I completed and returned the Annual return to Companies House and the return to the Charities Commission.
I secured an appropriate form of licence for our tenants produced professionally but at no cost to the Trust. I negotiated terms and secured licences for each tenant, all at no cost to the Trust.
I installed a 25 point CAT5 computer network for the CDA operated UK On-line centre in the stable block. This was a quoted arms length contract. I also repaired the leaking toilet and put right some of the doors that had moved in settlement immediately after construction. I took care of a number of other minor problems inevitable in a contract of this nature.
At this time I had spent so much time in the CDA that I had become a keyholder and eventually did several maintenance jobs for them including grounds maintenance, repair of the boiler and installation of a thermostat in the CDA building and locks on internal doors. For over a year I was the main key holder for servicing evening meetings when the CDA rented out rooms to community organisations. I was not paid for my caretaking work but several groups such as the Spon End Forum received free meeting space effectively paid for by my efforts. I was paid for the maintenance work and I developed a good relationship with the CDA.
At Black Swan we had nine rooms and the stable block for rent and by opening day I had secured tenants for the stable block and seven of the rooms. The rents were set by local conditions and were commercially viable. I prepared a budget for the next twelve months and set the level of service charge in negotiation with the tenants.
I spent a lot of time negotiating and preparing bids for phase 3 with the ERDF, English Heritage and the city. The latter came back quite quickly with a good offer and English Heritage indicated a reasonable participation. CDA and I had spent a lot of time preparing a very substantial bid with the National Lottery Heritage Fund and this eventually came good although there were some stringent requirements attached.
Eventually it began to be apparent that another ERDF bid would be impossible. The small one we had submitted was rejected and we were invited to re-submit but I was assured by CDA and a funding officer in the city that the amount of work involved was such that any bid for less than £5,000,000 was not worthwhile. The new ERDF round was not suitable for small projects.
I had been working unpaid since January when it became apparent to the chair of the trust that I was effectively doing a full time job. The chair suggested I should be paid and an agreement was made appointing me Administrator for a period of one year at a very modest remuneration.
In May 2002 we held a trust meeting and the acting chair of The Forum attended as a guest and saw a copy of this agreement on a side table and indicated his objection to it. He made it quite clear that he considered he should have control of the administrationof the Black Swan project although he had resigned from the trust. He wanted control to be through the Forum. As the Forum had no money and was not a limited company, this would have been extremely difficult to achieve in practice while the trust had dozens of immediate problems to deal with and acted quiet properly to protect its assets.
The Forum had set up a company called SCAN to own and operate assets but this had no money and was not a charitable company and such arrangements would have added an enormous burden to my workload. They were simply impractical. I was already doing work enough for two people and was being paid almost nothing.
It was also in May 2002 that the acting chair of The Forum sent me an email asking if I could arrange to transfer money from the Forum to SCAN. I told him it had already been done and he sent back a really snotty email that simply said “Who authorised this? “ I produced his own previous email authorising such a transfer and another member produced a record from her notes verifying the authorising Forum minute. The incident passed but I was well aware that the acting chair and I, who had been excellent colleagues for several years were now at loggerheads. The damage had been done.
It was around this time in June 2002 that the acting chair of the Spon End Forum requested a room for rent in Black Swan for the use of the community. I offered the downstairs room at the rear of number 123 as this had been suggested by other members of the community as it was accessible to most disabled people. The room favoured by the acting chair was immediately above this room and was virtually impossible to access by the disabled.
The main tenant, who rented five rooms, expressed his concern as he had been using the upper room as a conference room and its loss would cause him difficulties. He was a good tenant and I have always believed in looking after my customers and he made me an offer to rent the room from me immediately.
In the meanwhile I had agreed to give the tenancy to the Forum and had produced a Lease to the agreed terms and given it to the acting chair of the Forum on the first day of July 2002, to be effective immediately. He had received funding from Area Co-ordination and all he had to do was to sign the lease and give me a cheque. I spoke to him and emailed him several times in the following weeks but he came up with one excuse after another and did not sign the lease or the cheque.
In early September, at my request, we met in town and discussed matters. He had asked that the lease be rewritten to commence in September and although the trust had no fault, I agreed in the interest of maintaining good customer relationships. The trust thereby lost two months rent. After our extensive discussion we shook hands although his body language was anything but friendly and he said “I have not changed my mind”. Exactly what he meant by that I do not know but I was in no mood to start an argument. I thought we had reached agreement on the lease.
I phoned and emailed him several times after that and offered to go to his house to get the lease singed but he kept avoiding the issue. In the meanwhile, my existing tenant was pressing me to let him have the room.
The September meeting of SCAN, of which I was secretary, was devoted almost completely to the matter of the management of Black Swan. The acting chair of The Forum claimed that I should have made arrangements for the transfer of control from the SEBPT to SCAN as secretary of both organisations while I pointed out that this task had clearly been apportioned to him in the minutes of the previous November. It was very clear at this meeting that his attitude was hardening and he obviously had no inkling of the difficulties. He and the other members of SCAN ignored the obvious fact that I had an acute conflict of interest and blamed me for what they claimed was my failure.
They made it plain they considered I was trying to control the Black Swan project when the reality was that I was simply a servant trying to do my best for the trust and I could not possibly serve two masters.
Their treatment of me at a personal level was despicable. The Chair of SCAN stopped inviting me to meetings of SCAN despite the fact that I was secretary to the SCAN trust and had legal duties to fulfil. The next meeting was cancelled and everyone but me was informed. I was left sitting in the Doe Bank Building waiting for a meeting that had been cancelled. I sent chair a text suggesting she might have told me but she ignored me. This was the woman who two months before had stored her furniture in my property, rent free, where it still languishes two years later. The woman proved to be a mean, rude and extremely nasty person.
On the 27th October the acting chair of the Forum sent an email to various members of the trust admitting he had been into the Black Swan building and attempted to use the room for a meeting. He had still not signed the lease or the cheque and I had consulted the trust’s solicitor who advised me very strongly not to let him use the room without a licence in place. I behaved perfectly correctly throughout and managed the building correctly as was my duty to protect the trusts interests. Any other course of action on my part could have led to action by the trust against me.
The acting chair for his part had gone into the building without invitation and told my legitimate tenants to get out of “his “ room. This was a very nasty trespass and had upset my legitimate tenants. He then wrote to claim that the reason he had not signed the lease was that the room was not available to him. This was, of course, not within his possible knowledge, as I was manager of the building, not him. The room was not his as he had neither signed the licence nor paid the rent. When this matter eventually was resolved, I made the room available to him within 30 minutes. It was in any case none of his business until he had signed the lease and paid the rent.
I replied to the acting chair and politely pointed out the facts but he simply kept repeating his bullying lies to the other members of the trust. He still would not pay the rent or sign the lease. Eventually I explained the facts to the chair of the Spon End Building Trust who told Noble to pay up. Noble then signed the lease and paid the rent within 48 hours at the end of October. He had failed to sign for four months for me but did it within two days for the chair. It was perfectly clear he deliberately misused the money he had obtained from Area Co-ordination as a weapon with which to beat me.
It was very clear that he had deliberately engineered this whole thing to get at me. I had the full support of the chair but then the acting chair of the Forum pulled another nasty stunt. He had shortly before introduced another man into the trust. This man wrote a nasty and utterly unjustified letter to other members of the trust repeating thes lies and blaming me despite the obvious fact that I was simply acting in accordance with the law of the land, the advice of the trust’s solicitors and in the best interests of the trust, something the law demanded of me. The perpetrator compounded his nasty backstabbing by copying the heading of his letter to me without the text, one of the nastiest tricks in the book.
Simultaneously another friend, who had also recently joined the trust, wrote an unjustified letter criticising my accounts. I had been asked to present unspecified accounts to the previous monthly meeting of the trust with a few hours notice. I presented a copy of the current position of the bank account and a prediction for the next month.
The new member suggest a whole host of things that he could not possible have deduced from this event and completely ignored the fact that I had run the project very successfully, audited the accounts rapidly and completely successfully and could account for every single penny of a budget totalling nearly £1,000,000. It was perfectly obvious to me that the knives were out both from the Forum, from SCAN and now from within the trust.
All of these matters are set out very clearly in the various emails I received, and sometimes obtained through devious channels. I have invented nothing. Indeed, throughout the latter stages of this saga I sent no emails at all except to chair. All the dirty deeds were done by the acting chair of The Forum and his deliberately introduced thugs. I phoned one member of the trust to elicit support and she put the phone down on me.
Later one of the founders of the trust who had been involved in the community and Black Swan for many years and appears to be an honest broker told me he knew Kevin Noble “Had issues with the way you work ”. The way I worked was that I obeyed the law of the land and did my best to observe the terms of my contract with the trust and place the trust’s interests first in all my calculations. If the acting chair of the Forum thinks this is wrong then had an extremely distorted view of reality. He was expecting to me to act illegally and betray my employer and leave myself open to legal resort by the trust and the trust open to resort from the Charities Commission who have very strict rules on such matters.
Another incident had nothing to do with the Spon End Building Preservation Trust but is related here as it indicates the attitude and motives of the acting chair and his girlfriend. When I was chair of the Forum, the Cabinet Office had sent one of its officers to see the work we had been doing in the area. The purpose of Area Co-ordination was to implement Cabinet policy directed by the deputy prime minister and operated by the cabinet office to charge local councils with encouraging and supporting community organisation to get involved in the local decision making process. The visit was an inspection to check on results in the field. I had entertained the officer for several hours in turn with several other community activists in the city.
In 2002, after I had resigned the Forum chair, the officer paid another visit. The acting chair was asked to host his visit to Spon End but could, or would, not. I was asked by area Co-ordination to fill in, which I did as a matter of courtesy. The acting chair and his girlfriend arrived much later and made no secret of their annoyance that I was there. I had acted perfectly properly and courteously but incurred their wrath nevertheless.
The chair of the Building Preservation trust reconfirmed several times his support but had supported the Forum’s claims to use the room, quite wrongly in my opinion. The acting chair of the Forum deliberately refused to sign the licence. By now I had been totally banned from the community by the vicious anti-social and fascist actions of the acting chair and his friends and others but that is another story.
One of my relatives, who had been a leading member of Coventry City Council for around 40 years told me I had entered politics when I joined in community activities. I argued only slightly before recognising her point. I now know that community politics are much dirtier than those between the formal political parties. When I first attended council meetings I was appalled at the viciousness of the language used between political opponents. While always courteously expressed, and no swearing allowed, many of the points scored were downright rude.
But often these opponents would go down the pub together afterwards. Like good marriage partners, the political parties have learned to row without falling out. They have also created backup systems to support them through the trials and tribulations of the inevitable vicious infighting and opposition of politics. In the artificially created community forums there are no moderating influences and no backup for minorities. The whole community becomes a battlefield and those in Westminster who set up this monster are going to have to change the way they do things. I am sure I am not the only individual subjected to the political filth of a vain and ambitious opponent within the community who draws his power from the support of the city’s money, but without any responsibility or control over his political actions. This is pure fascism.
I took stock of my situation and decided that I had devoted several years of my life to serving a community, several leading members of which were behaving in a disgusting manner towards me. They were attempting to force me to use my talents in servitude to them. I immediately decided to resign from the trust and spent three weeks of November producing accounts for Audit. I had no intention of leaving the accounts of the trust in anything but perfect condition. The nasty bastards might hound me out of the community with invented lies but they were not going to have any chance to tell lies about my accounts.
I submitted a complete set of accounts to the auditor up to the 26th November on that date and submitted my resignation on the 30 November 2002 to be effective on 31st December 2002 in accordance with the terms of my Contract with the trust. The trust, 15 months later, still owes me £455.65 in payment of my term of notice. The contract is quite clear on this point.
Thus I was forced out of the trust for no reason but to satisfy the acting chair’s vanity, ambition and lust for political power which he is incapable of achieving through the normal political channels. The fact is that I was never any threat to his political ambition. Indeed, my work had taken him much further than his solo efforts had. We had been a good team. But his rabid ambition destroyed all the good work we had done.
His actions seemed perverse and destructive and illogical but they become explicable when one understands his political persuasion. He keeps a picture of Lenin on his wall and is obviously both extremely left wing and has anarchistic tendencies. He often referred to the squats he lived in during his student days. I thought that it was something he might have grown out of but it appears not. He could have signed the licence and paid the rent for the community room at any time but it suited his political purpose not to. He was determined to show that his alleged need was politically more important than the rule of law and the ownership of the building by the trust. As well as beating me up by his lies he was also making an extreme left wing political statement.
His behaviour was typical of Britain in the 1960’s and 70’s. He holds political views typical of the Arthur Scargill era and has not the slightest respect for the political system of work and law that makes our civilisation work. He wanted his way and was prepared to do anything to get it. At least one of his cronies shares his political views while the others are just sad thugs who have jumped upon his bandwagon. He supported me as long as I followed his agenda but when I was not prepared to bend the rules and break the trust of the Building Preservation Trust to serve his whim he set out to destroy me.