Thistle Housing Association Annual General Meeting 2019 – More Fairy Stories, Excuses & Lies?

1,321 DAYS – 3 YEARS + 7 MONTHS + 13 DAYS
since Thistle’s mismanaged Major Works Programme started on 7th January 2016
993 DAYS – 32 MONTHS + 16 DAYS
since 30th November 2016 when “all of the works to all of the houses in Toryglen will be complete“. Today, 20th August 2019, still incomplete, work proven to be shoddy and more importantly, dangerous and now possibly hazardous to life and limbA week from today will mark ONE THOUSAND DAYS since Thistle Housing’s Major Works Programme failed on 30 November 2016 when, “all of the works to all of the houses in Toryglen will be complete”.

Still not complete and will not be for some time and not before the year 2020, which will be the sixth year of this utter failure of Thistle’s wastrel management since they signed the funding agreement with Glasgow City Council in September 2015.

A Wee Bit About The Scottish Housing Regulator’s Intervention
The Scottish Housing Regulator decided on 21 August 2018 that statutory intervention into the running of Thistle Housing Association was required. click here for the details of that decision.

Thistle’s presumptuous Management Committee, backed up by the tyrannical senior management, subsequently decided to spend thousands of pounds of residents’ funds on expensive legal representation to launch an outrageous appeal to attempt to countermand the Regulator’s decision.

They comprehensively lost this appeal in December 2018 whereby every member of the Appeals Panel found against Thistle. This naturally delayed the work of Regulator’s Statutory Manager but alas, given that Thistle had failed on each and every one of the requirements The Regulator demands and expects from all housing associations and that it has since been discovered that mismanagement and malpractice has been endemic within Thistle for years, the intervention took (and has continues to take) much longer than expected.

• See more on a previous blog entry, click “Thistle Loses Its Appeal“.
• The Appeal Panel full decision here, click decision-of-the-scottish-housing-regualtor-appeal-panel-on-301118

The Scottish Housing Regulator: “We can appoint a statutory manager to a landlord if we identify serious risks to tenants’ interests. We will only do this where it is the most proportionate way to tackle identified risks and protect the interests of tenants and service users. Our document ‘How we appoint managers and governing body members’ gives further information about our powers to appoint statutory managers and how we will use the list”.

“A regulatory intervention is when we use a statutory power to require action from a social landlord where it is failing to provide services or manage its affairs to an appropriate standard. This may be non-compliance with regulatory requirements or a failure to achieve the standards and outcomes in the Scottish Social Housing Charter . We will only intervene where we need to and will always be proportionate, using the most appropriate power to target the problem effectively.
Our overall aim in any intervention is to achieve our regulatory objective to safeguard and promote the interests of tenants and other service users. The specific aim of intervention is to ensure that the tenants and service users have the benefit of a social landlord which is compliant with regulatory requirements as quickly as possible and at the least cost to tenants and service users.
One of the intervention powers available to SHR under Sections 57 to 59 of the Housing (Scotland) Act 2010 is to appoint a statutory manager to a social landlord. Our framework sets out more information about the use of this and our other statutory powers.
The statutory manager is not an employee of SHR or of the landlord. This is an appointment to carry out a statutory function. The time commitment and length of appointment will vary in each case. An appointment is likely to be for a period of 6 months but could be extended. The appointment is also likely to be an almost full time role and candidates in employment should be aware of the time commitment involved and ensure they can secure permission from their employer to accept an appointment potentially at short notice.
The landlord is responsible for paying the statutory manager’s fees and expenses.”

The Annual General Meeting
The AGM, another opportunity for the self seeking, patently failed management of Thistle Housing Association, in liaison with the remnants of their compliant, crony, poodle Management Committee (statutory appointees excepted) to come up with yet another pile of lies, stories, selected half truths in some desperate fashion to explain the shambolic mismanagement of the residents’ Association which has led to faulty chimney copes and roofs having to be replaced at a cost of MILLIONS of pounds, not including the heavy cost of removing asbestos in common attic spaces which they have criminally conspired to hide from residents and broken every rule in the book, the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012.

Additional to the above, is the cost of repairing window overcills which are NOT overcills, as they ripped out the original concrete window cills, replaced by bits of plastic by the untrained, bottom dollar, foreign labour gangs, cills which are now over nothing, merely jammed into the render and are warping and cracking as they have no base cill to sit on.

Not forgetting, of course, the dreadful rendering/roughcasting, discoloured, cracking and bulging (with water trapped behind?), the Rockwool EWI insulation (allegedly warranted to only two storeys in height) now soaked by leaking rainwater from the incorrectly positioned gutters with the consequential increase in reports of dampness in homes and rainwater leaking into (especially) top floor flats. More MILLIONS of pounds and all caused by Thistle’s arrogant but very ignorant “non technical” management who blatantly refused to take heed of residents’ fears reported to them in September 2016 and many, many times since.

Added to all of the above, are the fees payable to The Scottish Housing Regulator for the services of The Statutory Manager and the nominated members to the Management Committee, the cost of which will, itself, run to tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds.

So much for the disappeared (vanished for ten out of the last twelve months) Director, Grace McColgan’s eternal mantra (and only response) of “a fixed price contract“. Yes, it was certainly fixed!

None, not a single item of the above required rectification to an endless list of dreadfully shoddy work was due to any effort by Thistle management as they desperately reacted to hide the truth from Toryglen residents who, when they complained (and still complain) in droves, were and are treated to deflection and lies. This has been as a result, as Thistle themselves have put it, “a small group of determined residents” who refused to give in to Thistle Housing’s lies, bullying and threats.

Can you imagine any other enterprise with a multi million pound annual turnover, especially one which is supposed to be a mutual and so-called charitable association, whose senior management and governing body, being so useless and incapable and STILL being in position? Nope. That would never happen anywhere else.

Well Paid for Failure
With huge salaries comes equally huge responsibility and hence required examinations of performance and culpability for failure. Thistle’s management, thus far, have refused to accept any responsibility in the gross dereliction of duty in their administration of Thistle and have continued to grab every penny of their unjustified fat salaries for themselves in a forlorn hope that residents would give up the fight. They should, by this time be aware, Not going to happen!

Or is it the case that Thistle’s management, none of whom stays in Toryglen, can do what they like, at any time, at any cost, at any price and spend millions of pounds of money demanded from owners together with taxpayers’ grant funding like a drunk gambler in a casino without any reference to residents and shareholders and never be blamed for failure? After all, it’s not their money. It is the Association’s. No matter what they do, the loot keeps rolling into their bank accounts each and every month.

The financial figures for the just ended financial year are dreadful. Another £1.7MILLION pounds just vanished. Gone without explanation. All of this in addition to the huge repair bill, solicitors’ charges and Regulator’s fees. Won’t even go into the thousands of pounds Thistle has wasted employing an expensive PR Consultant, the Beattie Group, to take the heat from them and to front up the many requests for information from the media.

Jackboots?
Is it the case like, for example, last year’s profoundly fiddled Annual General Meeting, in which the Management Committee took 54 seconds to re-elect themselves without any form of discussion, vote or ballot (listen to that by clicking here) and that was after losing £1.1MILLION from the previous year’s Financial Statement, again, despite being constantly pressed over this past year, without response to residents’ letters and emails?

There is a word for that situation and that word is FASCISM

‘Fascism is a way of ruling that advocates total control of the people. It stands for a centralised government headed by a dictator, with few individual rights. Fascists are against democracy’

If you are a shareholder, please try to attend the AGM
on Wednesday 21 August at the Cornerstone for 6.00pm prompt
and let your opinion be heard