Northern Ireland

Companies House: Greenbelt Group Ltd – Status: Active – Proposal to Strike off

Nov 10th, 2009

Greenbelt Group Ltd., face new threat, with Companies House public records now indicating that there is a proposal to strike off the company, presumed due to failure to file accounts.

Companies House records detailed below indicate that accounts should have been filed no later than 30th July 2009.

In a meeting attended by the Editor of Planning Watch UK, in a private capacity, with Neil Cameron of Tulloch Homes and Richard Hartland, Head of Planning, Highland Council, on Thursday last, Mr Middleton, Managing Director Greenbelt Group Ltd., continued to state that it was business as usual, giving no indication of the threat to the Greenbelt Group Ltd., company.

Thousands of home owners throughout the UK are tied to maintenance contracts with this company, put in place by developers and signed off by council planning authorites as “fit for purpose”, with both UK and Scottish Government continuing to refuse to put consumer protection regulations in place demanded by home owners.

Complaints have been made to Trading Standards, a number of Police Forces, numerous Members of Parliament, both MP’s and MSP’s and directly to the Minister for Community Safety, Fergus Ewing MSP.

In Scotland, the Scottish Government have indicated that they seem to think that the Maintenance industry concerned should regulate itself and the Office of Fair Trading continues to sit on the fence, despite receiving numerous complaints from many different areas of the UK.

Surely it is now time for MP’s and MSP’s to collectively take action to represent the electorate who have elected representataives to protect the interests of their communities?

Editor

Notes:

Fergus Ewing MSP – Scottish National Party

Fergus Ewing MSP – Scottish Government bio:

Fergus was first elected in 1999 as the MSP for Inverness East Nairn and Lochaber. He was re-elected in 2003 and again in the 2007 elections. Prior to being elected he ran his own law practice and developed SNP policy on small business as well as serving on the national executive of the SNP.

He is the son of Winnie, formerly the MSP for Highlands and Islands and MEP for Scotland, and brother of Annabelle, formerly MP for Perth.

His constituency is the second largest in Scotland, and is about 5 times larger than greater London which has around 90 MPs. Fergus campaigns on a wide variety of matters of vital importance to the area.
He seeks to represent everyone, irrespective of their own political views, and is keen to try to offer help to all constituents when they seek it.

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Herald Scotland:

Closure looms for land firm over late accounts

West Myerton housing development where Greenbelt was contracted to maintain the open spaces

Exclusive – Chris Watt – Published on 7 Nov 2009

A controversial land management firm embroiled in thousands of disputes across Scotland has been threatened with closure, The Herald has learned.

Glasgow-based Greenbelt Group Ltd has been warned by Companies House that it will be struck off if it doesn’t produce its overdue accounts.

The firm failed to file records for 2006-07 by the July 2009 deadline, and it could now have its assets seized and handed to the state if it doesn’t comply. The registrar has formally proposed to strike off the firm, freezing its bank accounts and transferring all assets to the Crown.

Greenbelt managing director Alex Middleton said the outstanding documentation had been sent to Companies House, but he claimed that “it may have been delayed by the postal dispute”.

Sources close to the company told The Herald that Greenbelt had faced problems with its auditors, one of whom had resigned its position after disagreements over accounts.

However, Mr Middleton strenuously denied the difficulties, and insisted: “There is no question of the company being struck off.”

Greenbelt has been subject to thousands of complaints from councils, businesses and homeowners since it was incorporated in 1999, and a UK-wide campaign group now lists complaints from more than 130 housing estates.

The firm, originally established in the public sector by bodies including Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and Scottish Enterprise, was recently criticised for its work at the Black Cart Water, near Glasgow Airport, where it was paid £170,000 to maintain the area as a whooper swan reserve.

Greenbelt has since sold the SSSI to a local farmer at profit, without passing on grant money.

The firm has also been accused of failing homeowners who are tied into contracts for it to manage shared areas on housing estates. Aberdeenshire Council received so many complaints about work paid for but not completed that it wrote to developers urging them not to use Greenbelt.

Article website link

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Greenbelt Group Action

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Companies House Search:

Company Details – Name & Registered Office:
GREENBELT GROUP LIMITED
ABBOTSFORD HOUSE
ABBOTSFORD PLACE
GLASGOW
G5 9SS
Company No. SC192378

Status: Active – Proposal to Strike off
Date of Incorporation: 04/01/1999
Country of Origin: United Kingdom
Company Type: Private Limited Company
Nature of Business (SIC(03)):
9305 – Other service activities
Accounting Reference Date: 30/09
Last Accounts Made Up To: 30/09/2007 (SMALL)
Next Accounts Due: 30/07/2009 OVERDUE
Last Return Made Up To: 01/02/2009
Next Return Due: 01/03/2010
Last Members List: 01/02/2009

Previous Names:
Date of change:
8/04/2003
THE GREENBELT GROUP OF COMPANIES LIMITED
10/05/1999
COMLAW NO. 495 LIMITED

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General Companies House Information:

You could be penalised up to £5000 if you fail to send us your Annual Accounts by the due date.

And if you are late filing your Annual Return as well, your company may be struck off and you could face a criminal charge.

Winding up a company
A company may be wound up voluntarily if it cannot pay its creditors. It may also be wound up by order of the court on the petition of a creditor. In either case, relevant documents need to be sent to Companies House.

The following guidance is provided to help you understand how to wind up a company and the legal requirements that you must adhere to.

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House building targets warning – Professor Stephen Nickell

Jun 7th, 2008

by Editor.

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Ministers are “very unlikely” to achieve housing targets, the UK’s chief advisor on home building has warned.

Stephen Nickell
Fears housing chances are becoming social polarised.

Professor Stephen Nickell said that, unless conditions change, the target of three million new homes in England by 2020 will not be met.

To get to this target, the housing industry needs to be building 240,000 homes a year, a figure that few think they will achieve this year.

The industry is already behind in its construction targets.

Just over 200,000 new homes were built last year.

Priced out

Homebuilders have cut back new building this year as a lack of mortgage products and falling house prices have cut demand.

Mr Nickell, who heads the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit, believes that alongside the financial constraints local authorities are also holding up new house building.

The wealthier people in society can satisfy their housing demands, more or less, as they get richer

Professor Stephen Nickell

“Unless local authorities are given a strong incentive to allow house building in their locality, it seems to me very unlikely that we will hit the housing targets,” he said.

“And if you don’t keep building these houses the prices just keep going up relative to people’s incomes.”

Government figures published recently showed that new housing work was down 5% in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2007.

The Home Builders Federation, which represents major house builders, said that new building work did not show any signs of picking up.

“Right now the credit crunch is stopping people from getting the finance that people need to buy homes,” said John Slaughter, director of external affairs at the Federation.

“Longer term we need a better business environment and less regulatory cost to get the industry moving.”

The big building companies are beginning to show the strain with rumours that they may have to raise new capital to survive.

The two giants of the industry, Taylor Wimpey and Barratt Developments, carry a total of more than £2.5 billion of debt.

That equates to more than double their combined market worth.

The financial pain being felt by the companies has already forced one of them, Persimmon, to put a halt on all new building projects.

Falling prices

Figures from the Nationwide this month showed a 2.5% drop in house prices in May, with some predicting a 20% drop by the end of 2008.

But despite falling house prices, Professor Nickell said the current situation seemed to be only benefiting the richer parts of society.

“The wealthier people in society can satisfy their housing demands, more or less, as they get richer. While the rest of us get squashed into smaller and smaller houses.” he said.

And he added that if present trends continue, things are looking bleak for the future of housing in England.

“If the present situation continues we will be less well housed than the majority of people in Europe, Australia or the United States,” he said.

Original Article

Stephen Nickell

Is currently Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford. He was an External Member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee from 2000-2006 writing a number of pieces on the subject of the UK housing market. Until 2005 he was School Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, following this role from 1984-1998 as Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute of Economics and Statistics at the University of Oxford. He has also had earlier roles as an economist at the London School of Economics, in Paris and at the University of Princeton. He has been awarded a number of academic honours including Fellow of the British Academy and Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published widely in numerous branches of applied economics.

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Growth being led by developers, says campaigner

May 31st, 2008

by Editor.

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ASK Barrie Haycock why he decided to move to Inverness, he will tell you it is because he thought the Highland Capital was a good place to come to.

Growth being led by developers, says campaigner
By Calum Macleod – Inverness Courier

Four and a half years on, ask him if it is still a good place to come to and he hesitates.

“It’s difficult,” he said.

“It’s no better than other areas throughout the UK. The bottom line is that Inverness has the opportunity to learn from other areas and plan accordingly but no-one seems willing to do it.”

This apparent unwillingness to get to grips with the area’s planning deficiencies seems even more surprising to Barrie given the Highlands’ economic reliance on tourism.

“Tourists do not travel to see rows of soulless housing,” he pointed out.

For Barrie, who retired from a career in business at the age of 50, coming to the Highlands was an easy move to make as communications technology allowed his own public relations and allied services firm to operate from anywhere he chose.

He still enjoys getting out on the hills at the weekends and journeying to the unspoiled West Highlands, but soon learned that other parts of the region, not least Inverness itself, were going through what he describes as a quantum change.

To Barrie, Inverness’s rapid growth is being led by developers at the expense of community benefit and with little or no strategic planning or effective planning control “The emphasis in Inverness is on trying to build houses and then try and sort out the problems afterwards,” he said. “Exhibit A is the new trunk road with talk of bulldozing the new church at Inshes and compulsory purchase of properties. You would have thought they would have reserved the land, but that would be too easy.

“There is a growing view of many people in Inverness that the council should firmly get to grips with the situation and control planning so that development can take place in a properly thought out manner.

“Consultation is a joke. It’s a meaningless word in the planning process. Objections are rarely listened to and it’s the will of the developer that prevails over the will of the community.”

His awareness of discontent with the planning situation in Inverness was only heightened by his involvement with local community organisations.

Barrie is a founder member of the Milton of Leys local residents association, a member of Inverness Crime Prevention Panel and an Inverness South Community Councillor. More recently he has become involved with the Highlands and Islands Resilience Group, a disaster planning initiative designed to look at how threats such as pandemic influenza and terrorism could affect the Highlands.

These activities bring him into regular contact with a range of business owners, chamber of commerce members, police officers, community leaders, MPs, MSPs and Highland Council officials and local councillors.

A common topic of conversation has been concern at the way Highland Council is being run and its rapidly growing external debt problem which, by March this year, stood at a gross figure of 580 million.

The loss of prime farm land to residential housing with no meaningful infrastructure is another area of concern.

It was a prominent local councillor who initially suggested that a “Planning Watch” organisation was needed.

Barrie took up the suggestion and, as communities throughout Britain have similar issues to Inverness, widened the remit to create Planning Watch UK.

The organisation’s aims, objectives and interests are not confined to property matters. The regulation of the building industry, including land maintenance and property management companies, remains of prime importance.

“At present the new house build purchaser has been described by the National Consumer Council as having less consumer protection in law than when buying a kettle. This cannot continue and in general allows developers to make huge profits at the expense of the unsuspecting purchaser,” Barrie declared.

Nationally, Planning Watch UK members and contributors are working with MPs, MSPs and other organisations to introduce legislative changes to give houseowners the protection they need, just as locally the organisation wants to see more evidence of meaningful strategic planning.

Barrie Haycock, Planning Watch UK campaigner.

“The developer profit-driven process ignores the crucial requirement of infrastructure,” Barrie commented.

“Any future development must also look at education, health and transport services through to the massive number of jobs required to support the growing communities.”

Equally important are forward planning for roads, sewage and water supply and potential flood risk in certain areas. While there are plenty of bad examples of planning in Britain Telford in Shropshire or Scotland’s post-war New Towns there are also more positive designs which the Highlands could look to, such as Poundbury in Dorset. Designed by architect Leon Krier for landowner Prince Charles, this is an integrated community of shops, businesses and private and social housing and one which the planners of the Highlands would be advised to follow, Barrie suggested.

There are similar projects proposed for the Highlands, such as the “New Urbanist” community at Tornagrain, but for Barrie these being built are on too limited a scale and the principles which they adopt should be applied throughout the Highland region.

His work for Planning Watch UK and his other activities does take up a lot of his time and includes researching and studying local authority documents or fielding inquiries from journalists, but it is something he enjoys. “I don’t like to see people misled or ripped off and I have particular empathy and concerns for elderly people who are hung out to dry by the process. Who do they turn to for support?”

Barrie is scathing of a council which, he says, “would rather spend 300,000 on a fireworks display than care of the elderly.”

“The elderly are always the first to suffer when councils run into funding problems, yet the fat cat desk jockeys who decide the financial cuts continue to thrive,” he stated.

“This issue is constantly being raised by those who suffer and is a high priority for Planning Watch UK. Care of the elderly, young and disabled has to be of major importance but is so often put at the end of the bureaucrats’ list.”

Which is why Planning Watch UK highlights anything it regards as a waste of taxpayers’ money and wants to see local authority and government quango spending kept under strict financial control.

“A local example seems to be the bizarre reported redundancy payouts made to HIE members of staff, some of whom seem to have moved to highly paid new jobs some within Highland Council while collecting massive redundancy payments. This is an absolute disgrace!” he declared.

Barrie stood as an Independent candidate in the 2007 Highland Council election for Inverness South and came last, but reveals that he feels happier outside the political system.

“If you are part of the current system, you could very quickly get drowned under the current method of operation,” he said.

That system has been made even less effective, he believes, by the recent move to a party political council from one with a tradition of political independence and the creation of multi-member wards.

“The multi-councillor ward system isn’t working, full stop. None of the councillors can agree amongst themselves. End result: chaos,” Barrie said.

“Our councillors are paid salaries now, so there should be accountability all the way down from the chief executive to the most junior councillor.”

What is not so important, to Barrie at least, is the political hue of those councillors or even the MPs and MSPs.

“I’m apolitical,” Barrie stated.

“I don’t give a damn what party is in power as long as there are sensible policies from that party and I believe most people think the same.”

c.macleod@inverness-courier.co.uk

The true cost of Quangos to the UK Tax Payer

May 18th, 2008

by Editor.

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Quangos: The Unseen Government of the UK

The most comprehensive picture ever of the UK’s 1,162 Quangos

The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) presents the full list of the UK’s vast quango industry, a detailed run-down of the staff and cost of the 1,162 bodies, boards and agencies that make up Britain’s Unseen Government. It is now five years since the Parliamentary Select Committee on Public Administration recommended that the Government publish such a list, a recommendation that the Government has failed to fulfil. In the absence of an official list, the TPA has compiled one instead, providing the public with the most comprehensive information available on the organisations that increasingly spend their money and influence their lives without democratic oversight. The report can be found here (PDF).

Key Findings:

There are 1,162 quangos in the UK, running at a total cost to the taxpayer of £64 billion, equivalent to £2,550 per household.
Even under the Cabinet Office’s restrictive definition of quangos, the cost of these bodies has risen 50% in the last ten years.
UK quangos now employ an army of almost 700,000 bureaucrats.
Even the Government itself does not know the full extent of the unaccountable quango industry, which range from the massive e.g. Job Centre Plus (Staff: 70,042, Cost: £3.5 billion) and the Courts Service (Staff: 19,986, Cost: £704.8 million); to the bizarre e.g. the British Potato Council (Staff: 49); or the West Northants Development Corporation (Staff: 34, Cost: £15.3 million)
When the total number of quangos is added to the other government subsidiaries such as local authorities and NHS trusts, the total number of organisations controlled by the UK Government rises to 2,063, costing the taxpayer £257 billion and employing over 5.1 million people.

Ben Farrugia, author of the report and Policy Analyst at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:

“Government in the UK is now so large, diverse and complex that it is impossible for anyone to manage effectively, let alone by Ministers with no prior experience of management and little in-depth understanding of the work carried out by their departments. Government today tries to do too much, and consequently fails; the structure of government needs to change if we hope to see better value and significant improvements in our public services.”

The full report provides a full list of the quangos along with individual data on staff numbers, taxpayer funding and expenditure as well as national totals and can be found here (PDF).

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Northern Ireland

Companies House: Greenbelt Group Ltd – Status: Active – Proposal to Strike off