By David Wood
On 11 August 2026, a representative of Peabody Trust stood in Thames Magistrates’ Court and pleaded guilty to a criminal offence: failing, without reasonable excuse, to provide a leaseholder with a written summary of service charge costs.
Peabody was fined £1,000, reduced from £1,500 because of its guilty plea, plus £400 victim surcharge, but the fine is not the real story. No council brought this case. No regulator brought it. I did, as a leaseholder at Goldpence Apartments in Tower Hamlets, after other routes had failed to make Peabody comply with the law.
The conviction came after two years of chasing responses to my requests, making multiple official complaints, Ombudsman escalation, escalation to Peabody’s senior executives, an MP’s involvement, Peabody’s own admission that it had misrepresented its legal compliance, and an unsuccessful request for the local authority to prosecute. It even survived an initial refusal by the court itself.
It took around two years of requests, complaints and record keeping before the issue finally reached a criminal court.
What Peabody Was Required to Provide
The law gives leaseholders important rights to check the service charges they are being asked to pay. Under section 21 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, a leaseholder can ask for a written summary of relevant service charge costs. Section 22 then gives leaseholders the right to inspect the accounts, receipts and other documents behind that summary.
In simple terms, if a landlord is asking residents to pay service charges, residents should be able to see what the money was spent on and check the figures.
At Goldpence Apartments, residents do not just contribute towards their own block. Some costs, such as grounds maintenance, shared staff and buildings insurance, are spread across the wider estate and then divided between blocks and individual homes.
My own share is only a little over half of one per cent. But service charge costs across the wider estate came to more than £1 million in the same year. That is why access to the underlying figures matters.
Section 25 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 makes failure, without reasonable excuse, to comply with certain duties under Sections 21, 22 or 23 a criminal offence. In my case, it was Peabody’s failure to comply with my Section 21 request that led to the prosecution. Put simply, Section 21 created the duty, Peabody failed to comply, and Section 25 allowed me to bring a criminal prosecution.
The Request That Led to Peabody’s Conviction
The Section 21 request that eventually led to the prosecution was sent in January 2026. Peabody acknowledged it the next day. The one-month legal deadline passed without a compliant summary being provided. Three weeks later, Peabody’s own Stage 1 complaint response admitted that the deadline had been missed, but the required summary still did not arrive. Eventually, I applied to the Magistrates’ Court for a criminal summons. Peabody provided the summary shortly after, but by then it was around two months late.
That timing is important. The information was not provided within the legal deadline, nor during the weeks that followed. It arrived only after I had taken the step of applying to the criminal court. And this was not an isolated incident.
An earlier request had been made in November 2023. Further requests under Sections 21 and 22 were made by several residents in December 2024. Much of 2025 was then spent chasing responses, receiving apologies and being given promises that were not kept.
Peabody Told an MP It Had Complied With the Law. It Hadn’t
One of the most serious parts of the case came from Peabody’s own review. It found that:
“Peabody has made inaccurate statements related to this case to Rushanara Ali MP, the Housing Ombudsman and Mr Wood, by saying it had met its legal obligations.”
That finding is important. Residents had complained about Peabody’s failure to provide the information. But Peabody had told an MP, the Housing Ombudsman and me that it had complied with its legal duties when its own later review accepted that this was not correct. Peabody then missed its own deadline for correcting the position and set another deadline, which was also missed.
The Council Wouldn’t Prosecute — and at First Neither Would the Court
I asked Tower Hamlets Council to consider prosecuting the offence. Nothing came of that, so I decided to apply to the Magistrates’ Court myself. Even that was not straightforward. My application was initially refused because the court relied on legislation applying only in Wales and on a legal category that had been abolished in 2008.
Tenants and Resident protest outside Peabody head office in 2024
Most people would probably have assumed that the court must be right, but I went back to the court and explained why I believed the decision was based on the wrong law. The court eventually accepted that its interpretation had been out of date for 18 years and the prosecution was allowed to proceed.
On the day my case was heard, two much smaller cases went through before mine: one involving a market stall extending beyond its pitch and another involving a café bench placed too far into the street. The resulting fines were of a similar order. Yet the maximum fine for the offence Peabody faced was £2,500, which shows how weak the financial deterrent can be.
What Peabody Said in Mitigation
Peabody pleaded guilty, so there was no trial to decide whether the offence had been committed. At the hearing, Peabody’s representatives put forward two points in mitigation – excuses for their failure to comply, which they believed the court should take into account when deciding the penalty. First, they said that Peabody had provided the information in the end, and secondly, they pointed out that Peabody is a not-for-profit housing association.
Both statements are true, but the summary was provided only after I had applied to the Magistrates’ Court for the criminal summons, and around two months after it was legally due.
Nor does being a not-for-profit landlord remove the legal duty to comply. Peabody is a charitable housing association. It is also one of the country’s largest housing providers, owning around 93,000 homes and borrowing on the financial markets. An organisation of that size should be capable of providing a leaseholder with information the law requires it to provide. In this case, it did not.
Persistence and a Paper Trail
The most useful lesson from this case is not that every resident should prosecute their landlord – private prosecution is a serious step and should normally be a last resort. The real lesson is about following a process that will help others who need to escalate a complaint when the landlord is not complying with the law:
- Put important requests in writing.
- Make it clear when you are relying on a legal right.
- Keep proof that your request was sent and received.
- Record the deadline.
- Keep every response.
- Do not assume that an apology has solved the problem.
- A written admission that a deadline was missed or that they have failed to comply may become important evidence later.
In my case, much of the evidence against Peabody came from Peabody’s own records: my request, its acknowledgement, the missed deadline, its written admission and the eventual late response. Peabody had effectively created the paper trail itself.
Residents are also stronger when they work together. A residents’ association can help people compare experiences, preserve evidence and understand whether a problem affecting one person is actually happening to many.
Why a £1,000 Fine Is Not Enough
The size of the penalty raises another problem which is that the sanction is too weak. Producing properly certified service charge accounts can cost thousands of pounds. Peabody’s financial penalty in this case was £1,000, plus £400 costs. For a housing association the size of Peabody, that is unlikely on its own to change behaviour. The bigger consequences must therefore come from scrutiny by residents, MPs, regulators and organisations that expect their members to meet proper standards.
Peabody is a member of the National Housing Federation, which has been asked whether this conviction raises issues under its Code of Conduct and what it means for board accountability. At the time of publication, no response had been received. There is a particular irony here since Peabody’s Chief Executive, Ian McDermott, also sits on the board of the National Housing Federation and also chairs the G15 group of London’s largest housing associations.
Peabody’s accreditation with the Good Business Charter had already been put on hold while concerns about its conduct were investigated. By early August 2026, Peabody had disappeared from the Charter’s public directory.
What Does the Local MP Say?
I asked my local MP, Rushanara Ali, to comment following the conviction. Her office responded that:
“Rushanara has made a series of representations on your behalf, and has expressed her dissatisfaction with the issues you have raised.”
However, the specific questions I put to her were not answered. In particular, no comment was provided on Peabody having given her office inaccurate information about its compliance with the law, despite Peabody’s own subsequent review accepting that this had happened and despite Peabody now having been convicted for its non-compliance. Nor did she comment on whether she intends to pursue these matters further, or whether she considers the current enforcement framework under Sections 21, 22 and 25 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 to be adequate.
If individual residents have to resort to criminal proceedings to enforce statutory rights that Parliament has already provided, is the present system of enforcement really working as it should?
What Needs to Change
This case shows that having a legal right on paper is not enough if residents cannot realistically enforce it. Four things would make a difference.
Firstly, councils need a proper process for dealing with Section 25 offences. If a resident provides evidence that a landlord may have committed a criminal offence by failing to provide legally required service charge information, the council should at least consider the evidence and explain its decision.
Secondly, leaseholders need an effective civil remedy. A small fine months later may not persuade a landlord to provide information on time. There needs to be a practical consequence when a landlord demands payment but fails to provide the information residents are legally entitled to see.
Ian McDermott, Peabody chief executive
Thirdly, the Regulator of Social Housing should monitor compliance. Registered providers should have to record how many statutory service charge requests they receive, how many they answer on time and how many become overdue. Without that information, repeated failures remain largely invisible.
Finally, MPs, the Ombudsman and regulators should see the evidence. When a resident says a landlord has failed to comply with Sections 21 or 22, outside bodies should not have to rely only on the landlord’s description of what happened. They should be able to see the request, the response, the dates and the documents themselves. And where the evidence points to something more than an isolated mistake, those bodies – including MPs – should be prepared to ask whether the individual case reveals a wider problem requiring action.
Residents Shouldn’t Have to Become Prosecutors
A legal right means very little if residents cannot enforce it. It should not take years of correspondence, a residents’ association, complaints, an MP, the Ombudsman, a council that does not prosecute and finally a private prosecution to make one of England’s largest housing associations do something it was already required by law to do. Residents shouldn’t have to become prosecutors to make landlords follow the law.
If you pay service charges, join SHAC’s End Service Charge Abuse campaign. Share this article with neighbours, residents’ associations and tenant groups, and help us build the pressure needed to turn rights on paper into rights that landlords cannot ignore.
More information: An extended version of this article, with supporting evidence, is available on the Peabody Complaints Archive.
28 August 2026
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