Chelsea Bridge Wharf Residents’ Association has chosen a managing agent for Right to Manage application – your view does not matter.

Token consultation

CBWRA announced today that they are ‘recommending” Urang as the managing agent to handle the Right to Manage application for Chelsea Bridge Wharf. Except that it is not really recommending – the decision has been made. Residents are offered the opportunity to meet with Urang online on 30th May – but none of the other companies have been invited! Residents have been provided with some incredibly weak and superficial ‘analysis’ document, supposedly the basis on which Urang are recommended but detailed examination is only provided for Urang and not the other bidders. So this is not a consultation, it is in true CBWRA style, a decision made without resident consultation and then they insult our intelligence by asking for feedback after the decision. If such a consultation were carried out in any private or public organization it would be dismissed as heavily biased, or in plain language, a token consultation on a done deal. This is pretty pathetic given that millions of pounds of service charge are involved here (I believe Rendall and Rittners’ overall revenue, i.e. the total service charge collected, is in the region of £3 million a year at Chelsea Bridge Wharf) and that 2.5 years have been wasted by CBWRA telling us that Right to manage is not possible. So this is the biggest decision that a residents’ association can make and rather than doing it in an open and inclusive way, the decision has pretty much made already by a small cabal of mostly unelected people. ‘Consultation’ is happening AFTER their decision has been made.

It is very welcome that Right to Manage is being taken forward, something which I personally have been advocating and fighting for since 2021, despite being told repeatedly by Stephen Thompson (former CBWRA Chair) and Charlie Garton-Jones that Right to Manage was not possible and being called a liar (and having my CBW app account closed) for saying that it was. The current co-chairs were part of the committee that sent residents a newsletter in May 2022 stating in unequivocal terms that Right to Manage was not possible. They have yet to explain why they changed their minds (I suspect the independent advice which I obtained from Canonbury Estate Management showing they were talking nonsense might have had something to do with it) or to apologise to me or other residents for the huge amounts of wasted time and money.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire?

So yes it is great that RTM is moving (after two and half wasted years since myself and other residents reactivated the residents‘ association) and I have met with Urang’s senior staff some months ago and they seemed reasonably competent (although I had many question marks also), and I referred them to the current co-chairs after the dodgy Chair elections. However to basically make a decision in favour of Urang with no chance for residents to evaluate the alternatives or to express a preference, and then to pretend there is a consultation is once again insulting residents’ intelligence. I do not believe Urang are the best choice for CBW and there is a great danger of moving form frying pan to fire without any meaningful resident input.

The whole point of Right to Manage is to put residents in charge. If we have the current situation continuing where decisions are made in a small cabal of unelected people with no consultation with residents, and often no information, and the CBW app account of anyone criticising the committee is closed without any process or evidence, where there are few or no meetings with residents, will we actually be any better off in terms of understanding and controlling how our service charges are spent? We need a massive change in the culture of the residents’ association as well as a new managing agent.

The email from CBWRA today (18.5.23) is also inaccurate in stating that

”This process is called Right to Manage (RTM). The term is a little misleading and doesn’t mean leaseholders take over the role of managing CBW, but it does mean we control who does”

In fact, Right to Manage CAN mean leaseholders managing services directly OR hiring a managing agent to do so. In the case of CBW it will almost certainly be the latter but this is a choice to be made, and not an inherent limitation of Right to Manage. So there is nothing ‘misleading’ about the term Right to Manage, but it would be misleading to pretend that this is a genuine or meaningful consultation.

Rewriting history

The patronising email from CBWRA also states that

”Over the last year or longer, there has been a lot of discussion within the RA about whether or not RTM is possible and whether the best approach is to apply for RTM either building or estate-wide”

Really? do you as a resident recall any such discussion happening or being invited to take part in any discussion about this? In fact there was no such discussion – CBWRA simply told residents unequivocally that RTM was not possible and some people who contested this (including me) were savagely bullied online and/or had their CBW app account closed. In 2022, CBWRA wasted up to £15,000 on the ‘retendering of the management contract ‘ without consulting anyone. CBWRA claimed that this was a Right to Manage process when in fact it had nothing whatever to do with Right to Manage. It was promised that there would be a new managing agent by June 2022, when in fact the unviable and doomed process collapsed in September 2022 as I predicted on day one. In February 2023, CBWRA claimed that this contract retendering process was still active which was not the case.

So not only have residents not been consulted, but in fact any attempt by residents to discuss Right to Manage has been met with extreme hostility. This view only changed in Q4 of 2022 after I obtained independent advice that showed CBWRA were misadvising residents. Rather than admit this and apologise to me and other residents, the current Co-chairs are trying to pretend that this never happened. The committee and co-Chairs are not as they claim in their email ‘Right to Manage geeks’ they are in my view people with a limited knowledge of Right to Manage and with a track record of making poor decisions in this area and not informing or consulting residents. But they do at least deserve some credit for stopping their misinformation about Right to Manage not being possible.

However, residents should at the very least have been provided with a detailed examination of the pros and cons of all the bidders (not just one) and had the opportunity to ask questions of all bidders at a public meeting, before we hand over the running of a £3 million + budget to them, with all the ramifications that has for our service charge, property values and quality of life.

I invite residents to make their views known to CBWRA via info@cbwra.com and to attend the online meeting on 30th May.