A group of families have launched an audacious bid to take over their disabled children’s residential care home after it emerged the charity running it faces closure after amassing huge tax debts and paying £1m in fees to one of its trustees.
William Blake House faces a potential winding up order in seven weeks and is under investigation by regulators over serious financial governance concerns. The families said they no longer trust that the charity’s board has their children’s best interests at heart.
The families said a parent-led takeover was the best solution given the urgency of the threat to the charity’s services and ethos and the need to overhaul what they see as failing management that has led it to near insolvency.
They have accused the charity’s board of acting secretively and keeping parents in the dark about its £1.6m unpaid tax bill. They have also questioned the appropriateness and legality of £1m payments to a company solely owned by the charity’s chair, Bushra Hamid.
In a statement, the parents said: “The charity belongs to the 22 residents, not to the board of trustees and the chief executive who through their actions have taken this charity from a thriving community to one at the brink of failure. These people will be gone if the care homes go into insolvency, they will walk away. Our relatives won’t. This is supposed to be their secure home for life.
“Now that this group of 18 families have found each other, we have formed an incredible bond. There has been an outpouring of love and support for each other which we want to harness for the wellbeing of our beloved children. So we are taking matters into our own hands.”
The families are in the process of setting up a not-for-profit company to oversee the care services provided by the charity. They say they can draw upon a large pool of professional expertise among their number, including legal, business, accountancy and social care management.
A parent-led takeover of care services is rare, though the learning disability sector has a tradition of parent activism. Some established charities, such as Mencap, were set up by families determined to provide better care than the outdated and limited institutional services their children had been offered.
William Blake House is one of a handful of specialist residential homes in England for adults with severe and complex learning disabilities. The residents are mostly non-verbal, and require round-the-clock support and care.
It is run on Steiner principles, which aim to create a therapeutic environment where residents are treated as having potential rather than limitations and where care is underpinned by an active and socially inclusive lifestyle. Councils and the NHS spend more than £3m a year funding its services.
The families said they were devastated to realise the home was at risk. “Many of the residents had histories of unsuitable placements, emergency placements and trauma, so finding William Blake House, which was a place we could trust, was a godsend,” one parent said.
The families said the home’s ethos had suffered in recent years, with residents’ trips and activities reduced, although the quality and safety of care remained generally good. They discovered its financial plight and serious potential conflicts of interests on the charity’s trustee board last autumn.
They started to build a parent network after realising the charity had been been at risk of overnight insolvency multiple times after failing to pay staff PAYE and national insurance. Its assets shrank from nearly £1m to £200,000 in three years, and auditors have questioned whether it is a viable business.
The Northamptonshire-based charity has blamed its financial difficulties on high agency staff costs and the failure of local authorities to raise care fees in line with inflation. It plans to settle its tax debts by selling land to a developer.
It told the Guardian it had passed the families’ proposal to its solicitors and it would respond to their takeover bid this week.
The Charity Commission has opened a regulatory compliance case into potential governance concerns at William Blake House. It also confirmed it had received a serious incident report relating to the charity’s finances, believed to have been issued by a former trustee.
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