The Sunday Times April 24, 2022 11NEWS
Builder caves in to ‘Al Capone’
Gove over threats on cladding
Kate Alcock brought a discrimination
case after Girlguiding forced her outThe most prominent
property developer holding
out against Michael Gove’s
demands for cash to fix the
cladding crisis has caved in
but accused the housing
secretary of acting like
“Al Capone” and “the mafia”.
Galliard Homes, run by
Stephen Conway, had refused
to sign a pledge to repair
fire-safety problems with flats
built over the past 30 years
fearing that it could be an
open-ended legal liability.
Gove, the housing
secretary, tore up
government policy in January
when he scrapped a previous
loan scheme for leaseholders
and said the property
industry should bear the full
cost of fixing cladding and
other defects in the wake of
the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire.
He threatened to shut out
developers that refused to
contribute to a new £4 billion
fund from the planning
system and the taxpayer-
backed Help to Buy scheme,
leading to complaints from
some that he was trampling
over their legal rights.
About 35 housebuilders
have so far agreed to provide
about £2 billion to repair
buildings above 11 metres.
Last weekend Whitehall
officials singled out family-
owned Galliard as the
highest-profile developer to
have declined. An internal
government document said
the first step in response
would be to “begin advisingOliver Shah consumers formally” not to buy properties from it if the
process of obtaining planning
permission had not begun.
Conway, Galliard’s
executive chairman, said the
£1.3 million sale of a
penthouse in Soho, central
London, had fallen through
in the days after the story
because a prospective buyer
took fright. This weekend the
company gave up its
resistance and wrote to Gove
promising to join his scheme.
Galliard will promise to take
responsibility for fixing any
fire-safety problems with its
buildings and not to draw
down from the separate
Building Safety Fund
established by Rishi Sunak,
the chancellor. “We’ve signed
the letter, and if he wants to
take credit for it being signed,
that’s OK,” Conway said.
Galliard had previously
said it supported the
principle that leaseholdersshould not have to pay for
remediation works. David
Hirschfield, its legal director,
wrote to the Home Builders
Federation this month saying
that “we agree fully with the
sentiments” behind Gove’s
policy. But he cautioned that
“we cannot quantify what
our financial exposure might
be” and said therefore
Galliard would not be
signing up.
Conway estimated that
Galliard, which made
£62.7 million of pre-tax
profits last year, would end
up committing £15 million to
£20 million. He said it was
prepared to pay, but he was
highly critical of Gove’s
methods. He said: “I’ve got
letters saying, ‘We won’t give
you any more planning
permissions, we won’t
provide you with building
[regulations], we have a duty
to advise everybody that buys
flats off-plan from you that
they shouldn’t.’ It goes on and
on and on, like he’s the mafia.
And it’s a complete nonsense,
the way they’ve handled it.”
Conway, 74, said a better
solution would have been to
introduce a special stamp
duty for all developers of
new-build properties to pay
for fire-safety works. Gove
“didn’t ask the people who
understood it how to do it”,
he said. “We begged him to
put half a per cent on all
vendors’ stamp duty. It would
have just gone away — they’d
have raised the money,
finished. And if half a per cent
wasn’t enough, make it 1 percent. Nobody would have
screamed, nobody would
have minded and it would
have been proportionate to
what you’re building.”
The Grenfell fire claimed
72 lives and triggered a
cladding crisis as hundreds of
thousands of leaseholders
found themselves trapped in
blocks of flats that needed
fixing. More than 500,
people are still in properties
clad in flammable material
and a further three million
have been unable to move
because of problems
obtaining fire safety
certificates. Leasehold law
left flat owners liable for
repairs that can cost more
than their homes. Some
leaseholders have gone
bankrupt and many more
have had to pay for expensive
24-hour fire marshals.
Sunak announced a
£1 billion Building Safety
Fund in 2020, since
increased to £5 billion, to fix
cladding on buildings taller
than 18 metres. It is partly
funded through a levy on big
developers’ profits. Robert
Jenrick, Gove’s predecessor,
came up with a 30-year loan
scheme that would have
required leaseholders to pay
£50 a month towards the cost
of fixing their buildings.
Gove targeted the property
industry after Sunak made
clear the Treasury would not
contribute towards his new
£4 billion fund. The housing
secretary has described
property developers as
operating like a “cartel”.Stephen Conway of Galliard
Homes is uneasy about costI felt like I had lost
part of my lifeEquality Act”, the organisation said.
“Simply being transgender does not
make someone more of a safeguarding
risk than any other person. We proudly
remain trans inclusive,” it added. The
post attracted more than 400 comments,
with people on both sides weighing in.
“As someone who grew up in the
guiding community, and who is a proud
queer individual, I thank you for this,”
one wrote. Many used the hashtag “trans
women are women”.
“It’s not inclusive to exclude women
and girls from their own safe space by
inviting in men and boys... Why are you
putting the rights of men before the rights
of girls and women?” another said.
“Girlguiding: For girls and anyone who
‘feels’ like one. So not Girlguiding.
Politics trumping the needs and rights of
girls. Well done,” a woman added.
Last week, following the settlement,
Girlguiding said it was and “shall remain”
a “home for trans people”. Yet, after the
legal case, it would “ensure our inclusive
policies and procedures, and what they
mean in practice, are easy to under-
stand”, the organisation said.
For Alcock, this stance means that the
organisation, which describes itself as a
“girl-only” charity is no longer “single-
sex”. Like the Scouts, it should call itself
mixed, she believes.
Alcock says she eventually brought the
case against Girlguiding because she
believed she had been discriminatedagainst because of her “gender critical”
beliefs that it is not biologically possible
for a boy to become a girl. “Girlguiding
was set up in 1909 when girls turned up at
a Boy Scout meeting and demanded their
own girls-only movement,” Alcock says.
“Women are still discriminated against in
this society, and until that changes they
still need [the] Guides as a single-sex space.
“I made some of my best female friends
in guiding. It’s the kind of friendship that
starts with being happy for the girls doing
amazing new things, and carries on after
they’ve gone to bed sharing anything and
everything and putting the world to
rights, even when you come from com-
pletely different backgrounds,” she says.
“When I was expelled, it meant I lost all
those friends. Leaders who I’d done play-
dates with, with my kids, now didn’t talk
to me at children’s events.”
So how has this organisation found
itself at the centre of a debate over gender
and biological sex? In 2016 a survey of
“girls’ attitudes” revealed that 86 per cent
of members aged 11 to 21 said it was wrong
to discriminate against transgender peo-
ple. Insiders say that the new rules came
amid a national rise in the number of chil-
dren saying they wanted to change sex.
Between 2009 and 2010, 40 girls under
18 were referred to doctors for gender
treatment, including puberty-blocking
hormones, in England. Between 2017 and
2018, it had soared to 1,806. Over that
same period girl guides started telling
their leaders they were “non-binary”.
As the media started to report the
phenomenon of children saying they had
been “born in the wrong body” charities
including Stonewall and Gendered
Intelligence stepped in to advise.
Girlguiding was told that it was illegal
under the Equality Act to discriminate
against boys who identified as girls by
refusing to allow them to join, advice that
has since turned out to be flawed.
This month the Equalities and Human
Rights Commission published guidance
for anyone providing a service “to only
one sex”. Under the rules organisations
must prove that “limiting the service on
the basis of sex is a proportionate means
of achieving a legitimate aim” such as
privacy, decency, or to prevent trauma.
Girlguiding said: “We agree that sex and
gender are different, and will reflect this in
the language we use. The safeguarding
and wellbeing of girls has and will always
be at the heart of everything we do.
“We’re more than one hundred years
old and we appreciate that when our
royal charter was written, being trans
wasn’t recognised by society. But we’re
committed to changing as the lives of girls
change and the world they live in changes... Girlguiding has no plans to change how
it describes itself as a girl-only charity.”
Girlguiding ‘tied
itself in knots’
over trans rights
When Katie Alcock joined the Brownies
at the age of seven, she “loved it
immediately”. Later, in the Guides,
happy memories include camping in
torrential rain and building welly stands
from rubber bands and bamboo sticks.
As an adult, Alcock, a senior lecturer in
psychology at Lancaster University and a
mother of two, became a leader at the
organisation now known as Girlguiding.
But in 2019 the group expelled her.
Alcock, now in her 50s, had expressed
concerns over a shift in guidance, which,
she believes, could have resulted in trans
girls and women — who were born boys —
being allowed to use single-sex accom-
modation, showers and lavatories on
overnight expeditions.
In its policies Girlguiding said: “We
treat trans girls and women according to
the gender they have transitioned, or are
proposing to transition to, meaning trans
girls and trans women are welcome to be
a part of our great charity.” It added:
Trans young members can share accom-
modation with other young members.”
Comments shared by Alcock on social
media had breached its code of conduct,
the organisation ruled.
She brought legal action on the
grounds of discrimination and last week
an out-of-court settlement was reached,
with the organisation paying almost
£100,000 in costs. It also invited her to
apply to rejoin and she said she plans for
her daughter, seven, to become a
Brownie.
Today, in her first interview, Alcock
describes how the “long battle” had a
lasting impact. “It felt like I had lost part
of the meaning of my life. I had some
sleepless nights,” she says.
“I had been involved for so long with
the Guides and it meant so much to me. I
just want it to carry on, allowing other
girls to grow up having wild adventures
and fun, outdoors, with other girls and
female mentors,” she adds.
Yet the debate over transgender
members and the increasing focus on the
issue within the Girlguiding movement
stretches far beyond this case.
In recent years the organisation has
“tied itself in knots”, Alcock says, with
guides and parents repeatedly divided
over the issue of gender identity.
On its website Girlguiding has 26
entries containing the word “trans”. An
online glossary, meanwhile, defines
“sex”, “cisgender” and “gender expres-
sioning”, among other terms.
In a post last May on its Facebook page
Girlguiding said it had received “com-
ments and queries over its trans inclusive
equality and diversity policy”.
This document was “grounded in theSian Griffiths Education EditorA ‘gender-critical’ leader who won compensation after being
expelled from the organisation says it must reassess its stancePrince Edward presents a trophy to the winner of the sprint race at the Sir Vincent Beache national stadium in Diamond
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