Collapsing balconies, West Ham tickets and a council that got very cosy with developers

Matthias Beirens was there for the first collapse. It was the afternoon of 8 June 2022, and Beirens heard a noise echo from outside his window. When he went outside to investigate, he saw that the bottom of the balcony belonging to the flat next door had swung off, clattering into the one below. As he peered down, he could see kids' toys jumbled up below the hanging wreckage.

Beirens, a manager at a global insurance company in his mid thirties, had been excited to move into Weavers Quarter, an estate of new affordable flats in Barking that had won three separate industry awards, one of which said it “set an exemplary standard”. The estate was owned by the local council, even though most of the flats were rented or owner occupied. But the balcony collapse was a signal — and not the only one — that the awards judges might have erred; hints to Beirens and his fellow residents that something had gone badly wrong in the buildings they were living in.

Then, on a November evening the following year, a huge segment of a balcony from one of the upper storeys collapsed onto the street below, smashing into pieces outside a ground floor flat. If the balcony had fallen a few hours later, the area would have been packed with children on their way to school. “It's horrible to think I could have died here with our kids,” one resident told the BBC. By this point, several balconies had collapsed or suffered major issues. Residents were instructed not to walk on their balconies in case they gave way.

A BBC London investigation exposed the problem: when the buildings were erected just a few years earlier, parts of the balconies had been assembled using a weak type of plywood and glue that were not safe to be used outdoors. After the revelation, the estate was stripped of its WhatHouse? Award.

But there’s a bigger story behind the Barking balcony collapses, because Weavers Quarter was no ordinary estate of new flats. In fact, it was one of the much-heralded first pieces of one of London’s most ambitious regeneration programmes, a billion-pound effort that aims to expand the city eastwards and deliver more than 50,000 new homes. Barking is seen as central to London’s mission to get building, with the mayor Sadiq Khan last year announcing a “new town” on the Thames there and promising to create a “model for how to fix our housing crisis”.

But he may want to ask some searching questions first: questions about whether some of Barking's councillors became too cosy with the property companies involved in the council's massive regeneration push and failed to scrutinise what they were building. Our reporting shows that Barking’s leading councillors accepted thousands of pounds worth of gifts and hospitality from key construction companies, two of which also employed Barking councillors, including the daughter of the council leader. Those companies were awarded hundreds of millions of taxpayer-funded contracts, largely through the council’s “BeFirst” regeneration arm, a scheme that has helped make Barking and Dagenham Council the most indebted local authority in London.

The council and the companies involved insist that nothing improper has taken place and that the gifts and jobs had no influence over how this project has been managed. But not everyone agrees. Andrew Boff, a Conservative Greater London Assembly member who lives in Barking, told The Londoner that the revelations in this story suggest conflicts of interest for the Labour-run council. “You should be able to enter into a decision on the planning committee with completely clean hands and no interests,” says Boff. “I think the government needs to bring in commissioners to take over the running of Barking and Dagenham Council. It's in that bad of a state.”

Is Barking — one of London’s great hopes for new housing — a blueprint for the capital, or a warning? 

Free tickets and jobs for family 

Walk away from Weavers Quarter for a few minutes, down side streets full of construction sites and shiny new blocks, into the centre of Barking, and you’ll come across Challingsworth House. With light brick facades and rows of uniform windows, its blocks have a slight resemblance those in Weavers Quarter. It opened back in 2022 and soon after, 32-year-old Ornella Lueaki moved into the 12th-floor flat she rents. But just six months into her tenure, she says, “everything started falling apart”.

She speaks slowly, struggling to pinpoint where to start in her saga with the building she’s now stuck in. The first thing she noticed was the mould. It swiftly began to spread through her flat, and to this day she has to constantly clean certain walls with bleach to keep it at bay. Then there was the flood in the corridor last year, caused by a catastrophic building-wide leak. “I opened the door and the water was everywhere,” she recalls. “We had to use our own covers and duvets to stop [it] coming in.” The lift breaks on a near-weekly basis, leaving residents to hike up and down hundreds of steps.

Multiple other residents we spoke to confirmed Lueaki’s description of the conditions, sending us photographs of the black mould and the unfixed holes in corridor ceilings. One reported she was regularly getting sick from the mould, and told us of a neighbour being forced to sleep in the corridor of his house because of the damp in his bedroom. “It’s an absolute joke,” as one tenant told me. “This building is a monstrosity.”

These problems are not the fault of McLaren Construction Group, the company that built Challingsworth House, according to a top law firm representing the company. The problems are “plainly post-construction issues”, a legal letter sent to The Londoner said, which are the responsibility of the council-owned management company that is now running the buildings. McLaren blames vandalism and poor maintenance for what’s going on in the buildings, saying that past leaks attended by McLaren had been the fault of a balcony door being left open in an empty flat, leading to water flowing into the block, and a flat that wasn't properly disconnected from the water supply.

But did the council do enough to ensure that McLaren had delivered high-quality buildings? It would be a reasonable question to ask in any circumstances, given that the council was always going to manage the building once it was built. But it’s especially pertinent given the gifts and personal connections between the local authority and McLaren.

McLaren became an official supplier to the BeFirst framework in 2019, giving it access to major regeneration contracts in the area, and it would be awarded at least £151m of work by the council, including Challingsworth House. In that time, the council’s leader Darren Rodwell enjoyed some very nice perks from the company. McLaren paid for Rodwell to go to Royal Variety Performance in 2019 and 2021 and gave him expensive corporate hospitality tickets to a England vs Sri Lanka T20 cricket match at Lords. In total, Rodwell received more than £2,500-worth of gifts from McLaren.

Then, in September 2023, McLaren hired a Barking councillor — none other than Emily Rodwell, Darren’s daughter. While she posted her new job as a document controller on her LinkedIn, it was kept hidden from her formal register of interests at the council, using an exception reserved for when releasing the information would leave a councillor “subject to violence or intimidation”. It’s unclear why declaring that a Barking councillor and the daughter of the council leader was earning a salary from a company that was receiving massive council contracts might create a risk of violence or intimidation, and neither the council nor Rodwell herself have taken the opportunity to explain this to us. But we do know that Rodwell left her role at McLaren in September 2024, the same month her father stood down as council leader.

(This isn't the first time that Barking has faced questions over freebies: The Guardian reported in 2022 that Rodwell took nearly £10,000 of free West Ham tickets from a Los Angeles film company after his council approved plans for its new film studios).

McLaren categorically rejects the idea its hospitality influenced how it was treated by Barking Council and says its gifts were “legitimate and in line with standard industry practice”. The company points out that BeFirst is a separate legal entity to the council with its own leadership team, and that McLaren was “not aware of any link between the provision of hospitality to Mr Rodwell and the awarding of contracts by BeFirst to McLaren”.

The question of whether McLaren might have received better treatment from Barking because the council leader’s daughter was employed by the company and because of its generous gifts is impossible to prove, and we have no evidence of that kind of favouritism. But as always in politics, the appearance of probity matters too. For what it’s worth, McLaren says Emily Rodwell was recruited through “standard recruitment processes and procedures” and applied for the role using her married name, and was hired due to her position as a local resident, her experience in the construction sector and immediate availability. She did not work on any projects related to the council, and the firm had “appropriate information barriers” to ensure she did not have any information regarding those projects. 

‘Be First to seize the opportunity’

When Barking’s regeneration programme was first launched almost a decade ago, it had a soaring vision. The historically deprived and working class borough was to become a new economic powerhouse. Old car parks and office blocks would be taken over by the council’s regeneration arm, BeFirst, which would then work with developers to award contracts to construction firms. According to its website, the mega-project will “accelerate regeneration in the borough” and deliver 50,000 new homes and 20,000 new jobs by 2037. And Barking Council was prepared to back that vision with cash: its first round of redevelopment contracts, announced in 2018, would have a total value of £1bn.

The London skyline offers a sense of the scale of the council’s vision. Alongside the usual skyscrapers you see in Canary Wharf, London Bridge or the Square Mile, the view to the city’s eastern fringe is now full of cranes and new high-rise apartments. The ambition of the project helped establish Barking’s then council leader Rodwell as an up-and-coming figure in London politics, and he was selected to be Labour’s candidate to become the new MP for Barking at the last election (he ended up pulling out of that race after facing unrelated accusations of sexual harassment, which he was cleared of four days after the election).

Naturally, Barking’s building plans involved working closely with the private sector. BeFirst’s website talks about “attracting developers and investors to the most affordable and accessible opportunities in the whole of the Southeast” and encourages investors to “Be First to seize the opportunity”. All of which makes Barking an interesting case study in whether London’s councils — battered and shrunken by a decade of brutal funding cuts, and yet expected to oversee large increases in home building — have the capacity and internal safeguards necessary to do things properly when large property companies arrive on the scene.

The company behind the disastrous Weavers Quarter — scene of the collapsing balconies — was Bouygues UK, a subsidiary of a giant French engineering and property conglomerate. Back in 2015, it was handed a £41.5m contract by the council to build the estate, a project that was a precursor to the huge rounds of redevelopment that are ongoing. Bouygues UK didn’t respond to our questions when we got in touch with them last week, but we know that in the past, they have blamed the state of the buildings on the subcontractor that assembled the balconies which it said failed to follow the specifications it outlined.

It seems, however, that Bouygues UK had built up a strong relationship with the council. A few months before that contract was awarded, council deputy leader Saima Ashraf accepted a ticket worth £250 to an award ceremony paid for by Bouygues. She would take another free ticket worth £535 — this time to the Construction News Awards — from the firm in 2019, when the project was completed.

How did these gifts influence how the council responded when things started to go wrong at Weavers Quarter? We don’t know, but according to residents, the thing that rubbed salt into the wound for them was that the council and its managing agents were slow to act on complaints about faults. Tenants have shown us evidence that they made complaints about the safety of balconies and the collapses tenants were seeing to senior councillors over a year before the most serious balcony collapse in November 2023. While acknowledged at the time, those concerns weren’t acted on until the major street-side collapse. “I feel like instead of representing you and making your voice heard within the council, they are working to cover it up on behalf of the council,” one resident told us.

Another construction firm — Mulalley & Co — spent over £1,300 on free West Ham tickets for Darren Rodwell and his deputy, and has received some £37m in contracts from the council’s regeneration. Jerram Falkus, a property firm that has won over £59m in contracts from Barking, hired Alison Cormack in February 2022 as a “Social Value Manager” shortly before her election as a local councillor, a job she still holds according to LinkedIn. Before being elected, Cormack had previously worked for Bouygues UK as its community engagement lead on its Weavers Quarter project. She spent three years in that role before leaving in 2019. Cormack is significant because she isn’t just any councillor — she’s a member of the council’s planning committee, which decides which developments can go ahead and in what form.

On top of all that, an array of industry trade groups and lobbying firms representing clients in the construction industry have spent thousands more on gifts for councillors, including tickets to international conferences and corporate boxes at football games. All in all, seven Barking councillors took jobs or hospitality from the construction industry or firms linked to it, with the gifts alone worth a reported £27,895.

All of these individuals were either members of the council leadership, its planning committee or a blood relative of the council leader. They included Rodwell’s two deputies — Saima Ashraf and Dominic Twomey, the latter of whom went on to become the new leader of the council after Rodwell stood down last year. Seemingly, these perks were not enjoyed by their less influential colleagues. Of the 137 serving and former councillors listed on the council’s database, just 12 others have listed any form of free gifts at all since 2010.

‘De-risking’ the planning process 

What benefit can offering these sorts of gifts provide? You can get an understanding by looking at how the firms that have provided these perks talk about the process. Take Terrapin, a lobbying firm that represents construction firms, and which treated Barking Council’s former leader Rodwell to corporate hospitality worth hundreds of pounds on six occasions since 2020. 

On LinkedIn last year, its founder Peter Bingle boasted that his firm is able to “derisk” construction projects that could be opposed by local councils “by engaging with senior politicians and then talking to them throughout the process right up to the planning committee”. To be clear, Bingle does not explicitly say that free hospitality is what swings the deal for companies that offer them, but his firm’s gifts to Rodwell suggest it’s part of the process of getting to know local leaders.

Given the need for new housing in London, it’s to be expected that local leaders will closely engage with property companies. In fact, doing so is part of their job. But the alarming building and maintenance issues at Weaver’s Quarter and Challingsworth House — and the prominence of Barking in the mayor’s plans to solve the housing crisis — mean that the gifts and jobs we’ve reported on raise serious questions. Can the current rules allow conflicts of interest for councillors while Londoners live in shoddy homes?

A council spokesperson told the Londoner all gifts were declared in line with the council’s code of conduct and anti-bribery policies and stressed they were “confident that there is no conflict of interest between any of our councillors and their present or former employment”. All planning disputes, they said, were assessed “on national, pan-London and local policies” and the system “has robust safeguards to prevent conflicts of interest and ensure fair decision-making”.

George Havenhand, a senior legal researcher at leading anti-corruption charity Spotlight on Corruption, takes a different view. He told The Londoner the allegations are “very serious” and “raise questions about whether there should be a full investigation” into whether procurement rules were broken and if anyone involved should face repercussions as a result.

This month, almost all of BeFirst’s existing senior leadership team left the organisation as Barking Council announced plans for its development arm to pivot “away from a business model driven predominantly by the Council directly delivering development” to one more focused on private sector partnerships. The council says the changes will allow its shift to a private sector-funded model where the company “will set the conditions for private capital to flow into Barking & Dagenham”.

The atmosphere in the council itself is nervous. When The Londoner eventually found a councillor willing to talk about these matters, they insisted on sourcing a new number to call on first. “It stinks to high heaven,” they told us. “When I did ask questions about these contracts, in no uncertain terms I was told to focus on my ward work,” they explain. “I think council officers were really scared to make substantial challenges to these projects because all the direction was coming from the leaders’ office, and if the leader wanted a specific thing it had to be done.”

The problems, they say, have continued despite Rodwell’s departure. “There’s a stark feeling that if you ask too many questions there are repercussions that take place.” Meanwhile, the financial situation inside the council, they claim, is now “dire” — thanks in part to the £1bn costs of the BeFirst regeneration programme. Last year, the BBC found the council was officially the most-indebted in London, owing a staggering £1bn — equivalent to £5,000 per resident. 

A recent report into the council’s finances by accounting firm Grant Thornton gave it a failing grade and said there were “significant weaknesses” in its financial arrangements. They highlighted the “complex structure of subsidiary companies” (which includes BeFirst), which the report claims cost the council “more money than anticipated whilst delivering poor quality services”. If its budget deficit isn’t overcome, the council faces the spectre of declaring effective bankruptcy. 

Every councillor and firm named in this story was approached for comment about our findings. Only a small number responded. A council spokesperson told us our findings are a “non-story,” citing the “robust and transparent processes” it has in place that ensures all contract awards are objectively awarded to the firm offering the best “cost, quality, and social value”. They added that the council was “due to set a balanced budget” despite “unprecedented financial challenges”.

On the disrepair issues at Weavers’ Quarter, the council said they recognise their duties as freeholder of the estate, but their “legal powers to act and intervene are limited”, a challenge they have “raised with central government”. As a result, they claimed, responsibility for fixing its “construction defects” was primarily held by the housing association L&Q, which managed the development, and Bouygues. The final round of remediation works for the building is “awaiting sign off” from regulators.

Back in Challingsworth House and Weavers’ Quarter, most of the residents we speak to feel trapped; either by leasehold flats that they will struggle to sell given the very public building defects or, for the social housing tenants, because they can’t easily choose to move away.

Ornella Lueaki tells us she was horrified when she saw the news about collapsing balconies at Weavers Quarter. She confesses that now she never goes out on her own balcony, just in case her building has similar flaws. “We're all just waiting for something horrible to happen,” she says. “It just feels like a matter of time.”

Editorial note 28/02: A reference to McLaren's legal statement has been amended post publication to reflect that the firm did not blame residents for alleged vandalism in Challingsworth House.