Corruption Busters Durham SW: A Characteristically Inaccurate Response

In its response to a December article in the ‘Teesdale Mercury’ dated 20th March 2013, Under the banner headline ‘Run-down estate will be improved- pledge’, Teesdale Housing Association responded to residents’ consternation at the wholesale and deliberate running down of a block of flats in the immediate vicinity of where it plans to construct a brand new row of houses by claiming that the damage to the flats had occurred as a direct result of a ‘quick turnover in tenancy and the properties….being left empty’. Elsewhere in the same article the Housing Association also claimed. quite incorrectly, that this had ultimately resulted in the area being ‘named a hot-spot for trouble by the police.’

In reality the estate had been named a hot spot for trouble well before a September 2007 Etherley Parish Council Survey, published in November of that year, revealed that some 82% of residents taking part believed it to be an anti-social area. So why did it take the Police so long to designate it as such in the first place? In the opening months of 2012, as a direct result of the Police’s persistent failure to act appropriately in relation to a whole range of inter-related issues, from drug dealing, to copper theft, to harassment and anti-social behaviour, two residents undeterred by the alleged associations between a number of local criminals and certain elements within the Police, initiated a series of complaints with the Independent Police Complaints Commission, a number of which are still on going.

Teesdale Housing Association’s response has been to deny that any of what has been going on at Red Houses is its responsibility, in the characteristic tone that one would expect from an organization steeped in the corruption and criminality of the previous Blair administration. In a style that epitomizes the arrogance that has infested every arm of local government in the Dale since the demise of former Chair of Durham County Council Andrew Cunningham, and the rise of the late John ‘Kinmont Willy’ Armstrong, the one time self styled uncrowned king of Evenwood and Barony, whose own Council career appears to have been every bit as corrupt as the disgraced father of former Blair Cabinet Enforcer Jack Cunningham, who he himself was to follow as one of the major kingpins at County Hall, Teesdale’s response to its complainants has been as follows:

‘No one named in your complaints is a tenant of Teesdale Housing Association and to the best of our knowledge do not live with any of our tenants. If this was the case we would have worked with our partners to service notices of seeking possession where appropriate. Therefore I cannot uphold your complaint’.

A number of sound recordings of staff members conversations with their tenants currently lodged with Clark Willis Solcitors, Darlington, would appear to indicate that not only were Teesdale Housing Association fully aware of the fact that many of those responsible for the problems on the estate were not only resident at their properties, whether as tenancy holders, sub-tenants or members of their household, but that they were also aware that the same people were also regular visitors at other Teesdale Housing Association owned properties from which many of the previously referred to activities were actually being organized. Of further relevance still, in relation to the Police’s apparent inability to deal with the problem that they themselves had effectively allowed to continue, pretty much uninterrupted for any more than a few short weeks at a time, since the findings of the Parish Council Survey were published in November 2007, is that one of the specific individuals who they had persistently refused to deal with, in relation to certain matters directly related to the previously referred to complaints to the I.P.C.C., was involved in the affray that accompanied two stabbings in a drug related brawl at the local Cricket Club directly adjacent to Red Houses on Boxing Day 2012.

In due course we shall examine the supposed relationship between certain allegedly corrupt elements within the Police and those apparently responsible for the wholesale theft of copper, piping, wiring and boiler equipment from the block at Red Houses at the centre of the current controversy. Interestingly enough, some of what appears to have been stolen seems to have disappeared off the Police log altogether and has become consigned to a strange sort of limbo land in which the Police seem no longer responsible for either ascertaining its current whereabouts, or else attempting to bring about its recovery. The means by which this appears to have occurred seems to have been through the brokering of some sort of mysterious trade off, in which the man charged for the alleged break in at 58 Red Houses, where a boiler appears to have been taken, was only actually charged with effecting illegal entry into the property in order to use the facilities. An apparent case of Virtual Reality Policing with Durham Constabulary, where black is white. red is yellow, and two and two make five….or so the story goes!