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Buying up commercial property and residential homes, leaving them unoccupied and neglected. The vague wording, the subjects not covered or missing from planning applications. The relationships between 'worldly' neighbours and the brethren. Brethren Exposed investigates what can happen when the Plymouth Brethren develop their Meeting Rooms. In a series of reports, we start of with Swanley in the UK.
Swanley
Swanley is a town in Kent, located just 16 miles southeast of Central London and situated next to the M25. It is the home of the main Plymouth Brethren Christian Church 'City Hall' Meeting Room for the approximately 350 members of the London brethren community. Located to the Northwest of Swanley on Leydenhatch Lane, it has been home to the brethren for more than 30 years, though Leydenhatch Lane only became the main 'City Hall' meeting room following a large-scale redevelopment of the site between 2015 and 2019. Each brethren community will have several Meeting Rooms/Halls, the main City Hall will be the largest and have a capacity that enables large fellowship meetings, for which brethren will travel in numbers to attend from across the local region. There will be smaller district and local meeting rooms. Prior to 2019 the main City Hall in London was in Beckenham. The meeting rooms/halls are run by registered charities known as Gospel Trusts. There are circa 200 brethren gospel trusts in the UK and circa 700 globally. The Swanley, Leydenhatch Lane meeting room is run by the Manor Gospel Trust. Manor Gospel Trust The Manor Gospel Trust has four trustees, Anthony Hazell, Dean Ellis, Garth Woodcock and Paul Brown. Hazell, Woodcock and Brown all have substantial business interests. Hazell is no stranger to media coverage, he was the brethren member and director of Unispace Global that exchanged phone calls and emails with Michael Gove at the start of Covid. Unispace were awarded nearly £700 million in PPE contacts. Woodcock was another beneficiary of Covid Contracts, with his company Oska Care supplying over £20 million worth of beds for the NHS Nightingale hospitals, with the same beds later found to be selling for as little as £6 on eBay. Brown owns Valley Provincial, a large commercial landscaping company. Ellis is employed by Anthony Hazell at CMT Group. Manor Gospel Trust accounts are lodged with the Charity Commission; they show the trust holds considerable funds and assets. The assets consist of a mix of five areas of land and buildings covering the site of the Leydenhatch Lane Meeting Room and four residential properties on Leydenhatch Lane, in total there are assets with a value worth over £20 million. The Gospel Trust has been purchasing residential properties with a future development in mind. One property Wilburton was purchased pre 2000 and is located next to the entrance to the meeting room. This property has been subject to a planning application to renovate and upgrade, though unusually the planning application was in the name of Donovan Payne and not one of the trustees. A brethren gospel trust owning a property next to a meeting room is not unusual. The other three residential properties are called Lewis Cottages; they are part of a small row of four terraced properties adjacent to the meeting room on the meeting room side of Leydenhatch Lane. Lewis Cottages The cottages are numbered 1 to 4, and the Manor Gospel Trusts owns number 1, 3 and 4. They purchased Number 1 in December 2018 for £475,000, they then purchased Number 3 in September 2019 for £330,000 and finally purchased Number 4 in March 2021 for £264,000. In total the trust has spent over £1 million on the three properties, all being purchased after the meeting room became the large new City meeting room. We looked at Google street view and it does look like all three properties have been left empty since they were purchased and the condition of both number 3 and number 4, appear to have significantly deteriorated over the last few years. If we were the Rowland family at number 2, we would be concerned with the impact on the valuation of our property, particularly as the likely future buyer of our property would be the Manor Gospel Trust. It would seem strange for a charity to spend over £1 million and get no return on that investment. It should be noted that brethren members are not allowed to live in properties with an adjoining wall to their neighbours. On the many planning application submitted by Gospel Trusts, we haven't found one that mentions that the long-term goal of a particular Trust is to buy properties in the adjacent area to the meeting room. Though we often see the purchase of property by Brethren Members and the Gospel Trusts in the surrounding area.
The story of Lewis Cottages would appear in contradiction to the local charity work undertaken by the Rapid Relief Team (RRT). RRT is the Plymouth Brethren charity that supports emergency services and selected local events and charities with catering and food boxes. In the course of our research we found evidence of the local Swanley brethren supporting homeless charities in the area with food boxes. The irony of leaving properties empty whilst giving food to the homeless is hard to ignore. It should also be noted that the Manor Gospel Trust received a large donation, that is likely to have come partly from the profits of the Unispace/Sante PPE contracts. One might say that the taxpayer have indirectly helped fund the development of Leydenhatch Lane for the PBCC.
In the next of our series we will visit Chippenham, looking at how a key local amenity adjacent to the main city meeting room was purchased by a brethren member and sold to a Gospel Trust.
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