Peabody Trust, one of England’s largest housing associations, today pleaded guilty at Thames Magistrates’ Court to an offence under section 25(1) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, after failing without reasonable excuse to provide a leaseholder with a legally required summary of his service charge costs within the one-month deadline set by the Act.
The prosecution was brought privately by David Wood, a leaseholder at Goldpence Apartments and Chair of the building’s Residents’ Association, with the support and endorsement of the Social Housing Action Campaign (SHAC), after Tower Hamlets Council did not act on requests to prosecute the same failure.
Peabody was fined £1,000 — reduced from a starting point of £1,500 in recognition of its guilty plea — and ordered to pay £400 in costs, a total of £1,400. The maximum fine available to the court for this offence is £2,500.
The summary Peabody was legally required to provide accounted for £297,973 in service charges billed to residents of Goldpence Apartments for the 2024/25 year. The maximum fine available under the Act for withholding that information — £2,500 — represents less than 1% of the sum in question.
Goldpence Apartments forms part of a wider estate managed by Peabody where total service charges are understood to have exceeded £1 million in the same period — underlining how modest the statutory maximum penalty is compared with the sums housing associations administer.
BACKGROUND
Mr Wood wrote to Peabody on 22 January 2026 under sections 21 and 22 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, requiring a summary of the costs behind his service charge for the 2024/25 year. Landlords are required by law to provide such a summary within one month of a request. Peabody’s deadline expired on 22 February 2026 without a compliant summary being provided.
A compliant summary was not produced until 21 April 2026 — almost two months after the legal deadline had passed.
Peabody’s own Stage 1 complaint response, dated 13 March 2026, admitted that “the statutory 30-day timeframe for responding to the Section 21 request was missed” and that “the legal responsibility to respond still sits with us…”
An earlier independent review, commissioned by Peabody’s own Chief Operating Officer and published in November 2025, found that Peabody had not fulfilled its obligations under sections 21 and 22 of the 1985 Act on a previous occasion, and that inaccurate information about compliance had been given to the Housing Ombudsman and a local MP.
Mr Wood had made earlier requests for the same category of information in November 2023 and December 2024, neither of which received a fully compliant response.
