Following the money

An eventful year of chasing rogue housing providers

Dear readers — we hope you're all having a wonderful Sunday and your heads are a little less sore than ours were on Friday morning. We were down in London this past week where, on Thursday night, we were “highly commended” at the British Journalism Awards for a collaborative investigation we undertook this year alongside our sister papers in Manchester and Birmingham. The topic of that investigation? Exempt accommodation.

Exempt accommodation is not a topic that other news outlets are exactly queuing up to report on. It is a type of housing which is exclusively offered to vulnerable people who have specific needs (addiction, say, or mental health issues). The word “exempt” in the phrase refers to the fact that tenants of this type of housing are exempt from a normal cap on benefits — hence the immense sums of taxpayers’ money that the companies or charities who run the housing can receive on their behalf. The word “supported” refers to the intense, personalised care these companies are supposed to be offering in return. The sad reality is that some of the organisations behind this type of housing appear to be trying to generate maximum profits by offering bare-bones care in exchange for dizzying sums of money.

The British Journalism Awards 2024. Photo credit: Press Gazette

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s probably because you read Abi’s blockbuster four-part series into the Big Help Project, published earlier this year. In her investigations, she uncovered that the charity (and companies connected to it) had left tenants across the region living in dire conditions, and its ex-CEO, former Liverpool councillor Peter Mitchell, had transferred over £5 million pounds of charity money into private companies he owned. Her series explored how organisations like this can exploit the country’s current housing crisis at the expense of some of the most vulnerable.

Exempt accommodation is full of the sort of granular detail that has the average reader’s eyes misting over in record time (think: financial wheeling and dealings, byzantine webs of for-profit and non-profit organisations). It’s a struggle to report on something like this in a way that readers respond to. So to get this kind of recognition, especially as a small company competing against the likes of the BBC, was really incredible. The judges described our “brilliant forensic reporting drawing threads together from three cities to create a powerful expose of exploitation and corruption”.

L-R: Mollie Simpson from The Mill, Abi Whistance from The Post and Joshi Herrmann from The Mill. Photo: The Post

But as our investigations showed: money matters. Where it comes from, where it’s going, and why. It was our colleagues’ dogged hard work and determination that got them this recognition, absolutely. But who pays their wages? You do.

Without paying readers, there isn’t any of this. There isn’t any explanation of something that feels incredibly foggy and borderline impossible to make sense of on your own (we did a lot of consulting with financial experts). Without paying readers, there’s no pressure on local authorities to find a better way of organising exempt accommodation.

We’re walking a weird tightrope with our business model. Ideally, we’d reach everyone by having no paywall at all — but as you’ll see from other local papers, making your work entirely free but relying on advertising revenue can mean the reader is forced to navigate an almost unreadable website, with skinny little articles flanked by ads at every click. The paywall means we make the money we need to pay our writers and editors.

The numbers don’t entirely make sense. As of the time of writing, we have just over 30,000 total subscribers. It’s a fantastic figure, and one we’re proud of. A number that makes us feel a little less steady is that of our paying subscribers — just over 1,700. Without them, The Post would no longer be able to keep publishing. In order to provide the sort of journalism that wins awards and, more importantly, holds power to account, we need that list to keep growing.

Now, if you cannot afford to pay for our service, that’s completely understandable, and we’re glad you’re here. It is important to us to be accessible — so thank you for reading our work, and please go about your business. But if you are someone who values our journalism and is sufficiently financially buoyant to pay £7 a month for their news but is not yet paying for it, we’d urge you to consider doing so. It isn’t cheap to run a high-quality paper and frankly, if people don’t pay for it, then it won’t be around forever.

This year, we have broken some amazing stories (if we say so ourselves). We unveiled the surprise resignation of Labour Party heavyweight Liam Didsbury, tracked down a scam artist in the Baltic Triangle and exposed a scandal within the prestigious Blue Coat School. These are the types of stories — we think — that you just don’t get much of in local journalism anymore.

The reason this type of reporting is so rare these days isn’t rocket science. Frankly, it’s hard to make it pay. We’re trying to find a way to do that — and we’re getting there. It would be great to have you on board.

Thanks for reading,

Team Post