145: Day 6: The Big Help

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Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, our Paul Foote Award 2025 miniseries is drawing to a close.

Today is the final shortlist D, and then we'll be coming back tomorrow with the winner.

But before that, let's hand over and find out who today's shortlist D is and what their story is all about.

My name is Abby Wistons and I work for the Liverpool Post.

So I did a Goliath four-part investigation with the rest of my team into the Big Help project, which is a charity in Liverpool that had put vulnerable people into terrible living conditions.

And the owner of the charity, who was an ex-labour counsellor, had also misappropriated millions of pounds from that charity and invested it into companies that he privately owned with his wife.

It's quite a mouthful.

How did this story first cross your desk?

So it was quite a long time, I think it was nine months before the first investigation came out, so it was certainly a very drawn-out kind of period investigating it.

A woman had emailed me saying that she was living in terrible conditions and she wanted me to look into it.

We obviously get a lot of emails like that in the climate that we live in.

A lot of people live in dreadful conditions, especially people who live in social housing or supported housing.

But because I'd only just started working for the post and I was young and I was excited and a budding reporter, I was like, I'm going to go out to every single email that I get and try and pick up and chase any leads.

And I went for a coffee with her and immediately

I think I was struck by both how upset she was and she was telling me how the person that she'd lived next door to had committed suicide and his body wasn't found for a really long time, which I thought sounded unusual for someone that was supposed to be, you know, supported.

Supported accommodation.

Yeah, supported accommodation.

He was supposed to have a social worker and his body wasn't found for six, seven days.

And she was telling me all these things about the state of living, you know, the damp, the mold, the horrific living conditions, how she'd been pleading with this charity that was housing her and her friend who'd killed himself and she just wasn't getting through to them.

And then when I got home, I started googling the charity and looking at where they got their money from.

And then I stumbled across something called HomeREAT, which is an investment trust.

And when I started looking into that, I saw that they themselves were being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office.

And then immediately, everything started to unravel.

So, what is the Big Help project?

It's such a hard question.

So, the Big Help project, technically, is the charity, which is the kind of the epicenter of Big Help Group.

The Big Help project is the charity at its heart, but it has dozens of companies surrounding it, just under 30 in total.

Some community interest companies, some private companies, some non-for-profit, and all of them operate within kind of the housing sector, supporting vulnerable people, food banks.

I think there's initiatives in education,

there's religious initiatives within that.

There was a Knowsey Food Bank that started on religious grounds.

So it's just a really big web of organisations that can be very, very difficult to track.

But it all comes back to one man called Peter Mitchell, is that right?

It does indeed.

He's an ex-Labour councillor in Liverpool.

He was a Labour councillor for a very long time and then he switched to the Liberal Party.

He is the CEO or was the CEO of Big Help Project.

So he's the centre of each of these organisations.

He was a Labour councillor.

His wife, I believe, still is a labour councillor.

She is indeed, yeah.

So she is often a trustee with him or a director with him in the companies and the charities associated with Big Help.

And Big Help seems to have started more in the food bank area, in in charitable terms, simply providing food for people?

Yeah, so a lot of the charities involved in these big so big help, I should say, isn't the only charity in the UK that experienced kind of rapid growth by getting into the world of social housing or housing vulnerable people.

It happened

five, six, seven years ago.

People started to realize that there was a way, or there was a fault um a shortcoming, I should say, with the government being able to house vulnerable people.

So they decided to fill that gap by looking towards charities who could provide that housing.

Lots of other charities attempted to do this, most of which didn't have kind of original roots within social housing.

So, Big Help started as a food bank, and then its rapid growth is attributed to kind of finding that loophole within the government and exploiting that slightly to provide housing for people.

And when we say rapid expansion, we should just put a number on it.

In 2020, their income was £950,000, in 2021, it was nine and a half million pounds, so increasing tenfold in a year they took on a lot of properties to house vulnerable people in as a charity how on earth as a charity can you afford to just buy up a huge property portfolio like that well this is where a lot of charities came to ruin over the last few years um so homerethe who i mentioned earlier the charity big help project was leasing properties from homereth they had the properties and they were leasing them to charities on very very long leases it's extremely unusual unusual for a charity to take up a lease that's as long, like 10, 15, 20-year leases for these properties, most of which were in terrible, terrible conditions.

And so, it was quite an unusual model.

Now, the reason charities did that is because they were going to take money from property dealers connected to HomeREAT who would then give them handouts to do up the properties and to make them liveable.

Obviously, that never happened, so it was a bit of a house of cards with Home REIT, which is why they're now being investigated, and which is why all of the charities, apart from big help uh went bust and that is how we end up with a situation where there is this property portfolio i believe peter mitchell did he describe it on a in a phone call as shitty shitty portfolios he did indeed so there's this really poor condition housing that very vulnerable people are living in like callum greville the the young man who took his own life after living in this really awful home for a long time.

He should have been receiving enhanced benefit where you receive so-called intensive support.

You know, you have people checking in on you, basically.

And that's for people who are maybe recovering drug addicts or they've

mentally ill, you know, people who need that extra support from a welfare officer

in order to live a normal life.

And had he received that extra support?

No, and definitely not in the way that he should have.

So one of the sources that I spoke to, who lived next door to him, who was pushing the Big Help Project to show him a copy of his support plan, she She never received a copy, and he had no idea he had one in the first place.

He did have a housing officer, but she certainly wasn't there for him, didn't show up on a regular basis, and that's why his body wasn't found for nearly a week.

But Big Help were receiving enhanced benefit payments for housing these, as it were, extra-vulnerable people.

So the money is coming into Big Help, but it's not finding its way to the people who it's meant to be supporting.

Is that right?

Yes,

partially.

So sometimes that would happen, but initially, or initially, should I say, that was the goal of the whole model to house these vulnerable people.

But in reality, local councils and local authorities weren't willing to pay that money in the first place because the housing was so rubbish.

So, the entire thing, the entire model, was built on an idea of, well, we'd receive the money from the local councils and they'd in turn then pay it to these charities.

But the charities weren't getting that money in the first place.

But they were subject to paying home rate, who obviously they'd leased the properties from.

So, it was a really kind of complicated, complicated, confusing model that fundamentally was flawed, that would never work because the housing that was being offered was so poor.

And all the staff at these various charities were not properly trained in housing or support work.

They didn't, there were maybe a hundred staff who just did not have the ability to support these very vulnerable people.

Yeah, there was a lot of confusion around what they were supposed to be doing.

And I think this is because they went from, you know, like you mentioned earlier, a food bank, to becoming this huge operation across the UK that's supposed to be housing people with really, really complex needs.

And I mean, that's a really difficult thing to to do.

It can take years of training to do that.

And Peter Mitchell made a habit of employing his friends, his family, people that he was very close to.

There was a lot of nepotism within the charity that we touched on in all of the articles that we wrote.

And because of that, it meant that the people in charge often didn't have the experience that they needed.

They were only in those positions because they were close to him.

But millions of pounds is being sluiced from the charity, Big Help, to the private companies also owned and operated by Peter Mitchell.

Yeah, so when we took a closer look at their accounts, which we we were after for some time because there were always delays in filing their annual accounts, all the accounts weren't audited, and we'd find things that just seemed a little bit iffy.

When they eventually published their accounts

late last year, we noticed that £5.5 million had been taken from the charity or loaned from the charity, I should say, to private companies that both Peter or his wife were either directly or indirectly involved in.

One of which, one of those companies, Big Help Green, purchased outright without a mortgage the house that he currently lives in with his wife.

Right.

And also a series of cars that

we used as well.

What was Mr.

Mitchell's reaction when you approached him with this story?

Funnily enough, I've never once spoken to him.

He's spoken to every other journalist apart from me, which I always find upsetting.

So I have sent countless emails, phone calls, spoken to his representatives multiple times.

He's always said that he'd be willing to chat to me when his health gets better.

He's not very well at the minute, but he has phoned up other journalists, had long conversations with them, explaining himself.

We got a generic statement from the project, from Big Help Project.

And obviously, he denied that he'd ever received any kind of financial compensation in any way from the charity.

Same for his wife, and same for the other trustees that he was friends with or related to.

But yeah, he never once picked up the phone to me.

But one of the private firms did pay for the house and all the cars.

Yes.

Just tracking.

Was there any legal pushback from any of the Big Help portfolio to your story?

Absolutely nothing, which I think it says a lot.

I think our stories came at a really good time because the charity is collapsing inwards because of you know, the model, the financial model it was built on, was never built to last.

Every other charity involved in Home REIT has gone bust.

Big Help is on its last legs.

One of the final articles we wrote, and we're planning on potentially doing more as well, is about the downfall of the charity.

It's now really struggling, resignations have been handed in, people are being made redundant, They're struggling to keep up with pension payments.

And people aren't getting their wages paid.

So it's on its way out.

So I think as the empire crumbles, they kind of knew that this was on the horizon.

So there'd be no point maybe coming after us.

I would assume.

And the Charity Commission has launched an investigation into Big Help.

Yeah, so they're investigating Big Help project, the charity.

Unfortunately, because all of the companies surrounding the charity, like I said, there's this big web that supported the charity with money moving in between all of them all the time.

The charity can only investigate charities, it can't investigate community interest companies or private companies.

So, there's huge swathes of this empire that were being held unaccountable, which is why we were so determined to publish the set of articles that we did.

Because we know that, regardless of the outcome of the Charity Commission investigation, which is yet to be seen,

it won't be able to cover in real depth what was going on for so many years within Big Help.

Peter Mitchell has stepped down as CEO of Big Help and as a trustee, and his wife has stepped down as a trustee.

And he's begun stepping down from lots of other organisations.

He recently stepped down from Big Help Green.

Obviously, we don't know why.

It could be because of his health, could be because of the kind of looming charity commission investigation.

But yeah, the empire is certainly starting to be dismantled.

A lot of the assets for the company and a lot of the staff are being moved to other non-charitable aspects of the Big Help Empire.

And what happens to the people living in the houses supported by Big Help?

Well, that's the question, isn't it?

That's the point, that they're still living there.

While the housing is no longer being operated by Big Help projects, I've been contacted by a number of people who were living in the project housing who have now been told to pay their bills to other companies connected to Big Help again.

While assets are being moved around and people are being moved around,

the squalor that they're living in hasn't gone away.

If anything, things are becoming even more difficult because, as the companies fall apart and as the charity falls apart, it's now even more hard to email people to find the right people to speak to to ask for help.

So, unfortunately, these vulnerable people are still living in terrible conditions, and that's why we're continuing to investigate them and follow the story as far as we can.

And I presume a story like this is quite a big team effort.

I mean, it's a lot of pieces you've run, and there are so many different aspects to the story as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

My editor, Yoshi Herman, was a huge part of the story.

He pushed me over the first nine months to get as much information as I could to really hammer down the details.

And with something like this, I think that's what really matters.

Because it's so incredibly complicated, you want to make sure that when you publish these stories, people understand the gravity of what they're reading.

And he was a huge part of that.

And there are so many people behind the scenes-you know, financial advisors, people that helped me pour over these legal documents, people that helped me dig through companies' house to try and find out where the money was moved to.

And then other people within our organisation, Mill Media Co., who were incredibly supportive.

So, yeah, stories like this couldn't be done without them.

And I think, yeah, I think that I really relied on them throughout the whole thing.

That's it for our shortlistees.

Thanks to Abby and to all the other shortlistees for sharing their time, for sharing their extraordinary, outrageous, sometimes infuriating stories with us.

We will be back tomorrow to discover the winner of this year's Paul Foot Award, and we're going to be checking in with last year's winner, Tristan Kirk of the Evening Standard, to see how his story has developed since then.

See you tomorrow.

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