Maisie: Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast

Andy: Hello, our Paul Foot Award 2025 mini series 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 is

and what their story is all about.

Abi Whistance: my name is Abby Wis 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 charity in Liverpool,

that had put vulnerable people into terrible living conditions.

And the owner of the charity who was an ex labor counselor 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.

Andy: how did this.

Story first,

cross your desk.

Abi Whistance: 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 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 gonna 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, supported.

and 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, the.

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 Home Rate,

which is an investment trust.

And when I started looking into that, I saw that they would, they

themselves were being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office.

And then immediately everything started to unravel.

Andy: So

what is

the big help

project?

Abi Whistance: 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 just.

There's religious initiatives within that.

There was a nosy food bank that started, on religious grounds.

So it's just a really big web of organizations that can

be very, difficult to track.

Andy: But it all comes back to one man called Peter Mitchell.

Is

that right?

Abi Whistance: It does indeed.

He's an ex labor counselor in Liverpool.

he was a labor counselor for a very long time, and then he

switched to the liberal party.

He's the CEO or was the CEO of big help project

Andy: so he's the center of each of these organizations.

He

was a labor counselor.

His wife, I believe, still is a labor

Abi Whistance: She is indeed.

Yeah.

So she, is often a trustee with him or a director with him.

And the companies and the charities associated with big help

Andy: and seems to have started more in the food bank area,

in in charitable terms, simply

providing

food

for people.

Abi Whistance: 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, 5, 6, 7 years ago.

People started to realize that there was a way, or there was a, for, 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 finding that loophole within the government and exploiting that

slightly to provide housing for people.

And

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

In 2020, their income was 950,000 pounds.

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.

Abi Whistance: this is where a lot of charities came to

ruin over the last few years.

so Home Reap who I mentioned earlier, the charity Big Help project was

leasing properties from home re

they had the properties and they were leasing them to

charities on very long leases.

It's extremely unusual for a charity to take a lease that's

as long 10, 15, 20 year leases,

for these properties, most of which were in terrible, conditions.

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 home rate, who would then give them handouts to do up

the properties and to make them livable.

Obviously, that never

happened, so it was a bit of a house of cards with home rate, which is

why they're now being investigated and which is why all of the charities

apart from Big Help, went bust.

Andy: 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 is shitty, portfolios.

Abi Whistance: He did indeed.

Andy: So there's this really

Poor

condition housing that very vulnerable people are living in like.

Callum Gravel.

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 have people checking in on you, basically.

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

Abi Whistance: they've Yeah,

they've,

Andy: mentally

ill,

Abi Whistance: people who need that extra support from a welfare officer,

to, in order to live a normal life.

Andy: had he received.

That

extra support?

Abi Whistance: 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, to show him a copy of his support plan,

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.

Andy: But big help, we're 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?

Abi Whistance: Yeah, par partially.

So sometimes that would happen, but in, 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, we'd received the

money from the local councils and they'd in turn then pay 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 complicated, confusing model that fundamentally was flawed.

That would never work because the housing that was being offered was so poor and all

Andy: and all

the staff at these various charities were not properly

trained in housing or support work.

They didn't.

there were

there maybe a hundred staff who just did not have the ability to

support these very vulnerable people?

Abi Whistance: Yeah, there was a lot of confusion around what

they were supposed to be doing.

And I think this is because they went from, like you mentioned earlier, a food

bank to becoming this huge operation across the UK that's supposed to be

housing people with really, complex needs.

And that's a really difficult thing 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,

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,

Andy: but millions of pounds is being sld from.

Charity, big help to the private companies

also

owned and operated by Peter Mitchell.

Abi Whistance: Yeah, so when we, we took a closer look at their accounts, which

we were after for some time because they were always delays in filing

their annual accounts, or 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 pounds 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?

Andy: right?

Abi Whistance: And also a series of cars that would be, that we used as well.

Andy: What was Mr. Mitchell's reaction when you approached him with this story?

Abi Whistance: 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, 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.

Andy: Yeah.

same

Abi Whistance: 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.

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

Yes.

Abi Whistance: Yes,

Andy: just checking,

was there any legal pushback from any of the big help?

Portfolio,

Abi Whistance: no story, absolutely nothing.

Andy: How

Abi Whistance: I think it says a lot.

I think our, stories came at a really good time.

because the charity is collapsing inwards because of, 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 knew that this was on the

horizon, so there'd be no point maybe coming after us, I would assume.

And

Andy: And the

Charity Commission has launched an investigation into, big help.

Abi Whistance: 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 this 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.

Andy: Peter Mitchell has stepped down as CEO of big help and as a Trustee

and his wife has stepped down as a

Abi Whistance: And, he's begun stepping down from lots of other organizations.

He recently stepped down from Big Help Green.

we don't know why.

could be because of his health, could be because of the, kind of looming

Charity commission investigation.

but yeah, the empire's 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

Andy: and what happens to the people living in.

The houses supported by big help.

Abi Whistance: 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 being contacted by a number of

people who were living in, the project housing, who have now been told to,

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.

The squ 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 are continuing to investigate them and,

follow the story as far as we can.

Andy: and I presume a story like this is quite a big team effort.

it's, a lot of pieces you've run and there are so many different

aspects to the story as well.

Abi Whistance: yeah, absolutely.

My editor, Yashi 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 wanna 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 were so many people behind the scenes, financial advisors, people

that helped me pour over these legal documents, people that helped me dig

through company's house, to try and find out where the money was moved to.

And then other people within our organization, 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.

Andy: That's it for our short listees.

Thanks to Abby and to all the other short listees 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 gonna 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.