For almost 40 years, Blackburne House has given a lifeline to thousands of Liverpool’s most vulnerable women. But its former chief executive has described how the charity fell victim to a “catastrophic” property deal that is embroiled in corruption allegations engulfing Liverpool city council.
Claire Dove, who has been awarded a CBE, MBE, OBE and Queen’s lifetime achievement award for her work, had proposed to build an education centre but it went “very wrong” when the council brought in a developer to build the facility along with 132 apartments.
“As soon as we got planning permission, things started to go wrong. The developer more or less disappeared. The day we were allowed to go in and see [the finished development], I could have wept for what they had done to our piece of the building,” she said.
Dove, who retired from the charity last summer after 37 years in charge, said her long-awaited education centre was an uninhabitable mess: “They had put soil pipes everywhere and all you could hear was the tenants flushing toilets. The doors couldn’t open. The windows weren’t opening. The floor was uneven. It was catastrophic what they had done and just left it.”
The facility, which was due to open last year to teach digital and entrepreneurial skills to vulnerable women and children, has still not been able to open, in part due to the coronavirus pandemic. Dove said the delay “had a domino effect” on its ability to offer wider education to women and young people.
The Blackburne House saga is one of the examples cited in a devastating government-commissioner report published last week, which found a “rotten culture” of “dubious contracts,” lost documents and intimidation by senior council figures.
Dove said the experience felt like “David and Goliath”, pitting her charity against the city council and a powerful developer. “In the end, it cost the city and it took them away from other things they needed to invest in for the people of Liverpool. That’s the sadness of this: the losers in all of this have been the citizens and the women and young people of Blackburne House.”
Dove declined to name anyone involved in the episode; however, the developer, Elliot Lawless of the Elliot Group, was named in the report by local government executive Max Caller. Lawless has been arrested as part of Merseyside police’s corruption investigation into building developments and Liverpool city council. He denies any wrongdoing and his firm did not respond to a request for comment.