The Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) has issued the lowest, most serious rating for social housing landlords, after its inspection uncovered “very serious failings”.

The RSH inspects all social housing providers as part of its regulatory inspection programme. It takes into account all four consumer standards. These are: Neighbourhood and Community Standard, Safety and Quality Standard, Tenancy Standard, and the Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard.

The judgment on Northumberland County Council ruled:

Our judgement is that there are very serious failings in the landlord delivering the outcomes of the consumer standards. The landlord must make fundamental changes so that improved outcomes are delivered.

Social housing — ‘Significant inconsistencies’

The RSH also based the judgment on the “scale of the issues” and the “significant impact” on tenants.

Social housing providers are required to have accurate, up-to-date, and evidence-based information about the condition of their homes. This should:

reliably inform their provision of quality, well maintained and safe homes for tenants and to ensure that their tenants’ homes meet the requirements of the Decent Homes Standard.

Shockingly, Northumberland CC only had up-to-date information on the condition of around 3% of its homes. The council last conducted its stock condition survey in 2012. However, it only completed it for 10% of its houses. This means the RSH does not have assurance that homes meet the decent homes standard.

Additionally, the RSH requires Northumberland CC to meet all legal requirements related to the safety of tenants in its homes.

The judgment states:

Through our inspection we found very serious failings in Northumberland CC delivering this required outcome. We identified significant inconsistencies in reported information relating to health and safety obligations, and limited evidence that Northumberland CC is assured that it identifies and meets all legal requirements that relate to the health and safety of tenants in its homes and communal areas. We found no evidence to support that health and safety assessments are accurately recorded, are routinely monitored or that actions are being addressed within appropriate timescales.

The RSH also found weaknesses in Northumberland CC’s ability to undertake repairs and maintenance effectively and in a timely manner. It states:

We found no evidence that it has considered the needs of tenants in the delivery of its repairs service or that Northumberland CC keep its tenants informed with clear and timely communication.

Transparency, Influence and Accountability

The Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard sets out how landlords must be open with tenants and treat them with fairness and respect, so that tenants can access services, raise complaints, influence decision-making, and hold their landlord to account.

The RSH found that Northumberland CC was also massively failing on this standard, too.

It was discovered that it does not provide meaningful opportunities for tenants to scrutinise or influence services. Additionally, it did not respond to complaints on time.

On the subject of tenancy agreements, the RSH found:

Northumberland CC could not provide evidence that it was offering tenancies or terms of occupation that were compatible with the purpose of its accommodation, the needs of individual households, the sustainability of the community, and the efficient use of its housing stock.

Furthermore, it did not provide any evidence that it was taking appropriate action in response to anti-social behaviour and hate crimes.

Ultimately, the RSH ruled that:

Although Northumberland CC has indicated a willingness to address these very serious failings, and has started the work in some areas, we do not yet have assurance that it understands the potential risks to tenants, and that it has the ability to put matters right.

Based on our assessment of the seriousness of the failings, the risks tenants are exposed to as a result of these failings, and the fundamental changes needed to improve outcomes for tenants, we have concluded a C4 grade for Northumberland CC.

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Feature image via NorthumberlandTV

Writing in the Guardian, renowned economists Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis make the case that tackling the climate crisis first requires dismantling capitalism and its interests.

Hickel and Varoufakis astutely point to the ‘extraordinary paradox’ we find ourselves. One where we have the technology and resources to produce more than we could ever possibly need. At the same, time inequality is increasing rapidly, leaving millions of people suffering through severe deprivation.

Supporting their argument, they state:

Capitalism cares about our species’ prospects as much as a wolf cares about a lamb’s. But democratise our economy and a better world is within our grasp

“Our existing economic system, capitalism, is incapable of addressing the social and ecological crises we face in the 21st century.” https://t.co/nbKPcpnaVr

— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) February 12, 2026

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Capitalism: the cause of this paradox

Hickel and Varoufakis are sounding the alarm over our continued adherence to capitalist structures and principles. In this piece, they argue that we “have an urgent responsibility” to chart a different course. As they state, we’ve all learned it makes no difference who we vote for if we don’t have systemic change.

Additionally, they point out it’s ludicrous to tinker around the edges of a system that works against the interests of the 99%.

Quite aptly, they describe capitalism as:

an economic system that boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. Even if we live in a democracy and have a choice in our political system, our choices never seem to change the economic system. Capitalists are the ones who determine what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit. The rest of us – the people who are actually doing the production – do not get a say.

The latest situation in Argentina under far-right Trump-ally Milei only reinforces their claim that ordinary people’s quality of life is consistently sacrificed for billionaire profits:

This is what the far right calls ‘freedom’: turning workers into slaves—12-hour workdays, no severance pay, punished for striking. A country pushed back centuries in just a few years while working people lose their rights.
Milei is a monster. pic.twitter.com/7SzlWyukzh

— Alejandro🌹🇪🇺 (@Alejandro_SocEU) February 12, 2026

‘Irrational forms of production’ feeds into the climate crisis

Hickel and Varoufakis highlight the imbalance in principle between what’s best for capital and what’s best for people. To do this, they point out that capital does not prioritise social good or human need. Instead, its priority will always be to ‘maximise and accumulate profit’.

Elaborating on this point, they argue that capitalism’s demand for “perpetual growth” pushes questions of necessity or harm far down the priority list, with chasing profit firmly at the top. The result, they say, are “irrational forms of production”: endless SUVs, sprawling mansions, and mountains of cheap fast fashion. All excellent for boosting the wealth of the already rich, whilst hurting the environment and reducing value for ordinary people.

Meanwhile, genuinely urgent needs such as affordable housing fall to the bottom of the pile — unless governments step in to make them profitable through tax breaks and the stripping away of so-called “burdensome” regulations. Regulations, of course, that exist to protect people and the environment.

Further to this point, they refer to the climate crisis and the desperate need to turn to renewable energy and abandon fossil fuels. They write:

Similarly with energy. Renewables are already much cheaper than fossil fuels. Alas, fossil fuels are up to three times as profitable. Thus capital forces governments to link electricity prices to the price of the most expensive liquified natural gas, not of cheap solar energy. Similarly, building and maintaining motorways is many times more lucrative for private contractors, car manufacturers and oil companies than a modern network of superfast, safe public railways. So capitalists continue to push our governments to subsidise fossil fuels and road building, even while the world burns.

Since Donald Trump’s election, many major investment firms enthusiastically abandoned their climate commitments, which had, in favour of the common good, restrained their profitability.

‘Keep southern economies subordinate’

They add that this contradiction between what is best for capital and what is best for people ‘lock us into never-ending cycles of imperialist violence’. The need for cheap labour and nature from the global south incentivises western capitalist powers to use:

debt, sanctions, coups and even outright military invasion to keep southern economies subordinate.

Trump favours the strong man tactics of recklessly breaking international laws and norms for his own greed and power. With that in mind, there’s definitely weight to their argument.

Hickel and Varoufakis insist there are three conditions required that will ensure this necessary change happens to our economy:

1. A new financial system that makes harmful private investments expensive by enforcing penalties. The implementation of a new public investment bank, making it easier to get public finance for things that benefit the public. They suggest that this could run in tandem with the central banks.
2. Increase the use of ‘deliberative democracy’ to decide focused goals at sectoral, regional and national levels. The public financing provided in point one would then be directed towards those goals.
3. Introduction of the Great Corporate Reform Act which would look to democratise corporations. They say, favouring companies who adopt the change would incentivise more companies to work with a fairer system of ‘one employee, one share, one vote’.

The economists finished saying:

We live in a shadow of the world we could create. A world in which we shall be able to avert an almost certain ecological collapse, rather than waiting around for capitalism to push us beyond the point of no return. A world where the abolition of economic insecurity, precarity, poverty, unemployment and indignity is possible, while we lead meaningful lives within planetary boundaries. This is not a distant dream. It is a tangible prospect.

Climate crisis needs radical change — no more sticking-plaster politics

Our own James Wright wrote in November last year how inequality is exactly what capitalism is built to do, writing:

The non-work-based profiteering is taken to new heights by the few who are rolling in it to the point where they can pay experts to invest their money. Indeed, the global increase in rent-based income corresponds with a G20 report finding. Throughout the world, from 2000-2024, the richest 1% took 41% of new wealth, while 50% gained just 1% of it.

When it comes to neoliberal capitalism, we’re being fed a vision that’s well past its sell-by date. Like a decaying potato in the kitchen cupboard, we should preserve any positive parts and bin the rest ASAP.

Some public figures have also demanded an end to capitalist structures, arguing that they harm the vast majority of people. Ahead of the CEC elections, Zarah Sultana, the Grassroots Left, and aligned communities made their stance clear. Meaningful change requires a decisive break from what they describe as a system that traps people in the grip of self-interested capitalists.

This article from Hickel and Varoufakis backs their point up superbly.

At the Canary, we stand firmly behind that call and will keep speaking truth to power. No matter how loudly the establishment protests.

We need to nationalise our economy because the working class can run society better than the billionaires, the profiteers and the war criminals who rule over us today. pic.twitter.com/bAxIasbmYe

— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) December 7, 2025

Featured image via Counter Fire

The results are in – and surprise, surprise Northern communities are bearing the brunt of water companies capitalising on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Universal Credit deductions scheme.

As the Canary previously revealed, across 18 months, water firms robbed welfare claimants of £32.4m in Universal Credit.

However, the scale of individual water firms milking this punitive DWP debt clawback mechanism has been a mystery – until now.

Using a combination of publicly available data and Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, the Canary has been able to calculate ballpark figures revealing the likely biggest culprits snatching millions in welfare from some of the poorest households.

And among privatised providers engaged in routine sewage dumping, rampant profiteering, and opportunistic bill hikes, certain companies stood out as clear exploiters of this DWP deductions regime.

DWP Universal Credit deductions: the water companies cashing in

Unlike other services, monopoly suppliers dominate by location. What this means is that water companies serve fixed regional areas. Thanks to this, the Canary was able to estimate how much each company might have taken in UC deductions. However, there are a number of significant caveats to the following data, explained here.

Through an FOI, the Canary acquired UC deductions data for every parliamentary constituency in England and Wales. The data spans the 18 months between March 2024 – August 2025.

However, water company coverage does not exactly match up with regional boundaries. This meant we had to use water company parliamentary constituency data to collate the FOI information into our own dataset. Once we had this, we could make estimates for each water company:

So in total, constituencies that the regional water monopolies cover accounted for approximately £28.7m. However, it’s important to note that this will include significant double-counting, since suppliers will crossover in some constituencies.

Together, these regional companies supply water services to 30,099,891 postcodes. Small new entrant companies account for the remaining 159,524.

The most reliable data we have

Then, if we estimate deductions for the joint water and sewerage suppliers only, excluding parliamentary constituencies where the water company was different to the sewerage company, we get the following:

The above data was complicated by the fact that companies wouldn’t always cover the same number of postcodes for water services versus sewerage in any one given constituency.

As such, we only used data wherever sewerage postcodes were within 10% of the number of water postcodes.

The bottom line all this speculative data underscores is that it’s hard to know with any certainty how much each of the major water companies is extracting in Universal Credit deductions.

The key culprits

Nevertheless, the tentative estimates still provide a general idea of which companies are cashing in at welfare claimant’s expense.

United Utilities appears the most prolific user of the deductions regime by some margin. For a start, the company seems to make up the largest chunk of the £32.4m in deductions. Under all calculations, United Utilities nabbed somewhere north of £9m in Universal Credit. Moreover, even proportional to the number of postcodes it covers, the company is the clear forerunner.

In January 2025, regulator Ofwat greenlit United Utilities hiking customer bills by 32% over the next five years. Since it began raising bills in April, it has seen a 131% profit surge.

Meanwhile, Yorkshire Water and Northumbrian Water extracted the next largest sums from customer’s Universal Credit. At more than £2.95m and £2.65m respectively, the two northern utility giants also ranked high as a proportion of the postcodes they covered. For Yorkshire Water, it came in fourth behind United Utilities, Northumbrian in second place, and Dwr Cymru in third place as a ratio of deductions to the postcodes they supply services to.

In October 2025, Northumbrian Water was among five companies that lobbied the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for further bill hikes. The company had already secured permission in January to increase bills by 21%.

And of course, Ofwat slapped both United Utilities and Yorkshire Water with boss’s bonus bans in November. These were due to category 1 pollution incidents in 2024. In Yorkshire Water’s case, it was also down to its “serious failures” over sewage, which had resulted in “excessive spills”.

So as these companies provided atrocious services and mass polluted watercourses, they were also running roughshod over some of their poorest customers.

Northern water utilities running roughshod over welfare claimants

What’s immediately noticeable here is that, with the exception of Dwr Cymru, the biggest culprits are the companies administering water and sewerage in the North.

It tallies with broader statistics on Universal Credit deductions. During the same 12-month period, the North East had the highest number of Universal Credit households where the government or third parties had made one or more deductions. Specifically, it stood at 53%.The North West followed this, at 50%.

The North East (21.5%) and North West (20.2%) also has the highest number of highly deprived neighbourhoods in England. On the one hand, the high levels of deprivation offer an explanation for the significant scale of water debt. This is because, it logically follows that more people would be experiencing debt thanks to state-sanctioned poverty. However, on the other, it points to water companies and their extortionate bill hikes exacerbating the problem. And of course, eating into customer’s social security will also only compound this deprivation further.

Ultimately, the key point is that going after some of the poorest customers for outstanding payments is a choice. Water companies reporting mega-profits aren’t strapped for cash – and could easily take the hit. These unscrupulous firms are robbing welfare claimants of their social security to fund eye-watering shareholder dividends and executive pay packages. This needs to be recognised for the absolute scandal it is.

As ever, the most marginalised – particularly Northern – communities are bearing the brunt of this egregious cost of greed crisis fuelled by the DWP. This data shows clearly that it’s one in which the privatised water racket is undoubtedly playing a significant part.

Featured image via the Canary

The BBC has reported that a ‘”brazen” rail fare dodger’ has been fined over £3,600 for not paying for hundreds of journeys. However, it quickly becomes clear that the man is actually homeless and was sleeping on the trains. So why didn’t the BBC cover it that way?

BBC paints a homeless man as a criminal

The BBC article reports that Charles Brohiri, 29, “travelled” on Govia Thameslink Railway trains 112 times “without buying a ticket” in just under two years. He was given a suspended sentence and ordered to pay back £3,629. Brohiri had previously been sentenced for 36 charges of failing to pay for a ticket in August 2024. He pleaded guilty to 76 recent charges.

The judge at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, Nina Tempia, said Brohiri had a “sense of entitlement” and “acted as if he was invincible.”

The BBC also mentions that he continued to travel without paying after initially being charged in court in January, right up until the day before the current hearing. Apparently, there have been a further 16 offences since then.

What it glosses over, though, is the reason why Brohiri continued to commit the ‘crime’. He’s actually been homeless for the last three years and has had no choice but to sleep on trains, as well as in hospitals and libraries.

State incompetence to blame

His defence, Eleanor Curzon, said Brohiri had attempted to get support but struggled to engage with charities. She said it was:

a combination of a lack of support, a negative mental health space and not knowing how to go about maintaining support from services

Curzon also told the court that Brohiri wanted to make a change in his life, and getting sober three years ago demonstrated that. She also pointed out that he had always complied when caught by authorities.

Brohiri has admitted his crimes and wants to be given a chance to get into work and be supported back into having somewhere to live. Curzon told the court:

He reiterated to me this morning that if he is given the opportunity to work with probation they can assist him in securing accommodation and employment.

It is really these two factors which will put an end to Mr Brohiri’s offending.

BBC thinks homeless man not paying £15k is a bad thing

Thankfully, Brohiri was given a suspended sentence. He has, however, been ordered to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work. Hopefully, he will also be able to get paid employment alongside that, so he can live safely.

While Brohiri has to (somehow) pay the fine, he thankfully doesn’t have to pay the £15,120 prosecution fees. The article frames this as a bad thing, naturally. This is the part where they finally quote Govia Thameslink, who say that people not paying fares:

diverted public funding away from improving services for passengers. That is unfair both on taxpayers and on the vast majority of passengers who pay for their journeys.

However, if they hadn’t prosecuted a homeless man for the ‘crime’ of literally sleeping somewhere safe, that money could’ve been spent on homeless services.

As Adam Smith said on Twitter:

And we’re supposed to think our justice system is working? That £15,000 couldn’t have been spent actually helping this guy, and many others like him?

No, instead we’ll hound someone for money they don’t have. Like they do to all of us, these days.

BBC puts corporations before people’s lives, as usual

This is clearly a story about how the system is failing vulnerable people who fall through the cracks. The fact that the BBC frames this as a “fare dodger brought to justice” and not a sharp look at the way the state treats poor people tells you everything you need to know about who the BBC serves. And let’s be honest, the BBC aren’t strangers to twisting the truth to fit their narrative. 

When it was discovered that Brohiri was repeatedly ‘offending’ because he had nowhere to sleep, the effort should’ve been on finding him somewhere safe. Instead, the system punished him and slapped a fine on a man with no possible means of paying it.

The true injustice in this story is being done to people like Brohiri every day. Not faceless corporations — worth millions — that force the taxpayer to pay for their sham trials. That’s what the BBC should be reporting on, instead of sucking off scumbag CEOs.

Featured image via Housing Digital