Thursday 6 November 2025 – The Five Stages of Grief
Developer, Hill Group’s Rhino has submitted her case for reasonable endeavours made to employ 13 local residents into apprenticeships on the Fosters Estate that ended in none (see Shit Just Got Real). You’ll recall that in July I invited her to discuss her endeavours with me if there was any confusion about what the targets were but, she turned me down:
“Hi Paul,
"Thanks for your email.
“There’s no confusion, I just wanted to ensure the information regarding length of service was fully accurate.
“As outlined in the S106 agreement, which we have been working towards since the beginning of the project alongside both our predecessors, [her predecessor] and [my predecessor], the requirement is to target Barnet residents. We have consistently done so, as evidenced by the students studying in the area, notably those attending Barnet & Southgate College, as well as through the various activities documented in the spreadsheet.”
She didn’t send me a report of endeavours.
Then, on 19 September, with her client, Barnet Homes, being threatened with having to pay the financial remedy of £325,000 for the undelivered apprenticeships, and on being subsequently chased by her panicked client, she submitted a report claiming that 17 apprentices had been employed, “exceeding” her target of 13, and coloured it in green as a Pavlovian stimulus to readers to accept that the project had been delivered to plan (see None is Good Enough).
Despite the colour scheme, it hadn’t been. Denial is usually the first stage of grief so I braced myself for having to help her through the remaining three to reach acceptance. I’m not sure I’m there yet.
I gave this feedback to their client, Barnet Homes, who gave the Rhino “one last” chance (spoiler alert: it wasn’t) to submit a report for reasonable endeavours made. She ignored it. On 3 October, I notified the Planning Manager, “I’m done here with this.”
With the council’s Planning Manager reluctant to enforce planning obligations on rich people, I let my Director know that he was losing out on a lot of income from this and he had a quiet word with the Planning Manager’s Assistant Director. Next thing, on 22 October, the Planning Manager emailed the client/planning applicant saying that she was now going to issue a demand notice for the £325,000 unless, that is, “if… Hill are able to make a case we are happy to receive the info to review.”
He replied saying,
“I think Hill were expecting the LBB [the council] to reach out to them [Hill Group] if further information/evidence was required. It may be some confusion re who’s [sic] court the ball was in…
“Please could we give Hill the opportunity for one last response.”
The only “information/evidence”
they had provided was a denial that there was anything to answer for. I’m not sure why there could be confusion
that the ball was in my court to write the report of what endeavours
they had made: I’m the only one who thinks they haven’t made any. Still, I did give them one last chance, she
asked for two weeks, “close of play” the following Wednesday, and I accepted. And, again, she used all of that time plus
eight minutes.
The reason I accepted is that a big chunk of my job is allowing reality in on the fantasy world of expensively-devised local authority economic development strategy: it’s always such a volatile chemical concoction and I like to see the results. At 5:08 yesterday, she submitted her report incorporating two more stages of grief.
She was clearly annoyed that I had called into question her integrity and being made to write this report. But it was hard to balance this irritation with the juxtaposition that she was now accepting that she was no longer denying that she didn’t have anything to answer for: being annoyed at being told she was wrong and accepting she was wrong is a challenging position to take. But she rose to that challenge and still managed to be spiky about having to make this case. It started off saying that they had already said that they had “consistently used reasonable endeavours to target apprenticeship opportunities towards Barnet residents”, angry at the suggestion that that was not already made clear. How it would have been made clear is unclear but the client perhaps thought the ball was in my court to do that. Now it was made clear it was clearly always in her court, she wrote,
“We remain confident that the actions taken demonstrate a genuine, sustained, and good-faith effort to fulfil the S106 agreement. The following provides additional evidence and clarification in response to the points raised in your email, along with the attached zip folder where I have pulled together some supporting evidence…”
“Opportunities were shared directly with local providers such as Hendon and Barnet [jobcentres], careers fairs… and Barnet & Southgate College… with whom we have built a long-standing and productive relationship.”
No “opportunities” such as apprenticeship job descriptions for students to apply for were in the folder but there were email strings between her and the College saying that “we are currently recruiting for jobs”, not apprenticeships. Another email offered the College for “students to come back in the New Year for some work experience and then possibly in to an apprenticeship/job.”
Another email string was attached where the Assistant Site Manager had promised the College that, “I will start liaising with the plumbing contractor about the placements…” And another said, “We also have a couple of apprenticeship roles available in certain trades and I attended the recent T-Level talk with Barnet and Southgate [College] so am keen to assist if we can”.
Why the evidence she chose to provide is so cryptic is suspicious. Why send evidence of things they intended to do in the past as evidence of what they did do in the past? Why not send the evidence of them then doing these things in the past such as actually emailing the actual apprenticeship opportunity to the College with the apprenticeship opportunity advertised also attached? Instead, she had attached three job opportunities for a Document Controller/Admin Assistant, On Site Cleaner and Traffic & Pedestrian Marshal, all not trades that might have apprenticeship courses attached to them and, so, can’t really be apprenticeships, and certainly not things the College teaches. To allay any confusion, the job descriptions explicitly stated that they are not apprenticeships.
There was one email in the zip folder from the Assistant Site Manager to the College’s Head of Apprenticeships asking,
“Wondering if you can help me – im in urgent need of a bricklayer looking to do an apprenticeship!
“Happy to take the student over the summer for 1-5 days a week however much they are interested with a continuation into next year when they are back at college.”
Ok, I think I can see what the confusion is: The Rhino and the site staff don’t know what an apprenticeship is. An apprenticeship is not a part-time summer work placement. An apprenticeship is a long-term full-time job with 80% spent in the workplace. Still no job description relating to this email was in the zip folder.
Seemingly now implicitly accepting that she had no evidence that “Opportunities were shared directly with local providers such as Hendon and Barnet [jobcentres], careers fairs… and Barnet & Southgate College…”, her case took a sharp turn. She now said that she never had to employ local apprentices, that “The S106 [agreement] clause 1.3.3 specifies that opportunities be “targeted for the benefit of persons living within the administrative area of the Council” rather than exclusively limited to them. We have therefore worked to prioritise local candidates but, where this was not possible, ensured roles were filled to meet apprenticeship numbers and maintain programme momentum.” Instead, on students at Barnet & Southgate College not applying for the apprenticeships, possibly because the Rhino never advertised the opportunities with them to apply for, at least that was in the zip folder that was said to contain evidence of them advertising opportunities with the College, the contractor gave the apprenticeships to his two sons (see None is Good Enough).
The agreement does say this. It also has clauses that, as well as “targeting” Barnet residents, Hill Group has to employ them into apprenticeships, and not only that, but has to employ enough of them that 13 complete an apprenticeship and gain a qualification, something she had previously said they had “exceeded” and coloured in green because they achieved 17.
In another twist, she added,
“…completion rates [of apprenticeships] can be affected by factors beyond our control – including course changes, subcontractor movements, and personal circumstances [presumably a reference to the apprentices’ life circumstances, not the Rhino’s mood on the day she sacked them only a few weeks into their employment] which we outline below.
“[…]
“S - …his employment ended abruptly due to personal legal issues outside our control.
“A – Completed his required course duration before leaving to pursue other opportunities.
“L – Enrolled through [Barnet & Southgate College]. His apprenticeship was impacted by the college’s course termination…
“J - …who paid £900 for his Level 3 NVQ. Despite our interventions and offer of transport and continued employment at another site, J chose not to continue due to early start times.
“G – Completed over nine months on placement… She was offered a permanent role and bonus but sadly returned abroad due to her father’s ill health.
“M – Hired nearing the end of the project. [The contractor who employed him] confirmed M left their employment of his own accord.
I’m minded of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, paraphrasing, to lose one apprentice may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose six looks like carelessness. But she says these things were always “beyond our control”. Why they then entered into the S106 agreement committing to control them, I don’t know; perhaps they shouldn’t have become a housing developer in the first place. But we are where we are and that’s never a good place to be, so I examined the excuses made.
What legal issues S faced that they had to terminate him is left tantalisingly hanging. I don’t think that this cryptic insight warrants being called “evidence”.
Hill reported that A completed less than five months of a Level 3 Engineering apprenticeship at Barnet & Southgate College. This is far from what would be the “required course duration”. And I didn’t think that the College delivered Engineering apprenticeships so I checked with them, the same Head of Apprenticeships the Assistant Site Manager had been emailing and with whom she had said she had “built a long-standing and productive relationship”, and he confirmed to me that they never had. With an additional flourish condemning Hill Group’s “good faith”, he also added that no-one by this name had ever been enrolled at the College on any course.
L had been enrolled at the College on a BTEC back in 2022 and was referred to Hill Group to do a work experience placement. But they never heard back from Hill about L and he certainly was never on an apprenticeship at the College. And they have never delivered bricklaying apprenticeship courses as claimed by Hill.
G was claimed as doing a Level 2 Plumbing apprenticeship at the College and Hill did in fact claim that she had completed 10 months before her employment was terminated. However, the College has never delivered plumbing apprenticeships.
M Hill claimed did 3 months of an apprenticeship course at Oaklands College. When he started late in the development, I asked the Rhino for assurances that, unlike all our other residents, he would be retained in the apprenticeship for its duration. She ignored my email and, in her next monitoring report, M was terminated.
Still, J is the most intriguing case. He paid £900 for his course at Barnet & Southgate College? What does that mean? Apprentices don’t pay for their own apprenticeship courses, their employer does, usually from their Apprenticeship Levy and via their HMRC payroll portal! And apprenticeships cost a lot more than £900. Sure enough, in the zip folder was evidence of an invoice for an NVQ Level 3 Trowel Occupation course for J totalling £900, billed to the employing contractor, from a training provider called M2HSE Training. This is not Barnet & Southgate College as claimed. And it’s not an apprenticeship course; it seems to be an NVQ Diploma course.
J’s mum had complained to his Employment Adviser who, in turn, passed the complaint on to me, that J was told to come to site each day to see if there was work available and, if there wasn’t, he was sent home without pay (see Shit Just Got Real). When there was work for him, he was given general labouring work, not the brickwork he was promised as being employed as an Apprentice Bricklayer. One morning, when being told to go home because there was no work for him that day and to come back the next morning at 8am, he diffidently complained about having to return then because he couldn’t keep paying the travel fares if he wasn’t being paid, and enquired what college he would be attending for his apprenticeship. In “good faith”, the Rhino has translated this as evidence J didn’t like the early morning starts and unilaterally chose to leave the job despite being begged to stay with bribes of being driven to work at a different site.
Of his mum’s complaint that he was regularly sent home without pay, in “good faith” the Rhino didn’t address. Of her complaint that J’s mum said she didn’t know what he was being paid, in the zip folder was the Rhino’s email to me detailing the conclusion of her investigation, sent to me months later after my consistently chasing her for it, saying J was paid £68.80 for an eight-hour day minus “30% tax = £20.64 leaving him with £48.16 per day. Apprentice wage per an 8hr day = £51.20 which is where the confusion came from.”
That is confusing. She didn’t provide any follow-up to resolve the confusion. So the evidence she has provided is that he was paid substantially below the National Minimum Wage for apprentices? Or is she saying, before tax, he is paid the NMW? If so, why were they taking tax from someone paid so little in the first place and well within his Personal Allowance of first earning £12,570 before tax becomes due? And why is the tax, Income Tax combined with National Insurance, a round 30%?
The Rhino has accepted in this report that J had failed to enrol himself on an apprenticeship. Not that that makes any sense either but, despite the Rhino’s previous insistence that J was on an apprenticeship, everyone is in agreement at this stage that he wasn’t, so why is she quoting apprenticeship payrates? She is saying that, before tax, he was paid the NMW of £68.80 per day but, not to be in breach of the S106 agreement which requires them to pay the London Living Wage, he should have been paid £110.80 per day. That most days he was sent home from work with no pay at all didn’t enter into her average pay calculations.
And, these are the Rhino’s “good-faith” endeavours that, paradoxically, were also “beyond our control”. On seemingly realising mid-report that she was digging a hole for herself, it then took another sharp turn from anger at having her integrity questioned, to bargaining. She concluded:
“We remain committed to working collaboratively with the Council to resolve any outstanding queries and to ensure our shared objectives for skills development and local employment are fully recognised.
“Might I suggest we meet on Teams/in person to discuss with yourself/[the Planning Manager], [the Development Manager at Barnet Homes]/[the Senior Project Manager at Barnet Homes] and relevant colleagues from Hill?”
House, Acceptance:
Dr House is surprised Dr Cameron doesn’t recognise the Five Stages of Grief
over a dying patient.
One thing that still remains unresolved for me, though, is, is she lying about her endeavours to employ and retain local apprentices? Does she think that they paid the local students the living wage and gave them a good experience of working in the industry that would make them want to start a career in it, that they were going to college one day a week to study towards their qualification and that she didn’t, personally, irritatedly, sack them? Or is she too dumb to know, not only how horrible she has been to them, but that she has been employed by Hill because she is too dumb to notice and therefore have any compunction about treating them so badly that her endeavours would almost certainly result in no expensive apprenticeship contributions being made and because S106 monitoring officers at genteel local planning authorities wouldn’t have the gumption to deal with her spikiness at being questioned about them? Or maybe the Rhino is cleverer than me and she knows that the construction industry is just a bunch of stuff that happens which is beyond developers’ control and there is no reason why anyone in the UK has any skills to build anything, anyone gets employed, anything gets built, or why the owners have to pay themselves so much compared to the apprentices they employ to build their flats that they end up in the Guardian on 8 January each year as a mark of by when in the year they have been paid the national average annual salary, well above the £48.16 per day they paid J, if at all?
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