Hello everyone,

today it’s Dorit who is writing the weekly update from Loaf.

First of all: Thank you for all the kind words and ongoing support after our last week’s newsletter, thank you for the donations and for coming along to buy from us in our pop-up shop at Deadbeat. Being a part of this community means the world to us! We keep pushing GSA to give Stirchley Cooperative Development a fair deal and to finally set up fair leases with the worker co-ops. More updates below.

Opening times:

🟢 Wednesday 12th August, 12pm to 3pm at Deadbeat, Stirchley

🟢 Thursday 13th August, 12pm to 3pm at Deadbeat, Stirchley

🟢 Friday 14th August, 12pm to 3pm at Deadbeat, Stirchley

🟢 Saturday 15th August, 11am to 3pm at Deadbeat, Stirchley

No set lunch menu in August!

Apologies, but due to sharing the kitchen with Lap-fai Lee’s pop up at Deadbeat we will be assessing our lunch options each day and ask you to check our Instagram and Facebook stories for updates. Or just pop around to the shop!

Pre-order Info

➡️ Click HERE to pre-order bread and buns for Wednesday till Saturday. If you don’t want to pre-order that’s alright, we always have more to sell, but we try not to let anything go to waste, so pre-orders are very helpful.

➡️ Cut-off time for all pre-orders is 11am on the day before pick up!

Thanks so much to STEAMHOUSE for their continued support in letting us use a corner of their bakery in Redditch - we honestly do not know what we would have done without their generosity. 💛 💛 💛

Open letter from Birmingham City Council

Two and a half weeks ago four councillors of the Birmingham City Council followed an invitation from SCD to meet with us, with members of the worker co-ops and resident members of Stirchley Co-operative Development to hear about how we set up and shaped the project and to listen to us about our ongoing problems with GreenSquare Accord over the last year. Last week Birmingham City Council published now an open letter addressed to Ruth Cooke, CEO of Greensquare Accord ‘expressing extreme disappointment and concern that Greensquare Accord are no longer willing to sell at the initially agreed price.' And furthermore they are stating in their letter ‘the change in strategy from Greensquare Accord and the impact this has had on the local area has left the administration concerned about Greensquare Accord's social purpose and its fractured relationships with the Stirchley community’ adding their concerns ‘about future partnership working between the Council and Greensquare Accord’.

This got now also picked up by two major housing publications: Housing Today & Inside Housing, who just today published articles about the current situation with GSA. In those - GSA made claims that SCD disagree with in a public statement, from which I will be quoting in the following. GreenSquare Accord's comments in these articles claim they were always clear that SCD would cover Total Scheme Costs. This is not accurate. As a group and as individual businesses, SCD was told we were entering a "turnkey" arrangement. We had our businesses plans reviewed and supported by GSA, which produced agreed upon prices. Unlike GSA, we had no oversight of the potential for delays on this scale, and we were never informed of them until after the fact. SCD would never have agreed to open-ended cost increases and delays from June 2024 onward. The scale of the price increase only became visible to us, as their partners, in January 2026.

In a letter dated 22 July 2026, responding to SCD’s request for Board intervention on the cost overruns, the GSA Chair wrote: "The Board's view has always been that GSA stepped in to complete the Pershore Road development following the administration of Tricas on the clear understanding that costs in so doing would be fully covered by SCD."

The GSA Board may have held that view - but this view was never communicated to SCD, GSA's partners in delivering community-led housing in Stirchley.

Since January, when GSA announced €2.5 million of increases, SCD has disputed how the total scheme cost has been calculated. SCD believes €558,000 of this increase should not have been added. This figure comes from development interest earned on the Homes England capital grant, a by-product of the funds meant for SCD, while it sat in GSA's accounts during the build. GSA earned this interest in profit, and is now charging it back to SCD by adding it to the sale price. In short - GSA appears to have had no internal plan for managing cost overruns. Instead of absorbing this cost using the profit they'd already earned from that interest, they passed it on to SCD, their community partners.

Not only BCC is criticizing GSA and supporting SCD, other politicians like Al Carns (MP for Birmingham Selly Oak) and Richard Parker (Mayor of the West Midlands) met with us again, both being years-long outspoken supporters of the building project in the way it was intended to be run - community-led - with NO LANDLORDS - owned and managed by the people that live and work here.

Two weeks ago members of SCD, including Rach and Mike from Loaf met with Richard Parker and went together on a site visit, during which Richard Parker stated again that he will continue to work and stand with us, ‘because it is so important that this project completes and that the ownership passes to SCD’. You can see a short video with a sneak-peak into our building here on Richard Parker’s Instagram page.

We will have more meetings with GreenSquare Accord this week and will keep pushing for a fair deal and a moving date so this farce can finally find an end.

Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Thanks for all the continued support & see you soon!

Team Loaf

Fliss, Neil, Mina, Rach, Pete, Dave, Dorit, Molly, Michael & Kate

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Website: loaf.coop

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