Gillingham Street Angels suddenly announces closure
Plus Conservative defects from Conservatives to Conservatives, the latest flag stand-off, news in brief, and more
A charity that became one of Medway’s most visible community institutions has suddenly collapsed. Gillingham Street Angels, which rose from a volunteer food-distribution effort to a sprawling network of shops and services, has announced its closure amid financial turmoil, governance questions and the departure of almost all of its original leadership. We’ve got the details below. Further down, we have the latest internal drama in the Medway Conservatives, a new phase in the flag saga playing out on our lampposts, news in brief, and more.
Gillingham Street Angels suddenly announces closure
One of Medway’s most prominent charities is closing its doors, with Gillingham Street Angels announcing they are shutting down after six years of rapid growth and intense public profile.
In a statement, the charity’s trustees said it was “no longer financially viable” to continue and that it would be “irresponsible” to keep operating. The decision follows months of organisational turbulence, a change of leadership and growing questions about governance, record-keeping and the scale of its operations.
Gillingham Street Angels began in 2018 as a small volunteer group distributing food and support to rough sleepers. Its growth was dramatic, fuelled first by the pandemic and then by an ambitious expansion into cafés, charity shops, furniture reuse, uniform banks and catering activity, alongside a high-visibility food bank on Skinner Street. Founder Neil Charlick emphasised the need to ‘run a charity as a business’ and secure unrestricted income to fund services. At its peak, the charity was claiming to feed tens of thousands of people a month and operated a fleet of vans, a warehouse, multiple shops and a large volunteer base.
In 2023, the most recent financial year on record, the charity reported income of £1.23m, including more than £829,000 from its shops and £306,000 in grants. Spending reached £1.12m, with staff costs of over £577,000. Cash reserves at year-end were recorded as over £357,000. The accounts also noted the organisation’s rapid expansion and stated that “whilst we were proactive to the needs of the community, we had not made sufficient changes to the operational structure to cope with this rapid expansion,” adding that financial records had been found to be “inadequate” and that both its finance officer and its treasurer had departed.
At the start of this year, a new team was brought in to stabilise the organisation, including interim chief executive Tracey Errington and new trustees. According to the closure statement, they sought to streamline operations and improve oversight. Still, they concluded the task was too large and that “historical imprudent financial and operational decisions” meant recovery was impossible.
Errington told Local Authority that she discovered significant financial issues after taking the role. “I do have a lot of respect for Neil, but he is very much a one man band,” she said, “and I did not realise quite the mess that we were in financially.” She said Charlick initiated his departure early in the year and formally left in May, with most of the previous trustees also stepping down around the same time.
The end brings to a close a charity that has been a high-profile presence in Medway life, routinely praised for helping vulnerable residents and attracting support from local businesses, schools and political figures. It also featured regularly in the media and courted national attention, sometimes controversially, with TV appearances and public fundraising drives. For many residents struggling through a cost of living crisis, GSA’s food bank, soup kitchens and uniform banks were lifelines.
Yet questions had also grown around the scale and structure of the organisation and the boundary between charitable work and commercial activity. The charity operated a café serving high-end meals, including steak and lobster, which its founder defended as a way to treat people with dignity and raise funds. It also opened and closed trading sites at pace and spoke openly about running on a business model that could only continue if income-generating arms stayed profitable.
Relations with Medway Council had deteriorated by the end of last. In December, Local Authority reported on a letter GSA sent to councillors accusing the council of making its work more difficult, citing disputes over the location of services and reduced funding. Shortly afterwards, the charity publicly blamed the council’s transport policies for a shop closure in Rochester, though it later deleted the post. The council declined to comment at the time but confirmed this week that it had met with GSA leadership ahead of the closure announcement.
Council Leader Vince Maple said he was “saddened” by the news, praising the charity’s support for “thousands of residents” and noting the end of its household waste reuse scheme at council recycling centres. Maple added that the council would look at “alternative options” to continue furniture and goods reuse locally and signposted residents to existing support services, emphasising that “asking for a bit of help is perfectly ok.”
The collapse has also prompted Medway Street Angels to issue a statement distancing itself and stressing that it is a separate entity. The group, which predates GSA, said it did not employ staff or pay volunteers and said it hoped that the “Charity Commission will take further action if appropriate.”
The timing has raised eyebrows. The charity’s 2024 accounts are now overdue, and the trustees say legal and regulatory advice has been taken. The Charity Commission is already aware of issues, with trustees noting in their 2023 report that they had appointed external consultants, dismissed a finance officer and were seeking more specialist oversight. The closure statement says the Commission is being kept informed.
In the meantime, the food bank and shops are continuing to operate on a transitional basis. What happens next will matter most to people who relied on its food bank, clothing support and outreach. Medway’s voluntary sector has stepped into gaps before and will likely do so again, but the sudden loss of capacity from a group this large will not be easy to absorb overnight.
We’re very eager to speak to anyone knowledgeable about the situation at Gillingham Street Angels. If you are willing to have a chat about anything you know, please get in touch via hello(at)localauthority(dot)news
Conservative breaks from Chishti’s association
The Medway Conservatives have found a new way to make internal politics look theatrical. Cllr Andrew Lawrence, who represents Hempstead and Wigmore, has resigned from the Gillingham and Rainham Conservative Association and joined the Chatham and Aylesford one instead. He’s still a Conservative councillor, but he’s swapping associations mid-term, like changing gyms because someone kept hogging the weights. It’s an odd move.
Lawrence published two blogs explaining it all. The target is pretty clear: former MP Rehman Chishti, still the gravitational force in the Gillingham and Rainham party. Lawrence accuses him of trying to dominate selections, blocking him from becoming association chair, and fostering what he calls a “culture of fear.” There are references to personal smears, internal manoeuvring, and a sense he’s been waiting a long time to unload.
The tone is something else. One moment it’s local political gripes, the next it’s Burke and Disraeli. It lands like a constitutional lecture interrupted by ward-level beef. You don’t often get political philosophy deployed against a constituency association in Medway.
Lawrence is the Conservative shadow portfolio holder for regeneration, community and housing, sits on the regeneration scrutiny committee, and is the group treasurer. Senior councillors don’t tend to quietly relocate to another association unless something has gone very sideways.
The backdrop doesn’t help. Only a few weeks ago, Cllr Robbie Lammas defected to Reform. Lawrence clearly wanted no one drawing parallels, publishing a second post denouncing Reform as unserious populism and stressing his loyalty to the party. When councillors need to start clarifying they’re not defecting, things are not tranquil.
Conservative group leader George Perfect, himself from Gillingham and Rainham, offered polite disappointment that this all spilt out publicly, but confirmed Lawrence stays in post. Lawrence told us he backs Perfect, will carry on in the shadow cabinet, and intends to stand again in Hempstead and Wigmore in 2027. However, he added that he may need to look at a different ward if the association blocks him.
By the time any of this happens, Medway might not exist as a council. The next vote might be shadow elections to a new, larger unitary. So the question of who gets to run for Hempstead and Wigmore could end up being academic if the ward map gets wiped anyway.
Lawrence can talk philosophy, Reform can hover on the edges, and the group can smile through it, but all roads eventually loop back to Rehman Chishti and who gets to call the shots in Gillingham and Rainham. That story doesn’t appear to be finished yet.
A very Medway stand-off
Medway’s long, slightly surreal flag saga has entered a new phase. After months of Union Flags and St George’s Crosses quietly appearing on lampposts and roundabouts across the towns, council workers have now begun taking them down. It is, in practical terms, a straightforward bit of tidying up. In political terms, it has once again sent a very small group of very online men into meltdown.
Back in September, Medway’s Labour administration signalled this moment was coming. The flags, they argued, were not a spontaneous show of local pride but a coordinated far-right campaign to dominate public space. The council’s initial approach was to discourage, not intervene. That caution has now gone, and bolt-cutters have entered the chat.
One of the main flag enthusiasts on Facebook responded with trademark subtlety. “Cowards!” he cried. “Traitors!” He accused the council of working “under the cover of darkness,” vowed that “every single one” will go back up on 14 November, and claimed to already have “a few hundred” flags ready. He also reassured supporters that “the majority” of those taking them down were “legal immigrants” and questioned the timing of the removals. Coherence optional, emojis compulsory.
All this righteous fury is slightly complicated by his own page, which is full of photos of him and friends doing late-night flag drops, ladders out, posing like they’ve liberated the Pentagon rather than zip-tied flags to a lamppost by KFC. Darkness, it turns out, is patriotic when you’re the one holding the cable ties.
Meanwhile, the wider flagging circle has gone quiet. Their much-trailed 1 November anti-immigration march in Medway, which they had promoted with multiple posters and multiple locations before settling on Gun Wharf, evaporated last week when Kent-wide organiser Harry Hilden abruptly cancelled it due to “personal issues with the organisers.” Since then, silence. For all the online chest-beating, the offline energy remains small-scale and slightly embarrassed.
The next big date in the diary is now 14 November, when the flags are promised to return in a glorious polyester uprising. Based on recent form, expect more Facebook posts than actual people.
Medway Council did not respond to our request for comment, but those familiar with the operation say roughly a quarter of the flags were removed on the first night. They also sounded quietly confident that they could take them down faster than the flaggers could get them back up. A relay race nobody asked for, but here we are.
For now, it’s a simple back and forth between council cutters and men with ladders who believe they are the last line of defence for Britain’s lamp columns. The flags will go up, the flags will come down, and Medway will continue being drafted into a culture war most residents only encounter when they drive past a roundabout and wonder who exactly has this much free time. The real winners, as ever, are the manufacturers of cheap nylon flags.
In brief
🗣️ Two applications for premises licences will be heard by Medway’s licensing committee next week. One is a return by Budgens to get a licence for their new store at Chatham Waterfront, which Medway Council, Kent Police, and two residents object to. The second is seemingly for the coffee shop inside Gillingham station to sell alcohol, for which only one resident (who also opposes the Budgens application) objects.
🗳️ There is a vacancy for a parish councillor in High Halstow. A by-election will be held if ten parish residents request one in the next 14 working days.
🚓 Four people have been arrested after a man was stabbed to death in Chatham on Saturday.
💷 A pensioner in Cliffe Woods is refusing to pay council tax because of the state of the road outside his house. This will no doubt go very well for him.
More Authority
From Militant to TUSC and now Your Party, Chas Berry has long been at the forefront of leftist politics in Medway. We talk to him about his journey, leaving Labour, his hopes for the new party, and lots more.
“I still support the idea of revolutionary change”
Chas Berry has been involved in working-class struggles since the 1980s. Formerly a member of Militant tendency. He stood in the 2015 local elections as a candidate for TUSC, and is now a coordinator for Your Party Medway. Steven met him at The Royal Crown in Rochester where they discussed whether people should support Your Party, why he left Labour, why he hadn’t considered joining the Greens, and lots more.
Footnotes
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Brilliant thanks for this 😀