Yes, yes, yes, he’s on the right in this picture!

On 6 November 2023, Berkeley Group’s Southall development — The Green Quarter, rising on the site of the former Southall gasworks — handed a £2,500 cheque to the Western Road Urban Garden Project.

The cheque was branded with Berkeley’s logo and The Green Quarter’s name.

It was presented in the garden and photographed for Berkeley’s website, where the story was published on 23 January 2024.

The image is striking for reasons that go well beyond a small community grant.

The person presenting the cheque on Berkeley’s behalf was Jags Sanghera, Berkeley’s Head of Business & Community Engagement.

The person present as chair of Southall Community Alliance — the umbrella organisation through which the grant was directed — was also Jags Sanghera.

A Career That Connects the Dots

To understand why this matters, it helps to trace Jags Sanghera’s career.

Between April and October 2015, he worked as Community Liaison Regeneration Officer at Southall Community Alliance itself — the charity he now chairs.

In November 2015, he moved to Berkeley Group as Community Liaison Officer, a post he has held continuously since (since promoted to Head of Business & Community Engagement at St George PLC, yet another Berkeley Group subsidiary).

Sanghera is also named as a Berkeley Foundation “Community Champion”, a role he took over in Southall from Rick Watler (Berkeley’s head of construction at the gasworks site, who was a local authority appointed governor at Blair Peach Primary School).

Berkeley’s own SouthAll Community News newsletter (Issue 1, Winter 2016) featured Sanghera in its Staff Spotlight, describing him as someone who had been “working with the Southall community for many years” and was helping to deliver Southall Waterside for “current and future generations.”

His role, as described on his LinkedIn profile, is “to facilitate, own and manage key stakeholder engagement” for Berkeley St Joseph — the Berkeley subsidiary responsible for the Southall gasworks site.

In other words: Jags Sanghera’s professional role, for nearly a decade, has been to manage Berkeley’s relationships with the Southall community. The organisation he previously worked for — and now chairs as a volunteer trustee — is one of the most prominent community bodies in that same space.

An example of Sanghera’s engagement with the community is from his 2023 “consultation” report.

In it, Sanghera asked local residents adjacent to the Gasworks site, many of whom have suffered years of bad smells, toxic air pollution, ill-health, damage to the structure of their homes and roads, loss of enjoyment of their gardens, and loss of light into their homes what they thought.

This is what Sanghera published about them:

“The response from residents to our engagement activity was generally ambivalent or positive. There was, however, a pocket of discontent towards the end of Beaconsfield Road, where residents took issue with a re-occuring smell, noise from the construction site and loss of views. There are still a substantial number of residents who do not really understand what is happening at The Green Quarter, despite their proximity to the site. However, many of these residents appear to take little interest in the community more generally.”

To anyone who knows anything about Southall and the impact of the Gasworks redevelopment on local residents, it’s an absolutely shocking and appalling thing to say. It shows a complete lack of empathy, and a total absence of any sense of regret, responsibility or accountability.

On 27 October 2022, the Charity Commission register records, Jagjit Singh Sanghera was appointed as a trustee of Southall Community Alliance (charity number 1104671). He is now its chair, as listed on the SCA’s own website.

The Cheque

Berkeley’s Community Chest programme distributes small grants to local community projects. A £2,500 award to a community garden is, in isolation, unremarkable. The grant was also reported by Ealing.News.

What is not standard is the arrangement visible in the photograph published on Berkeley’s own website.

The grant was presented by Berkeley’s Head of Business & Community Engagement.

It was received by the chair of Southall Community Alliance.

Both roles were held by the same person.

The cheque passed, in a literal sense, between two positions occupied by a single individual.

Neither Berkeley’s published account of the event nor SCA’s public-facing materials flag this overlap.

There is no declaration of interest on the public record in relation to Berkeley Group funding received by SCA.

The Charity Commission’s published guidance on conflicts of interest requires trustees to identify, declare, and manage situations where their personal or professional interests intersect with the charity’s.

Where a trustee is professionally employed by an organisation providing funding to their charity, that relationship requires active management — typically including the trustee stepping back from decisions about that funding. No such process is visible in the available public record.

The Political Dimension

Jags Sanghera has stood for election three times in Ealing.

In 2010, he stood as a Conservative Party candidate against Julian Bell — who would go on to lead Ealing Labour for more than a decade in power — in Greenford Broadway ward, receiving 1,478 votes.

By 2022, he had changed party: he stood for Labour in Ealing Common ward, coming close to winning a seat on a strong Labour night across the borough.

This year — on 7 May 2026 — he is standing again, as one of three Labour candidates in Norwood Green ward, as confirmed on his Ealing Labour candidate profile.

Sanghera’s selection as a candidate in Norwood Green — usually a safe Labour ward in the Southall constituency — comes after he facilitated Cllr Jasbir Anand’s catering business to take over the coffee cart opposite Southall station, ousting a small local business which had built up the customer base — more on that story post-election!

Jags Sanghera explains how Anand came to operate the coffee cart opposite Southall station, on Anand’s Instagram.

If elected, Jags Sanghera would become a councillor on Ealing Council — the same council that determines planning applications for Berkeley Group’s Southall developments, negotiates section 106 community benefit agreements with Berkeley, and makes decisions that directly affect the financial and operational interests of his employer.

That is a conflict of interest of a different order of magnitude to the community grant.

The Southall Town Team

Southall Community Alliance’s reach extends beyond grant-receiving.

SCA has a presence on the Southall Town Team, a council-facilitated body that brings together community stakeholders, local businesses, and the council to plan for Southall’s future.

The Town Team has a formal role in shaping how community benefit funds and developer contributions in the area are directed.

Through SCA’s participation in that body, Berkeley’s Head of Business & Community Engagement — in his separate capacity as SCA trustee chair — has a seat at a council-facilitated planning table.

Community stakeholders engaging with that body in good faith may not be aware of this overlap.

Greenwashing, corporate capture and conflict of interest

I am not alleging that the Western Road Urban Garden Project did anything improper in receiving a grant. The garden project serves a genuine community purpose, and the volunteers who tend it deserve support.

I am not alleging that Berkeley Group acted unlawfully. Corporate community grant programmes are entirely legal.

But these activities can also be used for purposes that ultimately extract resources and wealth from the communities they take over for the benefit of company shareholders.

The United Nations calls it “greenwashing":

Greenwashing manifests itself in several ways – some more obvious than others. Tactics include:

• Claiming to be on track to reduce a company’s polluting emissions to net zero when no credible plan is actually in place.
• Being purposely vague or non-specific about a company’s operations or materials used.
• Applying intentionally misleading labels such as “green” or “eco-friendly,” which do not have standard definitions and can be easily misinterpreted.
• Implying that a minor improvement has a major impact or promoting a product that meets the minimum regulatory requirements as if it is significantly better than the standard.
• Emphasizing a single environmental attribute while ignoring other impacts.
• Claiming to avoid illegal or non-standard practices that are irrelevant to a product.
• Communicating the sustainability attributes of a product in isolation of brand activities (and vice versa) – e.g. a garment made from recycled materials that is produced in a high-emitting factory that pollutes the air and nearby waterways.

Jags Sanghera’s marketing video for The Green Quarter as posted on Anand’s Instagram.

Readers can decide if any of that applies to the contaminated old gasworks site now rebranded as “The Green Quarter”.

I recommend that curious readers who like to verify things for themselves (and who doesn’t?), visit the Green Quarter. Free parking for three hours at Parkside Yards! Just be aware to follow all the rules, including:

“Unauthorised filming, photography, audio recording, or live streaming of any part of the site (including external façades, communal areas, residents, staff, or visitors) is not permitted under any circumstances”

The Center for Constitutional Rights calls it “corporate capture":

“Corporate capture” is a phenomenon where private industry uses its political influence to take control of the decision-making apparatus of the state, such as regulatory agencies, law enforcement entities, and legislatures. When corporations draft legislation privately with lawmakers that they have significant influence over, this results in laws and policies that benefit corporations, while often harming the environment, low-income people, and communities of color.

Jags Sanghera, among his many other roles, also sits on the Ealing Safer Neighborhood Board (see also https://esnb.org.uk/).

The overlap between his roles — as a Berkeley employee managing Southall community engagement, as chair of a Southall community charity that receives Berkeley funding, and now as a Labour candidate for the council that regulates Berkeley’s planning interests — raises serious questions about conflicts of interest that do not appear to have been formally declared or managed.

Those questions are in the public interest, during an election in which he is a candidate.

There is also a structural question about the revolving door between community organisations and the developer whose long-term presence in Southall depends on maintaining community legitimacy.

Sanghera moved from SCA to Berkeley in late 2015. He returned to SCA as a trustee — and became its chair — in October 2022. Berkeley describes his work as facilitating and managing key stakeholder engagement. The community body through which he does part of that work is one he also leads in a voluntary capacity.

The Allotment Question

This article began, in a sense, with a YouTube comment.

ECI’s recent video report on Manor Way Allotments documented the neglect of a community site maintained largely by elderly volunteers — volunteers who, as a commenter on that video rightly noted, have given years of quiet, unpaid work to their community.

The video raised the question of why these volunteers had not received funding support, and noted that another project in Southall had.

The other project was the Western Road Urban Garden Project. The funding came via Berkeley’s Community Chest. The grant was presented by and received by Jags Sanghera.

A commenter challenged this comparison as unfair: if one project applied and another did not, that is simply a different outcome based on different actions. It is a fair point, as far as it goes.

But the structural question is different.

The allotment volunteers at Manor Way are not the subject of this article, and nor are they responsible for any of the arrangements described above.

The question this article asks is whether those arrangements — the multiple roles, the undeclared overlap, the revolving door — represent the kind of transparent, accountable community governance that Southall deserves.

And whether the voters of Norwood Green are entitled to know about them before they cast their votes today.