WHHA cloak of secrecy hid financial collapse.

Camden council could not have predicted the financial meltdown of the West Hampstead housing association (WHHA) because of the organisation's "blanket of secrecy" according to the council's own scrutiny panel report published last week. The report was immediately branded a "whitewash" by tenant group chair Peter Rutherford who gave evidence to the scrutiny investigation. Rutherford said: "All the ingredients of the WHHA crash - and the thing that binds them, secrecy, are still going on. Nothing's changed."

The six month inquiry - which questioned more than 20 witnesses and received over 100 items of written evidence - concluded that WHHA's culture of secrecy, coupled with a lack of information from the Housing Corporation, meant that Camden could not have foreseen the collapse or taken action to protect itself from the consequences. Although the report makes a total of 45 recommendations for future "joined up" working with both housing associations and their regulator, the report states that the finding of a "culprit" for the collapse was "outside its terms of reference".

But Rutherford slammed the panel for ducking the issue. "It is absolutely clear to pretty much everyone that the job of the regulator is to regulate. The government has put this quango into place top regulate these associations and clearly in this case it has failed." Rutherford, who was a tenant representative on the board of WHHA between 1995 and 1998, gave evidence that he had been "expelled" from the board when he sought to bring irregularities to the attention of the Housing Corporation. The report recommends that the corporation implement a "whistleblowers" line to afford protection to any informant from within housing associations.

The Housing Corporation said that it would be publishing its own independently commissioned report into the WHHA affair "in a matter of days".