Trouble in Telford

Dear readers — you don’t need to have read us for very long to recognise the name Gary Ata. The landlord has become notorious in Sheffield for his various properties, such as Lightbox where tenants were left without heating or hot water for two months over winter. Gary and his business partner (and daughter) Jade have never provided a statement or explanation for why they seem to have such little regard for building maintenance and tenant welfare. While Sheffield council have successfully prosecuted him twice for failing to meet their housing standards, so far fines and legal action have had little impact.

‘He’s a crook’: how Gary Ata became Sheffield’s most infamous landlord

‘I have never seen a developer who has as little regard for the people who invest in his buildings or the tenants. It really is quite shameless’

Sheffield TribuneDan Hayes

And then, two weeks ago, there was more news. We broke the story that the Grade-II listed Old Town Hall, which became part of Ata’s property portfolio in 2021 and is one of the city’s most important heritage buildings, had suffered a major roof collapse. We immediately e-mailed to ask Ata what was going on, and what on earth he was going to do to sort it out.

But the response was the same one we got for all our stories on Ata’s properties: silence. It was time to track the Atas down and ask them some questions.

Since the roof collapse, we’ve been hard at work trying to find addresses that might lead us to the Atas and allow us to ask them, face to face, what they have to say to the people of Sheffield. 

It wasn’t easy. Hours compiling a long list of Ata’s addresses registered on Companies House led to phone calls with businesses operating on trading estates in Telford, Uttoxeter, Exmouth and Preston, all of whom said they had no idea who Gary Ata was. One business, which specialised in the restoration of vintage arcade games, confirmed their premises was once used as Gary Ata’s mailing address, and insisted they had nothing to do with him nor his “unscrupulous activities”.

At the end of all of it, we still weren’t sure we’d got what we needed. But we’d found three addresses, all with clear links to the Atas, clustered around Telford in Shropshire. On Wednesday, we decided it was finally time to drive over and see if we could speak to them. Dan and I got in a car and drove to Wellington, a small market town near the Shropshire Hills.

On the high street, we stood outside the office of Noble Living – the trading name of the Ata empire – and readied ourselves for the confrontation. When we went in, we asked a woman in her early 30s, with thick-rimmed black glasses and dark hair scooped up into a ponytail, if she could introduce us to Gary and Jade Ata. She cut me off mid-sentence to tell me they weren’t in. 

This, we are almost certain, was incorrect. In fact, the woman herself looked identical to pictures of Jade Ata that we’ve managed to find on social media.

We started to feel uncomfortable about the wide-eyed toddler looking up at us. Now wasn’t the time. We left without asking any of our questions, as the woman insisted that we should leave and send our enquiries via email instead. We got back in the car and headed to a terraced house in a suburb of Telford, a home that we’d managed to link to Gary Ata via searching online records. When we knocked on the door, the tenant said they didn’t recognise the name Gary Ata and explained they’d only recently moved in. 

We had one last address to try: a grand detached house in the village of Horsehay, just outside Telford. Alas, another dead end. The neighbours told us the Atas moved out six years ago, and in the intervening years, the property had been let out as a rental. What was it like to live next door to the Atas? “A nightmare,” the man said grimly, while his wife shook her head in the doorway. He pointed to the wall next to us and explained this used to be a shared driveway, but that endless visits from bailiffs, police and housing officers to the Ata home forced them to separate their driveway off. Unsurprisingly, they hadn't stayed in contact. The neighbours had no forwarding address for the Atas. It was time to head home.

To have trekked all the way to the West Midlands and turned up nothing was dispiriting. We knew that was a risk when we got in the car, but we hope you agree that Sheffielders deserve answers from the Atas, and it’s worth trying to track them down to put the hard questions to them. You can watch a quick clip of our road trip below.

Sometimes we have to admit we don’t have all the material to publish a full story, and it’s a bit of a Tribune tradition to take readers along on the journey as we try to track people down and work things out. But, we still have big questions for the Atas — and we’ll keep going until we get answers. (If you have information and want to get in touch, please do contact Mollie.)