The denigration of council housing has long been commonplace, as is contempt directed at its tenants. Yet in the post-war decades, Labour and Conservative national governments seemed almost to compete to build more of it.
That attitude began to change in earnest after the election of the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, bringing with it the Right to Buy and an ideological belief that such homes were undesirable and best sold off.
Westminster Council, led from 1983 by firm Thatcherite Shirley Porter – Hackney-born daughter of Jack Cohen, the man who founded Tesco – was very much of that view. Porter’s administrations became notorious for many things, most of all for a policy called “building stable communities”.
Introduced following the Tories’ narrow re-election in 1986, it was really a covert strategy for selling council homes in marginal electoral wards with the aim of increasing the number of Conservative voters living in them. It became known as the “homes for votes” scandal. The policy was found to be illegal.
One of those in the thick of exposing Porter’s secret activities was Jonathan Rosenberg, who was already involved in battling the sell-off of two north Westminster housing estates, Walterton and Elgin.
Tenants were mobilised, put the council under pressure and – enabled, ironically, by Conservative legislation designed for selling council dwellings to private landlords – eventually secured ownership of the estates through the vehicle of Walterton and Elgin Community Homes, a community land trust and housing association. Today, it manages 673 homes with over 1,500 residents.
The 40th anniversary of the start of the campaign is now being marked, including with a commemorative calendar. Jonathan was my guest of my latest True London podcast. So was his cat.
More on the story of WECH from me here. More on “homes for votes” here. The Westminster Tories’ graveyard sell-off scandal, to which Jonathan alluded, is documented here.
Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. Photo from the WECH calendar by David Ingham, originally published in the Paddington Mercury newspaper.
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