STOP THE EVICTIONS IN LAMBETH
40-YEAR-OLD COMMUNITIES BETRAYED BY LABOUR
Lambeth Council is evicting housing co-op residents who have lived in the borough for up to 40 years, residents who have maintained and repaired houses that the authority abandoned. Members of these communities are being taken to court so that the council can sell off their homes at auction – thereby losing social housing units and adding to the housing waiting list.
Members of Lambeth’s housing co-op community will be demonstrating outside Cllr Lib Peck’s ‘Meet the Leader’ event at the old Library in Clapham (now the Omnibus centre) this Thursday at 6.30pm.
What Labour Lambeth Council has done:
• pulled away from a social housing solution and enforced evictions
• purged established communities and destroyed home and family life built up over 4 decades
• sold social housing units and displaced people onto the overburdened housing waiting list
• used re-housing offers as instruments of coercion & charged exorbitant legal fees as a scare tactic
• spent money on lawyers, vacant property managers, contractors and auctioneers
• picked on the vulnerable and the elderly, causing serious psychological and physical problems
OUR LOCAL COUNCILLORS HAVE SOLD US OUT
In Clapham Town Ward (where Thursday’s event is situated) the three local Labour councillors have made clear promises to defend the rights of our housing co-op communities – but only Cllr Helen O’Malley has stuck to her principles, joining other critics including Kate Hoey MP. Cllr O’Malley has called the council’s actions against our communities “savage” and reported that a council officer said Lambeth were deliberately making our lives “more difficult”.
Here are the statements also made by Cllr Nigel Haselden and Cllr Chris Wellbelove in support of housing co-op communities – sentiments and promises that they have now broken!
“Your communities have given a welcome permanence and continuity to the area.”
Cllr Nigel Haselden in a surgery meeting, March 2012
…and from these leaflets: www.lambethunitedhousingco-op.org.uk/?page_id=433
“We have reminded colleagues and officers that some of these homes would not be standing if it was not for the work of the people living in them.”
“It would be senseless as well as expensive to evict people only to have to re-house them again.”
“Labour will continue to fight for your right to stay in your home.”
THE BETRAYAL OF THESE STATEMENTS WILL COST US OUR HOMES
IT’S TIME TO STOP LABOUR’S COMMUNITY PURGE
Lambeth United Housing Co-operative
Mobile: 07584 906161
Website: www.lambethunitedhousingco-op.org.uk
Twitter: @LambethUnited
Sign our petition here: http://tinyurl.com/nwkuvlr