The apple of Eric Pickles’ eye is rotten to the core

By Andy Slaughter MP

On Monday, the same day the Localism Bill had its second reading in Parliament, Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities & Local Government described one Tory council, Hammersmith & Fulham, as “the apple of my eye”. But Hammersmith & Fulham Council, as Johann Hari reported on the eve of the May elections, is the opposite of your friendly local borough.

It’s a council that abandoned a heavily pregnant woman to sleep in parks after she begged for emergency accommodation, and then when a charity housed her and told the world they withdrew its funding and shut it down.

It reacted to the end of the ring-fence for Sure Start by announcing a 60% cut in the budget and the closure of nine out of 15 centres.

It was in the news on Monday for evicting 22 local charities from their home of 30 years to hand their offices to Toby Young for his divisive and unwanted Free School. In fact almost every community building is in a fire sale of assets, from libraries to town halls and the Irish Cultural Centre.

It was in every paper from the FT to Estates Gazette last week for trying to block local council tenants from taking over their estate so H&F could demolish the homes it had just renovated and sell them to a property developer. Almost every major planning application that is passed now is a joint venture between the council and developers resisted by residents in the face of a Tory majority on the supposedly independent planning committee.

It is also the employer of Mr Nick Johnson, paid a grand a day (£700,000 so far) despite being retired on a 50 grand a year pension on grounds of ill-health from another council – ‘good value for money’ apparently.

Of course each of these abuses runs exactly contrary to the purported aims of the Localism Bill, as I pointed out in my speech in the debate. Pickles is no fool, he may pay lip service to the Big Society but what he wants to see from Tory councils up and down the country is the same single-minded destruction of the public realm and strangulation of the voluntary sector.

Only in the area of housing policy is the Bill true to the Tories aims. The ending of the consensus on social housing by introducing two-year tenancies and allowing councils to use the private sector to discharge their homelessness duty complete the plan hatched two years ago in H&F (they already are proposing an end to low rents and capital investment). Their vision of taking the state out of housing altogether sounded crazy at the time I leaked their secret discussions. Now it’s about to become law.

The apple of Pickles’s eye? Let me show you how it’s rotten to the core.

Andy Slaughter is Labour MP for Hammersmith and Shadow Justice Minister

You can read a recent commons debate featuring Andy on this subject here.