Lovells Flats saved from privatisation! October 2007

On 10 October (2007) Leeds City Council informed tenants of three Lovell Park high-rise blocks of flats in Little London that it would no longer seek to sell off the flats to a private developer, and would instead retain them as council homes.

The decision was announced to an open meeting of the newly-formed Lovell Park Flats Tenants and Residents Committee at the Little London Community Centre.

This is magnificent victory for tenants, and the small number of leaseholders, who have fought the proposed sell off since Leeds City Council announced its plans in early 2006. Thanks to dogged campaigning, tenants decisively rejected the sale of their homes during the February 2006 consultation. Initially, Leeds City Council ignored their wishes and in May 2006 passed a resolution to press on with the sale.

However, following the public embarassment to senior councillors of the extensive television and newspaper coverage of the injustice to the Lovells tenants, and a 500 signature-strong petition from local residents calling for regeneration to 'benefit all, not some', the Council agreed to 'look again' at the options and consult tenants.

Yet again, the Council failed to communicate with anyone in the Lovells flats, and following a newspaper article in December 2006, tenants were forced to endure another agonising and worrying period of silence on the matter until this month (October).

At the meeting with tenant representatives from the Lovells, an officer from the housing management company, West North West Homes, finally gave tenants the news they had always wanted to hear: that the proposed sale of 297 flats to be refurbished as private flats was off, and that instead West North West Homes and Leeds City Council would apply for extra cash from central government to bring the flats up to the Decent Homes Standard.

Despite the good news, the discussions with housing officers confirmed what the Save Little London Campaign has been saying all along - that the Lovells are viable council flats in a great location with many years of public service left in them. In other words, Leeds City Council was not telling tenants the truth when it said that the flats were beyond saving as council homes and that the council could not continue to let these flats in the long term because of falling demand and high turnover.

The simple truth is that Leeds City Council originally decided to sell off the flats for a variety of reasons that bore little resemblance to their official explanation. Housing officers admitted as much at the meeting when they explained that the private sector market had "moved on" in recent years to favour "new build schemes" and therefore a refurbishment scheme was unlikely to attract much interest from developers.

So what is the future for the Lovells now?

Leeds City Council and West North West Homes will hopefully succeed in getting extra funding from government to carry out Decent Homes repairs. This means that every flat that needs it will get double glazing, but only those flats with outstanding repairs and renewal issues that fail the Decency standard will actually have anything spent on them. The Decency threshold is also pretty low in any case.

In other words, even though the flats look like being saved, we are extremely concerned that the housing management company and the Council will not have / or make available enough funding to get the flats refurbished to a level of human decency. The situation in the Lovells at the moment is a disgrace with drug dealing and addiction causing major security and health problems. Tenants standard of living is shocking.