Westmaladministered

Westminster City Council
- A National Embarrassment

Squall 8, Autumn 1994, pp. 30-31.

When an independent investigator publicly concludes that a local authority has acted in a "disgraceful, improper and unlawful" manner, you can be sure there are bags of dirt under the carpet. The independent investigator is John Magill, a top city accountant and district auditor for Westminster. The local authority is of course, Westminster City Council. The implications are national. Jim Carey sweeps the dirt back out into the open.

John Magill's 700 page provisional report published last January (the full report is yet to come), left no doubt that Westminster City Council under Dame Shirley Porter's leadership, had selectively sold off council houses with the intention of attracting Conservative voters into the marginally held wards of the Borough.

The documents pertaining to the investigation contained unequivocal evidence of the Council's intention to remove homeless people from the Borough as "they are not our natural supporters" and to selectively sell council houses to Conservative voters in order to "increase our support" in "key wards". As a personal friend of Margaret Thatcher, Porter felt safe that the scheme would never backfire on her and as a result, the council's real intentions were both documented and candid.

The implications that turn this incidence of local authority corruption into a matter of national significance, are that the sale of council houses as a national policy, was always designed to please potential Tory voters. The only difference between the national policy and that adopted by the accused members of Westminster City Council, is that the real intentions were never documented as such by national Government. The promised land of freely available mortgages and council house sales was an attempt to sign people up for the very life the Conservative Party were always thought to defend - namely one with business interests.

Once an occupier buys the house in which they live, their interest in that property becomes economic, they would then be more likely to vote for the political party that had enabled them to join the home owner's club, and the party that was best known for protecting the interests of club members. Unfortunately, the essence of the business ethic lies in competition and, of course, in competition there are at least as many, if not more, losers than there are winners. Hundreds of thousands of people whose homes were subsequently repossessed as the mortgage dream collapsed, and thousands of council house buyers stuck in properties with negative equity, are the symptoms of the promised land turned golden calf.

The connection between Westminster Council's "social engineering" and national Government policy was made even more obvious by the announcement in July that the Government's review of homelessness procedures, based in part on Westminster's example, is to be implemented nationally despite a consultation process that provoked somewhere in the region of 10,000 negative responses. (See SQUALL 7 'Consultation Exorcise'.)

Taken in part from a confidential document put together by Westminster City Council and entitled "Homelessness; a Shopping List for Change", the new national policy aims to remove the statutory right of 'priority need' homeless people to permanent accommodation, place even more emphasis on the private rented sector (rather than public housing) - as a solution to homelessness and to allow councils to 'export' homeless people outside their borough.

It is for these reasons that the public exposure of Westminster City Council's clearly stated ulterior motives are of such acute embarrassment to the Government. Sir Edward Heath said that, if the accusations levelled in Magill's report were true, it was "the heaviest blow the Conservative Party has had to take in living memory". To fully appreciate the background to Heath's statement, it is vital to appreciate that both Westminster City Council and fellow Tory council Wandsworth have been held up on numerous occasions as shining examples of Conservative local government. Hence David Hunt, ex-employment secretary, claimed, at a local government conference in 1990, Westminster to be one of the Tories' "stunning successes... a source of cheer for every Conservative".

The cheers are silenced now and look set to become an embarrassingly inappropriate applause for a council that will be further publicly exposed when the full public hearing, chaired by John Magill, commences in October. However, because of the major political ramifications of the scandal, it is unlikely that the investigations and exposures will be easily concluded.

In April of this year, one week before local council elections, the BBC had planned to broadcast a Panorama programme explicitly detailing the political manipulations at Westminster City Hall. It would have been a programme scheduling catastrophic to Conservative candidates running for re-election in Westminster. Then, without any convincing explanation, the BBC pulled the programme, deciding instead to run it a few weeks after the elections. No-one was in any doubt that this re-scheduling was a diplomatic move by the BBC, concerned with the impending government review of its charter to broadcast. Instead, Michael Portillo appeared with the prospective Tory candidates in pre-election media shoots saying: "There is nothing wrong with Westminster. It really is outrageous that people are casting aspersions on Westminster when all that has happened is that a report has been published to which a defence can be mounted."

As a consequence, the Conservatives were once again elected to run the Borough; sheer force of manipulation ensuring against what would have been a major local government disaster. The present leader of the Council, Miles Young, even had the audacity to claim that the suspension of Westminster Council's political methods as a result of Magill's report was "a disappointment to the residents of Westminster's housing estates". It was therefore no surprise when, in August of this year, his name and the names of four others were added to the original list of ten named council officials implicated in the gerrymandering scandal and due to be further investigated.

One of the original ten, Dr Michael Dutt, was found dead in his flat two weeks after the publication of Magill's provisional report. Lying next to him were the shotgun he had used to kill himself and several pages of the report. The Westminster Tories made an effort to capitalise on Dutt's death by suggesting that it was the overt and accusative language used in Magill's report that led to his despair rather than the ramifications of what he had been involved in.

Wandsworth Borough Council, the other Tory flag-ship local authority and pioneer of council-house sales, are also under investigation after selling a record 19,000 council houses whilst still having a waiting list of 6,000 homeless people. Recent investigations have also shown that half of the homeless families housed by Wandsworth Borough Council under it's present statutory duties, have been farmed out to private rented accommodation in other Boroughs.

Both Westminster and Wandsworth have pioneered some of the proposals recently put forward in the Government's homelessness review, which makes into national policy some of the tactics deemed to be "disgraceful" and "improper" in John Magill's report. For these reasons it will be extremely important to the Conservative Party, and this Government in particular, that the political implications of "the heaviest blow the Conservative Party has had to take in living memory" are cotton-wooled, muddled and re-explained more abstractly. Their difficulty will lie in the fact that the documentary evidence clearly exposing the ulterior motives behind council house sales is already in the public domain.

Both the 14 implicated officials still alive, and the Government, will be hoping that time and prevarication will shroud the scandal in a cloak of public forgetfulness, allowing the techniques to continue, masked in less candid ways. The district auditor's investigation has taken four years and has longer to run. The confiscation of further files and documents from Westminster City Hall over the summer fueled speculation of the further exposures to come.

It is still unknown when the final and full report will be published. However, with the weight of evidence mounting up against Shirley Porter and other Westminster Tories, it looks likely that it will be even more damning than the provisional report released last January. The 13 'objectors' who filed the original complaint to the auditor, will still have to find the resources to take the accused Tories through the High Court. There is little doubt that Porter et al will employ expensive lawyers and more, in an effort to avoid legal responsibility for what they now seem unarguably to be guilty of.

Having trumpeted Westminster City Council as such a shining example of local government, and having partly based its national review of homelessness policy on Westminster's example, the Government are unlikely to allow Magill's exposure to go unhindered by further political interference. - Watch this space.