Islington North MP joins protests outside the Wellington Mews blocks which housed prison guards and their families

• THE Labour Party was in government at Westminster for 13 of the 29 years the Roman Way/Wellington Mews flats have been empty and decaying, constituency MP Emily Thornberry for the last five of those, Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North, for the entire period, (MP Corbyn backs prison flats protest, April 23).

All must, therefore, take some responsibility for the debacle that is the sell-off of the former prison-officer accommodation for private housing.

It’s worth noting that the Ministry of Justice, the current owner and vendor of the site, is a creation of the last national Labour government.

On its formation in 2007 Charlie Falconer, Baron Falconer of Thoroton, was its first secretary of state, to be replaced shortly after by Jack Straw. Mr Straw is a former Islington councillor (1971-1978).

A protest against the sell-off is one thing. The question, though, is why our MPs failed to act sooner…

On a separate housing matter: it seems that the Town Hall recently ran a consultation on its latest “Housing Strategy 2021 to 2026” from March 10 to last Friday, April 23.

The problem is that few residents seem to have known about it as it appears not to have been advertised or flagged up by the council’s media team which regularly uses Twitter. It seems, therefore, that a legal challenge may be in order.

As the housing department currently has plans to build on tenants’ green spaces on at least 20 of its council estates – including on Highbury West’s Aubert Court with its landscaped gardens – and the Bemerton in Caledonian ward, residents may well have used the borough-wide “consultation” to express their views on the Town Hall’s housing proposals.

A by-election is to be held in the former next week, at least giving those ward residents an opportunity to express their political opinion of the current administration and its estates’ densification plans.

Is depriving some of the poorest residents of their existing environmental amenity a sensible way of “improving health and wellbeing”, one of the four housing department stated priorities, particularly in these pandemic times?

MEG HOWARTH
Ellington Street, N7