“Empty barrels make the most noise”
It’s all very well Councillor Una O’Halloran (Daily Telegraph 26/7/25, “Islington plans purchase of 900 former council houses”) boasting about the Council’s scheme to “buy back” former council homes for temporary accommodation. What she fails to say is that these properties are owned by former council tenants — people who paid their rent in full, 125 years in advance, by purchasing their flats.
Now long-standing residents are being pushed aside so the Council can parade its “achievements” as a triumph of social policy. In truth, it’s little more than an act of displacement dressed up as compassion.
When leaseholders challenge the ever-escalating major works bills, the Council falls back on its same hollow excuses — shouted ever louder, as though volume were a substitute for reason. The old adage certainly fits perfectly, “empty barrels make the most noise”.
If this Council genuinely believed in equality, it would use the 11–14% from over-specified, building projects — the very excesses that create these problems — to support leaseholders. Reducing re-chargeable costs or extending payment terms (without the insult of compound interest) would show leadership. Instead, the Council behave like a debt collector.
Few outside this experience grasp the reality of being a council leaseholder : the relentless anxiety, sleepless nights, feeling of being treated as a “cash cow” by the authority that once offered security and community.
At the I L A, we hear this pain month after month. The stories are heartbreaking — ordinary residents bullied, threatened, and financially bled by a Council that seems more interested in retaining control than serving its residents.
If the Council wants to create a “fairer Islington,” it should start by treating its leaseholders with fairness, dignity, and respect — not as collateral damage in a PR campaign.”
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