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Published: 23 June 2011
by DAN CARRIER

PROPERTY fat cats hoping to make a quick killing by buying up key-worker homes and selling them at top market prices were thwarted by a two-year ferocious tenants’ campaign which prevented landlords Crown Estate from selling their Cumberland Market estate homes for profit. 

Now guaranteed low-cost housing, security of tenure and no sell-offs are the buzzwords, as Peabody Estate officially take over as owners of the 600-home property in Regent’s Park.

Peabody chief executive Steve Howlett met tenants for a celebratory breakfast on Thursday and helped Holborn and St Pancras Labour MP Frank Dobson plant a London plane tree at the entrance to the flats, believed to have cost Pea­body around £150million.

 Mr Howlett praised the decisive action taken by tenants to stop their homes being sold to the highest bidder. Speaking to tenants, councillors and staff, he said: “As a result of serious and sustained opposition, and all the fuss that was kicked up about it being sold at a commercially high value, the Crown had to change their plans.”

Property press reports suggested that offshore capital investment funds had been hovering with bids of around £250m ready to be tabled. Mr Howlett continued: “We were not contacted by the Crown Estate but we heard it was for sale, and we thought this is the sort of thing that is at the heart of the Peabody ethos.”

Peabody was established 150 years ago to provide good, low-cost homes for working people in London.

Mr Howlett told the New Journal that he and his colleagues were now working to soothe any fears and uncertainty that tenants may feel since the change of ownership – and vowed to simply keep things as they are.

“It is a wonderful estate and providing extraordinary value for Camden,” he said. “There is a real need for key­worker housing, and we were concerned that Crown Estate properties of around 1,200 homes across London would be lost.”

Tenant Jean Stanford, who has lived at Cumberland Market for more than 70 years, said the relief to have a new social landlord in place instead of a property developer was incredible.

“I could not believe it when they said they’d sell our homes,” she said. “The Crown were known over generations for never selling up, never selling any of their properties, so we all felt secure. It was a very worrying time – many of us have spent our whole lives here. We are so relieved that Peabody have taken us over.”

Tenants’ leader Steve Smith spearheaded the campaign to stop the Crown Estate putting profit before people by selling to the highest bidder, which was revealed to be the original intention under a top secret board-level plan called “Project Blue”. 

Mr Smith said the new landlords had been “very welcoming,” adding: “The jury is still out at the moment – we want to see how they perform as landlords. We are being asked for our opinions more than the Crown Estate did and we have been asked to comment on service standards. The guarantees regarding rent are in place and they say they will stick by them. Wherever possible they have said they will guarantee to re-let the flats and not sell any off.”

Holborn and St Pancras MP Frank Dobson added: “I am a delighted it is Peabody that is here today. We were faced with an intergalactic private property speculator buying the estate. The Crown Estate behaved despicably, and they  were only stopped by a brilliant campaign by the tenants’  association.”

• A new 50-year lease with the estate’s gardening club for the stretch of allotments that run through the heart of the 1920s estate has been signed, protecting it for the future from any attempts to build on it.