Liberal Democrats vehemently opposed the creation of the Lambeth Living ALMO when Lambeth Labour first proposed it moving council tenants to this quango.

Labour politicians had set up a dodgy poll of tenants and leaseholders promising a whole raft of improvements and cost savings. They also told tenants that voting for the ALMO would guarantee heaps of money from a friendly Labour Government that would transform their dire living conditions. Even this was not persuasive to perceptive residents, more of whom voted “No” and “Don’t Know” to setting the organisation up than voted “Yes”. Yet Labour ignored that verdict and ploughed on. In the event, not one penny of the promised funds arrived until the Labour Government was ejected from office.

The best news for Labour was that the ALMO they’d created meant none of their raft of elected councillors nor their run of expensive cabinet members had any direct responsibility to their tenants – still less to leaseholders – for the catalogue of housing disasters that ensued.

The management of leasehold properties has been a disaster, with millions being lost through mismanagement and homeowners forced to pay through the nose through overpriced contracts, while tenants have suffered misery from a failing repair service. Lambeth LIving’s first chair was even forced to resign after being arrested on fraud allegations and later convicted.

After the 2010 general election, the new Coalition Government announced that Lambeth was to be awarded £100 million, the highest amount of Decent Homes cash in the UK. And the Government has made hundreds of millions more available to Lambeth by reforming housing finance. Labour then cynically claimed credit for these funds – refused to Lambeth over a decade from their Labour colleagues in Westminster – at the same time as attacking the very government which made them available.

So with the coalition government changes Lambeth Labour are able to save money by closing their ALMO disaster. About time it was banished to.