1991 Lambeth NALGO Advice Centres Occupation

For those of you who just can't get enough of this Blog, you can now purchase my overlong and quite honestly fairly tedious memoirs for a purely nominal price online.

Here is an extract from those memoirs concerning the 1991 NALGO advice centres occupation in Lambeth; 

At the beginning of the occupation, the manager of the Money Advice section walked into his team’s office to inform staff that their colleagues in Consumer Advice appeared to have occupied the two threatened advice centres. Then - looking around the office at the rucksacks and sleeping bags brought in by his staff - he paused and acknowledged that he realised he was probably talking to the night shift of the occupation.

The occupation would last for ten weeks, from the middle of April to the end of June. During the day, advice workers ran an advice service from each of the centres and overnight - and at weekends - a rota of members of the advice shop and other branch activists, including myself, spent the night in the occupied centres. I was assigned to Lambeth Walk CAC, along with my partner, Margaret and our closest friend, Christine.

The advice centres had their own kitchens and toilets, as well as telephone lines (which the Council cut off, not realising that we could attach telephones to the lines connecting the burglar alarms, which they had not cut off). We were able to cook - and eat - some quite impressive meals and - since the majority of the occupiers were in our twenties and thirties we coped quite well with sleeping on the floor. 

The NALGO branch also hired a couple of mobile telephones to ensure we could keep in touch if the Council worked out that that they should have cut off the alarms. These devices were the size of house bricks, and we could only get a signal at Lambeth Walk (a stone’s throw from the River and the centre of London) by leaving the advice centre and climbing to the top of a children’s climbing frame in the square outside.

A month into the dispute - when management were still refusing to talk until we ceased our “unlawful occupation of Council premises” - we successfully escalated the dispute by bringing out NALGO members in the Trading Standards and Public Safety sections on strike in support of the continued employment of a temporary admin worker, and making clear that we were linking the two disputes and would only settle the two together.

The Council responded to our escalation by offering negotiations with the Director of Environmental Services (and future Chief Executive) Henry Gilby, out of which we arrived - eventually - at a settlement whereby one of the threatened advice centres remained open (the other being replaced with a series of local advice surgeries at libraries in the south of the borough) and the threatened temporary worker was found permanent employment elsewhere in the Council.

This dispute was my first experience of negotiating a settlement and return to work. As with everything of significance I ever did as a trade unionist this was a product not of my own endeavour but of the collective action of workers prepared to take risks in support of action which they believed to be both justified and potentially effective. 

It also led to my first visit to NALGO Headquarters at Mabledon Place, where the Industrial Action Committee turned down the branch’s request for support for our successful dispute from national funds.