A grassroots community group for people in Luton is being priced out of the building it rescued from dereliction more than a decade ago.
Marsh House, a former farmhouse on Luton’s Marsh Farm estate, was facing demolition by Luton Borough Council before neighbours took repairs into their own hands.
Marsh Farm Outreach (MFO), a grassroots community group, took over the site in 2011. Organisers initially struck a ‘rent earned’ agreement with Luton Borough Council, meaning the council would pay to fix a dry rot problem while volunteers would cover the resources and labour needed to restore the rest of the building without paying any additional rent.
But now the council has hiked the rent, leaving the group in thousands of pounds of debt – and facing eviction if they don’t pay.
Volunteers renovated the farmhouse, making space for a music studio, a radio station, a bar and restaurant, and a social action hub for organisers and charities. They say their labour was valued at £110,000 by an independent quantity surveyor.
Glenn Jenkins, one of the founders of MFO, said: “We’ve put all that together and created from the bottom up, jobs, social enterprise, entertainment – all the things which exclude people by cost.
“We’re about providing from below. Marsh House is one of the latest examples of us doing that.”
MFO signed a 25-year lease in 2017, after what they say was an assurance by the council that they could continue to earn their keep by doing work on the building. A rent review was due in October 2019 after further renovation works were done.
But Jenkins says the council instead simply began charging commercial rent in 2020, rather than carrying out the previously agreed review. MFO says it can’t afford that without abandoning vital restoration works at the “very old and very expensive to run” house, and as a result has not paid.
The council, however, says its recollection of events is “substantially different” from that of MFO, and accuses the group of misleading the public. If the rent arrears are not either settled or cancelled, Luton Council could repossess Marsh House and evict MFO and its sub-tenants.
I would be completely destroyed if they were to take it away
Marsh House would be a big loss to its local community. Luton is a relatively deprived town, and has suffered cuts of £160m to local government budgets since 2010. Two years ago, research by the YMCA youth charity found that the loss of £1bn of investment in youth services in England and Wales since 2010 has resulted in zero funding in some areas, including Luton, Slough, Medway and Trafford.
Kirsty and Duncan Smith have been taking their 13-year-old twins, Ethan and Ella, to Marsh House for several months. Ethan – who, like his sister, is autistic – has been using the community centre’s studio to make music.
“With his autism, we’ve found that music works really well for him,” says Kirsty. “He’s come a long way – he doesn’t like to be in social situations much. But since he’s been doing the music, he’s found a new confidence. He’ll dance to his music, he now lets other people in to listen to what he’s doing, he’s working with people – whereas, before, he couldn’t talk to them.”
Kirsty says Marsh House has been a “safe space” for her and her family, while she’s coped with depression and anxiety.
“I would be completely destroyed if they were to take it away,” she adds.
Steven Jacob, a single parent and member of MFO, says he has gained new skills as a result of the project. When the organisation needed to submit a planning application in 2015, it didn’t have the money to pay professionals – so Jacob taught himself architectural drawing from scratch.
“We didn’t have the money to allocate to an architect, so I thought: I’m going to learn this. I’m going to do the drawings, and I’m going to put the planning application in.”
Jacob played a crucial role in renovating Marsh House. Now, he’s turned his skills into full-time planning work for hire.
It’s going to get worse
The battle over Marsh House isn’t an isolated case. London neighbourhoods like Tottenham and Brixton, and Warrington in the north-west of England, have also recently seen protests at threats to valuable community spaces.
Before the pandemic, a 2019 investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and HuffPost UK revealed that thousands of public spaces, such as community centres, libraries and playgrounds, were already being lost to local government funding crisis.
Councils in areas such as Luton argue that they have not been allocated their fair share of funding from central government. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found deprived areas have suffered a disproportionately high level of cuts since 2010, widening inequality.
Earlier this year, the Local Government Association found that rising energy prices, soaring inflation and national living wage pressures are predicted to cost councils an extra £3.6bn in 2024/25.
When asked about the threats to community spaces, Jacob said: “It’s obvious it’s going to get worse – social cohesion will be eroded more and more and more, and there’ll be fewer spaces for people to gather.”
Lives being turned around – why would anyone oppose that?
MFO wrote to Luton Council in 2020, arguing that its agreement with the town hall had been to continue providing labour and maintenance in lieu of the rent. It was met with a denial that any such offer had been made.
“As the meeting [about the lease in 2017] had not been recorded, we could not prove the agreement was made,” Jenkins told openDemocracy.
MFO filed a formal complaint, and provided what it said was evidence to back up its version of events, including recordings of subsequent meetings, but was unsuccessful.
When contacted, Luton Borough Council referred openDemocracy to a statement it published online in July, which said: “MFO are a community interest company who collect rent from their sub-tenants at Marsh House and generate income from a number of operations on site, and their last published accounts show them to be producing an operating surplus.”
In response, MFO told openDemocracy that its members don’t take any income from the project. The group said that all operating surplus was reinvested back into running the house and further developing it into a space for wider community use.
Referring to the lease MFO signed in 2017, the council added: “We can confirm that the agreement factored in the repair works to the building. Additional flexibility was also offered during COVID… We have also offered them the opportunity on more than one occasion to repay their rent arrears over a period of time and we are still open to working with them to find a solution for this phased approach to avoid them paying the full amount in one hit.
“A community asset transfer, which they are seeking, cannot be considered when an existing tenant is in rent arrears as is the case here.”
But for Jenkins, the council’s insistence MFO pay up or shift out is baffling. “This seemingly wonderful thing of bottom-up development, and people empowerment, as we call it, and lives being turned around, and buildings being transformed – why would anyone oppose that?” he said.
