London Friend, the UK’s oldest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered organisation, has launched a capital appeal to buy its rented premises in Islington after the local council tried to auction the building giving the charity just three weeks’ notice.

London Friend needs to raise £200,000 to buy the building on Caledonian Road and launched ‘Friend 200’ last week, targeting existing donors, former beneficiaries and previous and current funders. Chief executive Matthew Halliday said he was confident the appeal would be successful enough to enable the charity to stay put.

Islington Council has a £50m deficit and had decided the building was surplus to its requirements. Halliday said he had no problem accepting that decision, but was highly critical of the high-handed way the Council had tried to sell the building with little notice.

“We have been in the building for 22 years and we’ve been a tenant of Islington Council for 40 years,” he told Civil Society. “Just before Christmas I got a call to say they wanted to come and see me, and when they did they came with a lawyer and a surveyor, and told me the building would be auctioned in three weeks’ time.”

The council planned to sell the leasehold as part of a larger property auction with London Friend as a sitting tenant.

The council told Halliday it had no legal obligation to inform him any earlier, but was forced on to the back foot when Halliday asked to see the equality impact assessment, which the Council had a statutory duty to conduct. “They’d not done one, so I used that in my favour when I wrote to the Council’s chief executive.”

In the end the Council cancelled the auction and gave London Friend six months to buy the leasehold.

Halliday added that the timing could not have been worse: “The day before the Council came to see me, we’d had notice from the Lottery that we’d been awarded £500,000 to merge with another organisation, and from the middle of April our building is to be housing both services.”

The other organisation is Antidote, an LGBT substance abuse project.  Until now it was within Turning Point but lost its contract and Turning Point did not want to susbsidise LGBT work.  London Friend will take on two more full-time staff as part of the merger.

London Friend had already borne a 25 per cent rent increase from the Council last March. Halliday added that Labour had supported the charity against the Liberal Democrat-controlled council then, but now that Labour is running the council “they’re not in Opposition so they’re not our friend any more”.