Our House Party: Derrick Ellorm’s Grassroots Movement for Local Change
Photo Courtesy: London Less Travelled via Creative Commons
Derrick Ellorm founded his political party Our House to bring focus back to local issues. Daring and innovative, he seeks to use his unique background to reshape policy-making from a grassroots level.
Born in Ghana, Ellorm moved to the UK with his family when he was eight. He became involved in student politics at a young age, being elected councillor of his primary school in Year 3 and eventually finding his niche in environmental concerns. After spending a few years back in Ghana, he returned to the UK to study Geography at Durham University. But when the pandemic hit, he dropped out. He later enrolled at SOAS and quickly became involved in student politics. Ellorm worked on initiatives for black students, became a student representative, and stood for the student union’s equality representative. At the same time, he took internships at Deloitte, Microsoft, and the UN. However, after experiencing academia and corporate life and trying his hand at a few startups, he decided it was his ideas rather than commercialism that he wanted to be driven by.
In early March 2024, Ellorm drew on these experiences and founded Our House, a local party composed of himself and Toe Pyae (TP) Naing. For members, the party offers networking events, volunteering opportunities with local charities, and fundraising activities for humanitarian causes in Ukraine, Sudan, Congo, and other regions.
Our House’s manifesto centres around local empowerment to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis and address climate emergencies. As part of this vision, Our House pledges to institute a regional basic income. “Using an RBI, you could directly tackle poverty rather than having all these abstract economic ideas about socialism. If you give a portion of all those millions from council tax, I'm sure you won't have any poverty in that local area,” said Ellorm. But when pressed about how local councils increasingly fail to provide essential services due to a lack of funding, Ellorm admitted that realistically the RBI could not be an immediate priority for the party. Instead, they would focus on the other hallmark pledge: local allotments.
Local allotments have been used in the UK since the early medieval period, but their function has shifted from solely producing food to fostering community engagement. Our House pledges to increase local allotments to provide locally sourced fruits and vegetables, hopefully lowering the average family’s grocery costs. Still, while farming fresh fruits and vegetables can save as much as £1,000, it isn’t without its problems. To start with, the capital cost of a new site can be heavy for councils (roughly £2,000 per 250 square metre plot), and residents can also face discouraging upfront costs: in the first year, expenses can exceed £200 due to tools, materials, and seeds.
Our House also pledges to pass the No Bill Home Act. Based on the idea of EarthShip fully autonomous homes, Our House would advocate for local governments to fund infrastructure renovations that enable complete energy autonomy, solving the issue of rising utility costs.
In an address to future voters, Ellorm said, “I want them to know that there are different parties out there. We might be small, but we have our focus and our strategy. We deal with local issues, not national ones, so we have more focus. And as a local party, we could implement things immediately rather than depending on the typical five year cycle and waiting for someone else to debate it.”
Our House will be standing for its first local elections this May. To volunteer or donate, visit their website here: https://www.ourhouseparty.org.uk/