Kit Malthouse
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Kit Malthouse (born 1966) is a British politician and former city councillor and Deputy Leader for Westminster City Council in London. Malthouse who is a member of the Conservative Party has led a battle, for five years, to eliminate prostitution advertising in telephone booths.
Mr. Malthouse who also is the owner of a financial firm and chief executive of Alpha Strategic PLC.
Mr. Malthouse has been campaigning since 2000 for British laws to outlaw the use of telephone booths by prostitutes and brothels to advertise their services. He maintains that this practice is detrimental towards the appearance of the city and disturbing for residents and families, since the telephone booths are, of course, public places that even children use. He also maintains that this advertising fuels gang controlled prostitution and the traffiking of women across Europe.
The problem that he has faced through his campaign is that prostitution itself is legal in England and Wales. Keeping a brothel or soliciting for sex are not. Because of this, brothels and individual prostitutes have resorted to posting photos with telephone contact information in phone booths.
Mr. Malthouse's efforts have not gone without results: although British Telecom had begun blocking the numbers concerned and collecting prostitution advertising cards from telephone booths as far back as 1996, police efforts to tackle prostitution in Britain were raised after Mr. Malthouse began his campaign.
Many pimps and prostitutes have answered Mr. Malthouse's phone booth ad cleaning campaign by changing their telephone services to cellular telephone companies, because, unlike BT, cellular telephone companies in England do not own telephone booths, therefore, they do not employ people to pick up prostitution advertisements at these public areas. Initially, they were also unwilling to bar the numbers.
Mr. Malthouse then mounted a campaign to shame the cellular operators into also barring the numbers. He became known for his "direct action" tactics in this phase of the campaign. For example, he and some colleagues stood at the Oxford shopping district in London, handing out fake prostitution advertisement cards, which included the names and business telephone numbers of CEO's of cellular telephone companies as well as the companies' addresses instead. The cards urged people to ring and protest at the company's inaction. Many of the owners received calls from would be prostitute clients and protestors that day. Following this stunt 3 companies fell in line and started barring numbers. Vodafone, the biggest provider in the UK, refused to co-operate however.
Following the general barring of numbers, most pimps and prostitution gangs moved their business to Vodafone and others who would not join the scheme.
Mr Malthouse also ran high profile campaigns against the introduction of the London congestion charge, challenging Mayor Ken Livingstone in the courts, and against the results of the 2001 population census, which seriously disadvantaged the City of Westminster. Following a two year war of attrition against the Office for National Statistics in the UK, Mr Malthouse extracted an apology and a revision of the local population upwards by 20% - resulting in huge financial benefit to the council. After this the director of the ONS, Len Cook, failed to have his contract renewed and left the UK.
In addition Malthouse was responsible for bringing to an end the long running homes for votes scandal involving fugitive Dame Shirley Porter. Malthouse and his lawyers tracked her down, froze her money and forced her to come to a deal with the council to end the 10 year legal battle. He recovered £12.3 million for taxpayers.
Earlier in his council career Malthouse was given responsibility for reducing the number of people sleeping rough on the streets. At the time, there were around 450 rough sleepers in Westminster. After a high profile campaign of tough love and creation of downstream capacity to handle the people, Malthouse was successful in reducing numbers to under 100. Throughout his campaign Malthouse was constantly criticised by charities and other politicians, despite his success. He stated: "It is not and never can be an expression of individuality to live your life as a vagrant. To do so is actually an expression of deeper problems that society can help with in the right circumstances.It is precisely because we do view our rough sleepers as individuals that we refuse to leave them to rot on the street."
On February 7, 2005, Mr. Malthouse was the subject of a Wall Street Journal article.
He retired from Westminster City Council at the May 2006 local elections.
On 26th March 2007 he was selected as the Conservative Candidate for the London Assembly seat of West Central. The Assembly elections take place in May 2008.