Camden New Journal-news-Minister rejects calls for housing investment

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Camden New Journal - by RICHARD OSLEY
Published: 31 May 2007

Cllr Anna Stewart

Minister rejects calls for housing investment

Town Hall embarks on sell-off plan to plug budget gaps

HOUSING minister Yvette Cooper has once again told Camden to forget about further government investment for council housing.
She refused to release any of the money needed to bring Camden’s 30,000 council homes up to scratch during a meeting with senior council figures on Thursday afternoon.
Camden has been refused investment because tenants and leaseholders have repeatedly refused to follow government policy of hiving off homes to outside bodies.
Ms Cooper’s defiance has been raised as justification for Camden’s latest plan of selling off empty homes and doing deals with housing associations to raise money for urgent repair work.
Liberal Democrat housing chief Councillor Chris Naylor said: “The government has put billions into housing around the country, but years of lobbying have not produced a single penny here.
“The Minister (Ms Cooper) this week made clear yet again that the government will not budge on this issue. We can’t sit back and wait while our homes continue to deteriorate.”
Tenants have vowed to fight the sale of any council property insisting that every home is needed but Cllr Naylor added: “Selling a small proportion of homes to help improve the lives of tens of thousands of tenants living in miserable conditions is not an easy decision, but is a choice I feel we have to make.
Even before Thursday’s meeting with Ms Cooper, the council’s tactics of revealing what it planned to do if the government didn’t back down were criticised.
Labour leader Councillor Anna Stewart told a cabinet meeting last Wednesday: “We listened to tenants when we were in power and took their views into account. This is a major decision and it is being taken without a ballot.”
She added: “It is a ludicrous bargaining position to go to the government (at today’s meeting) and ask for funding while at the same time mapping out a way of raising the cash if you don’t get in this way.”

More than 130 homes on hold

HOMES on a desirable Highgate estate will be mothballed indefinitely by the Town Hall as they struggle to find the cash needed to do them up.
More than 130 studio flats out of 611 homes on the Holly Lodge estate are currently lying empty – despite the council having a waiting list of around 16,000 people eligible for social housing and spending just under £34m each year putting people up in hostels, bed and breakfasts and privately owned flats.
At a meeting on Saturday, residents met with Lib-Dem housing chief councillor Chris Naylor and were told the Town Hall had their hands tied. At an estimated cost of £15m to meet the government’s decent homes standard, Mr Naylor promised to explore every option but warned there was no quick fix. He also refused to guarantee the homes would remain council owned.
He said: “All the options are on the table and selling the flats is one of the options that has come up, as has approaching housing associations. We have to look at housing associations and a private sale, but the idea of selling them is very much a last resort.
“We want to keep as much as possible in council ownership and we are looking borough wide for funding.”
Using Holly Lodge as temporary housing for people living in hostels has been ruled out – despite Camden spending £34m a year on emergency accommodation, with nearly 100 families living in bed and breakfasts and over 200 people in rooms that have shared bathrooms – which is the reason the flats were originally mothballed.

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