Camden New Journal - Letters: Work with existing budget

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Camden New Journal - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published:9 August 2007

Work with existing budget

• CAMDEN complains incessantly that it is short of money. Three stories in the New Journal (August 2) show one of the predominant reasons – incompetence and extravagance.
There were children in care at £3,000 a week per head, £11.6 million spent on a council office refit and an estimated doubling of a repair bill on the Whittington estate from £4 million to £8 million.
Sadly this type of profligate behaviour is the norm for Camden. It is especially relevant in the context of housing where the current Lib Dem/Conservative administration is proposing to sell up to 500 Camden properties to fund the Decent Homes programme.
There are no realistic grounds for believing that the government will change its mind about the “fourth option” of direct investment to pay for the renovation of Camden’s council housing (Will tenants’ victory in homes battle be thwarted by the laptop neocons, July 19).
On May 31, 2007 a month before Gordon Brown became PM, the CNJ reported: “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”.
This is particularly significant because Yvette Cooper and Gordon Brown are very close political allies.
She was obviously putting forward Mr Brown’s policy when she ruled out the fourth option. That being so, the only realistic way to prevent the sale of council properties is to do the work within the existing funds. This is not unrealistic because there is good reason to believe that the estimated cost of the programme is much too high. In addition, the estimated costings produced for the arms-length-management-organisation bid and those recently calculated by the surveyors Savills are so divergent as to raise doubts about the credibility of such estimates generally.
There is a massive question mark over the costings which Camden are receiving from their surveyors.
But even at the Savills’ cost the price is much too high. In 2003 I obtained quotes from MFI as a retail customer for bathroom and kitchens of a similar quality to those proposed by Camden. The cost fully fitted was around £1,500 a room (£3,000 for the pair. ). That is half the Savills’ price. Of course, with a contract for more than 10,000 kitchens and bathrooms the price would be much less than the retail cost, probably a third less. Even if the cost for a pair of bathrooms and kitchens was reduced to £4,000 that would save tens of millions of pounds.
If kitchens and bathrooms are substantially overpriced it is reasonable to suspect the rest of the work is.
If that is the case and realistic prices were paid for everything, Camden could easily meet the Decent Homes work within existing budget.
ROBERT HENDERSON
Chalton Street, NW1

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, Camden New Journal, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@camdennewjournal.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Tuesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld. Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number. Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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