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We’ll fight any plan to sell our homes
• I AM responding to your front page story and editorial comment which alarmingly suggested we plan to sell off all Camden Council housing “estate by estate, brick by brick.” (A disastrous step in the dark, December 14 and The great sell out, 14 December).
I want to reassure your readers that there is no such plan. Your report was based on a list requested by the Housing and Adult Social Care Scrutiny Committee of possible options for getting our council housing stock up to the Government’s Decent Homes Standard, should government funding not come through.
This committee is an independent group of councillors that cross-examines our work. It does not form council policy and I would like to make it clear, that there is no plan for a whole scale privatisation of housing.
As promised in our first Council meeting in May, we of course continue to lobby for direct funding to renovate our homes. However, there are significant sections of council housing that are just not good enough and getting worse by the day. I have seen at first hand real problems on our estates and our street properties – windows falling out, broken sewers, mould and leaking roofs.
We cannot simply stand by and patiently hope the money becomes available – I don’t think this would be taking our responsibilities to our long-suffering council tenants seriously. It could be many years – if at all – for the investment we need materialise. In the meantime, conditions will continue to get worse.
We therefore must think with residents about alternative ways to bring in extra investment – for many homes, options will include using the council’s own funds and investments better.
And for some, where we just don’t have enough money, we will want to talk with residents about possible collaborations with housing associations, which government funds much better than they do the council.
There will no ‘great sell out’ of Camden council homes.
COUNCILLOR CHRIS NAYLOR
Executive Member for Housing
Camden Council
Judd Street, WC1
• YOUR comment along with your front page story, highlights the catastrophe that would be the making over of council properties to housing associations, with or without the tenants’ approval.
Genesis, aka Paddington Churches Housing Association, runs with more secrecy than a stealth bomber, and only a little less wastefully. Board meetings are secret, both agendas and minutes, and so are those of the toothless and worthless tenants’ consultative groups.
Their Annual General Meetings are also behind closed doors.
Council tenants have already made it clear that they want none of this; the matter should not be raised again. But the real puzzle is why the seven page document presented to the meeting on December 11 (available to the public on demand) fails to mention two important possibilities; these are the best form of social housing known to me, housing co-operatives, and secondly, the bringing into the equation and fully resourcing Defend Council Housing to act as a friend and ally.
The government is facing a General Election in the near future, and DCH are quite capable of presenting a case which will frighten the wits out of ministers who have not one shred of evidence to support their contention that the £283 million may be safely spent by housing associations but not by Camden Council.
The Independent Federation of Genesis Residents hold a wheelbarrow’s-worth of evidence that, actually, quite the opposite is true. If the wrong decision is made, the fallout will last for a generation.
PETER RUTHERFORD
Independent Federation of Genesis Residents
PO Box 50784
NW6
• THE council’s Housing Scrutiny committee on Monday decided to test the water to see whether the council could drive through estate-based stock transfers (sell-offs), demolition schemes and the sale of individual homes and public land.
All the parties in last May’s local elections stood on a platform of opposing privatisation and campaigning for direct investment. None of them have done much about it.
On Monday councillors started to rehearse the argument that unless government policy changes quickly they will have no option but to privatise our homes.
The council know that they have no chance of winning a borough-wide ballot (we stopped stock transfer in 1998 and the arm’s-length management organisation – Almo) so they plan to try and take us on estate by estate.
As we saw with the old Camden Housing Strategy Group (used to work up the original Almo proposals) and numerous ad hoc focus groups around repairs, caretaking, tenants participation and now a housing management review, they can always find a few tenants who are gullible enough to accept an invite on to yet another focus group or board.
Dressed up as providing choice and information this is a deliberate strategy by councillors and senior management to try and legitimise their proposals.
No doubt TPAS (Tenants Participation and Advisory Service) will be keen to assist the council with this strategy. They are currently employed on tenants participation – despite a democratic vote at a meeting called by the council in October 2005 to kick them out.
They’ve been caught supporting the transfer in Brighton and Tower Hamlets and have now advised officers that Kentish Town and Gospel Oak district management committees (DMCs) should not be allowed to purchase copies of the national Defend Council Housing ‘Case for Council Housing in 21st-Century Britain’ pamphlet for information purposes.
It’s no coincidence that the new privatisation proposals come at the same time as the council announces a massive cuts package and their housing management review.
It’s the script we’ve seen before: talk up the funding gap, try and demoralise tenants, suck a few tenants in and then try and make the proposals look inevitable.
Anyone with any illusions about the Housing Management Review should think about the timescale of events carefully. The review was set up without our knowledge and had already been running for some time when I challenged Neil Litherland the executive member for housing at the DMC Chairs/Vice Chairs meeting with him in October.
They didn’t bring it to the September round of DMCs or ask tenants’ associations for our opinions. The Joint DMC meeting that some of us attended at the Town Hall on December 4 turned out to be just an informal discussion with no papers distributed in advance.
The Joint DMC Rent Setting meeting on January 11 is more double-edged than ever. In one short meeting the council will attempt to get DMC representatives to sanction a budget based on their proposed cuts and redundancies in housing.
Now more than ever we (existing tenants, our children and others in housing need) have a strong collective interest to defend and fight to improve decent, affordable, secure and accountable council housing.
Please come to the Camden DCH meeting at 7pm on Wednesday January 10th, Peckwater TA Hall, Peckwater Estate, Kentish Town, NW5 2UD – and tell other tenants activists in your area.
We hope you can come to the meeting so we can discuss these issues properly. Help make sure we win round three against privatisation and step up the pressure to secure direct investment for Camden homes – hopefully in 2007.
ALAN WALTER
Chairman
Camden Defend
Council Housing
Peckwater Estate
NW5
• I AM appalled by the unscrupulous way the Tories and Lib Dems are intending to treat council tenants. Neither party gave any hint during the elections six months ago that they had secret plans to sell off council housing. Indeed in Gospel Oak the Tories actively courted tenants and promised to improve their housing – they forgot to mention that “improvements” meant breaking up council estates and throwing tenants out of their flats. When will people learn that the Tories and Lib Dems cannot be trusted on council housing?
SALLY GIMSON
Chairwoman
Gospel Oak Labour Branch
Oak Village
NW5
• AS a councillor, a former Camden mayor and a council tenant, I have always been a great believer in low cost social housing for those who need it.
I’ve always spoken in favour of it. People should vote no to council house privatisation wherever possible. We have done it before and we will do it again.
We need to defend council housing – because the Lib Dems and Tories want to sell it all off. If they do that, there won’t be any need for councillors.
RAY ADAMSON
Mansfield Road, NW3
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