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We can’t sit back and wait for homes cash to turn up
• I WAS disappointed by the article (Council flats for high fliers, April 23).
The council executive has not yet considered any specific proposals along these lines.
Five years ago our tenants voted to reject the government’s option to transfer our council housing to an arm’s length management organisation (ALMO) – and we respect that.
So the government did not give us the £283million then earmarked for our homes, and so we still have a significant funding gap to get our homes up to standard.
Other councils such as Westminster and Brent have already modernised all their homes.
We cannot sit back and wait for the cash to turn up. We must act now to raise the £413million we need for new wiring, better bathrooms, modern kitchens, heating systems and lifts.
Council officials are naturally working hard to secure these funds. The council is, of course, still pursuing public funding, but when we consulted tenants in 2007 we made it clear that we would need to sell a limited number of homes to contribute to our funding target and the majority of tenants who responded approved this strategy.
We have not wanted to sell homes and many have expressed concerns about this – not least the New Journal – so officers have been exploring alternatives, one of which is indeed to help raise funds by renting some homes to private tenants for a limited period, rather than selling them and losing them forever. This has, of course, already been discussed with Camden’s tenants, through the district management committees which met in March, to get their views.
Meanwhile we are, of course, working hard to build more homes for Camden, to reduce the numbers of homeless stuck in temporary accommodation, and to tackle overcrowding.
We have just agreed with London’s Mayor an ambitious target of 1,000 new affordable homes over the next three years for Camden.
We are currently reviewing our hostel provision to ensure the reducing number of homeless who come to us are looked after properly.
And we have a major initiative to tackle the worst cases of overcrowding in the borough, which is making real progress with those families facing the greatest need.
Cllr chris Naylor
Executive Member for Homes and Housing Strategy
Sell-offs are immoral
• TENANTS groups and any right-thinking persons are against sell-offs and market renting of council homes (Council flats for high fliers, April 23).
With 17,497 families on the waiting list, sell-offs are immoral.
The private housing market is in crisis and collapsing, it won’t provide the homes we need, or the money Camden is chasing.
The Prime Minister and Housing Minister say they want more council houses built, and are reviewing housing finance to make it “sustainable”.
The answer is to stop the robbery of our rents. Government is taking £24million this year out of Camden rents, £1,003 per tenant. Councillors need to join the protests, stop the robbery, and help win back the money to do the repairs and modernisation. We are writing to each councillor asking them to support this.
This fight goes beyond Camden. We must nationally put the pressure on government. We again call on all Camden councillors and the executive to join us in a joint deputation to the Housing Minister to demand justice.
We are not asking for a hand-out but for our rents to be used to do up our homes, instead of them being privatised.
Meric Apak
Chairman, Camden Federation of Tenants’ and Residents’ Associations
A social service
• THE housing policy of this present Lib Dem/ Tory coalition running Camden Council is a disgrace.
On one hand we have over 17,000 plus on the housing waiting list; few new flats available including very few larger flats and even fewer adapted and accessible flats for disabled people; and here we have this council flogging off flats by auction and now they are planning to refurbish council flats and rent them out at market rents for those not on the housing waiting list but to private tenants wanting some form of pied à terre in Camden. Five hundred of them going to people who don’t face the dreadful housing conditions that those who want council housing face in overcrowded flats.
This means that the bidding for council flats through Home Connections is fruitless in that the good properties will have gone already to private tenants leaving very little attractive properties for those bidding and on the housing list.
These flats should be for those who can’t afford to rent privately or purchase. It makes sheer nonsense of the belief many of us have that housing is a social service, not for fat-cat profits; not for the Rachmans of the world to extract large rents from those who can’t afford it. These properties were built for people with poor housing, not for selling off by councillors.
My Labour colleagues are working to get greater investment in housing from the government, but the Lib Dems are stooping to new-found lows to get funding.
If Councillor Chris Naylor and his colleagues can refurbish these flats for private tenancies as they are doing then they could do that for those desperately needing accommodation. They surely could find, with a little more intelligence and thought, some funding from the surplus in council finances to refurbish these flats for those who need rehousing from that 17,000-plus list and the homeless and not for those who are not in those appalling conditions.
I deal with hundreds of housing cases a year and it hurts me to see the few successes there are to rehouse given the lack of housing and now – if the Lib Dems and Tories have their way, even less.
We need now improvements to estates to make them far more secure; proper security measures; better cleaning, and refuse collection, and other measures to make the lives of our tenants far better and less stressful; better and more efficient repairs.
To sell off our flats is not the answer.
Help from national government combined with use of our surplus of funds in the council bank account for housing held their to ensure we have a 0 per cent increase in council tax is the answer.
I want an end to selling off council flats; made even worse by the Right to Buy scheme which has severely reduced our number of council accommodation available for the 17,000-plus, not fat profits for those who don’t care a damn about the needs of ordinary people.
Defend Council Housing, that’s what many of us fight for. And that message goes to Cllr Naylor and his colleagues. Don’t go down the way of renting out empty council properties to private residents and landlords.
Cllr Roger Robinson,
Opposition Lead on Housing
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