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Inadequate repairs and the immorality of homes sales
• I WRITE concerning the immoral sale of council homes to fund repairs and, second, the shabby works done by Camden Council to our homes.
Having visited my neighbour’s flat on the next estate to mine, I am having serious thoughts about allowing Camden contractors into my flat. On the one hand, they say that all the cables must be concealed in the kitchens when they rewire sockets and lights, and on the other hand they use plastic conduits and then tile up against it, creating all sorts of mismatch.
The designer designed something but the finished kitchen looks nothing like the design.
My neighbour had to wait three days without hot water and during this time nobody told her what to expect and when.
This is no way of doing things professionally and if my neighbour had the power she would have sacked the whole lot of them from the beginning.
And to think that the money raised by the sale of our council homes is being spent on their cock-ups. That makes the whole sell-off (or market rental) doubly immoral.
Gillian McMahon
Harold House, Finchley Road, NW3
Cuts and yet more cuts
• I AM angry that this council administration is not combining forces with tenants’ representatives to lobby the government to pay back all the rent money it has collected and kept, so that our homes can be brought to a modern, decent standard.
I voted Liberal Democrat last time round but I can now see that Liberal Democrats in Camden are just the puppets of the Tories. They are so blinded with not raising the taxes that they are not seeing the bigger picture.
Cuts after cuts and yet more cuts. Everything on the cheap.
Name and address supplied
Cock-ups!
• I HAVE read the article in your paper about the cock-ups admission by the assistant director (Repairs cock-ups bound to happen, April 30).
Talk about cock-ups.
Had I known that my new kitchen would be worse than my old one, I would never have allowed [the contractors] to set foot into my flat.
I now have less cupboard space than I had before, the tiles are already falling off the walls, my neighbour downstairs has been complaining for over two weeks that there has been a leak coming through from my flat since the replacement of my kitchen. Oh, and our lifts have been going faulty since the contractors have moved in. It’s a sham!
Eugene Monaghan
St Pancras Way, NW1
A disgrace?
• COUNCILLOR Roger Robinson (A social service, April 30) denounces Camden Council’s housing policy as “a disgrace”, but, as your own editorial goes some way to acknowledge, the disgrace really belongs to the Labour government and the Labour Party which Cllr Robinson still so stubbornly adheres to.
It is Labour’s central government that has consistently refused Camden (whether Labour or Liberal Democrat-led) the money to bring the borough’s existing stock of council homes up to decent standards.
Labour locally decry any attempt to better this situation, and seem to think that doing nothing to help might eventually shame the government into relenting. Some hope! This government has so many other shames, disgraces and overwhelming debts on its plate by now that Camden’s housing money is long since spent and gone.
Yet the Labour government still makes all the rules and controls all the purse strings.
Cllr Robinson’s suggestion that Camden has “surplus” funds or can still hope for “help from national government” shows a sad and total detachment from reality.
We all share Cllr Robinson’s moral outrage at the misdirection of housing policy in this country under successive Tory and Labour governments since the 1980s, but some of us realise that whoever is to blame it most certainly isn’t the Liberal Democrats.
Your own Comment (Coalition should heed tenants over the housing fiasco, April 30) acknowledges that funding is urgently needed to bring council homes up to date and that the council is facing an “extraordinary crisis” but suggests “debate” with the tenants.
Have you so easily forgotten that it was Labour’s “debate” with the tenants about the arm’s-length management organisation that got us into this sorry situation in the first place?
Robin Young
Bedford Avenue, WC1
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