by Rene Lavanchy
SUPPORTERS of council housing have met at Parliament to increase pressure on the Government to provide more of the so-called “fourth option”.
Defend Council Housing says the Housing and Regeneration Bill – which a House of Commons committee is currently considering – does not allow councils to build and invest directly in enough housing.
The bill is meant to deliver Gordon Brown’s promised three million new homes by 2020, but opponents complain that the housing will be privately built and largely unaffordable.
Council tenants, trade unionists and councillors packed a Commons committee room this week to provide evidence supporting amendments to the bill proposed by Labour MP Austin Mitchell, chair of the Commons council housing group.
Mr Mitchell said he was “horrified” by the bill, calling it “a ragbag of all the things that have been mouldering in the basement of that department [Communities and Local Government] for so long”.
DCH chair Alan Walters told Tribune he was confident of support for the changes. “MPs, from their caseload and listening to the debate we’ve conducted, realise that council housing has to play a major role in solving the housing crisis”.
The Government’s bill changes the law to allow councils to keep 100 per cent of revenue from rent and sale of council housing, but only on newly built homes.
DCH says this will result in only 2,500 new homes a year. Mr Mitchell’s amendment extends the terms to cover existing as well as new housing.
Council tenants complained they were being coerced by councils into agreeing to accept privatisation.
One Milton Keynes tenant said: “You talk to a lot of shared homeowners: they’ve been pushed into it.”
About The Author
CRAWLEY DCH PRESENTATION PARLIAMENT ON 22ND JANUARY 2008
After spending more than £615K, Crawley Borough Council (CBC) abandoned the Stock Options Process in January 2007 without holding a ballot and we believe this is why:
Council tenants in Crawley were informed by the Council administration and their advisors that a minimum of £100M was needed to maintain the housing stock to 2010 and of that amount a minimum of £60.5 M was needed to meet the Decent Homes Standard (DHS) that represented 59% of homes failing DHS – we didn’t believe them!
Neither did the Audit Commission, who subsequent to being approached by us, agreed “the figure quoted by CBC was inclusive of the cost of works beyond the minimum required by DHS” They diplomatically suggested to CBC that it would be helpful to separate DHS costs. Also in July of last year the Advertising Standards Authority ruled Crawley Council had breached their advertising code for truthfulness by putting a £60.5 million price tag on reaching the decent homes standard.
CBC revised their minimum DHS figure from £60.5M to £25.3M. We remained dissatisfied and pressed on. Subsequently Crawley Council provided a further revised figure in the basis of the government’s DHS criteria for assessing the state of repair of its homes had been strictly applied, resulting in a further £22.6 million being shaved off the Decent Homes estimate, leaving ‘a fig leaf’ amount of just £2.7 million.
How did the Council, the usual suspects; their surveyors Savills, Tribal, TPAS (Tenants’ Participation Advisory Service) and Government South East who signed the whole thing off, get it so wrong?
The answer is the misapplication of the Decent Homes Standard resulting in many millions of pounds of newly arising or future council housing repairs that should rightly fall within the HRA/MRA being passed off as overdue work that Central government does not fund. Including, the wrong component lifecycles being used for bathrooms, kitchens, windows and heating systems making the picture appear worse than it was by many millions of pounds.
Crawley Council claimed in respect to their original calculation of Decent Homes failures they had done nothing differently from hundreds of other local authorities up and down the country. True, we believe that many local authorities convinced their tenants to agree to transfer to housing associations and accept inferior tenancy right on the basis of providing them with misleading information relating to DHS failures. We are therefore encouraged that earlier this month the Audit Commission wrote to us and informed there is a need to give further guidance to their appointed auditors in relation to possible stock transfers, including to satisfy themselves that financial information provided to tenants is robust, reliable and relevant information.
Finally, it might be that Crawley Borough Council does need to spend £100M in total to 2010 to maintain our housing stock in good condition however we have proved that virtually none of that work relates to Decent Homes and should rightly be funded through the HRA system yet the Council administration has already introduced cuts to housing services since their retention decision.
A ridiculous situation since Crawley in common with 82% of local authorities in England is in a negative HRA rebate situation, receiving no money from Government to maintain its housing and is currently forced to hand over £11M a year of Crawley tenants rents as assumed surplus rents in addition to right to buy receipts.
If this Labour Government persists in ‘not fit for purpose’ assumed surplus rent calculations that do not take into account the needs of new towns, this Government will in the case of Crawley and many other councils be the author of disrepair and future decent homes failures.
A coating of Starlite by Starlite Technologies will cut heating costs of all houses to near-zero. Let’s start with council houses.
Mr Buxton is a well know idiot.