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NOT IN MY BACKYARD. I LIVE NEXT DOOR TO PRESCOTT
You may have got the impression that I’m not exactly well disposed to flogging off council houses. Flog-Off isn’t Labour Party policy. I’m not even sure its government policy either. When I asked ministers in the ODPM to explain it to my local Tenant’s Assembly I didn’t even get a reply. I cant even get the DPM himself to come to Grimsby to defend the policy though he’s assured of a warm welcome. If the audience is allowed to bring firewood.
John himself dislikes the policy. Its forced on him by departmental officials who’ve devoted their lives to taking away all independent power from local government. Then Treasury would rather give away government assets than borrow on them while, behind treasury, lurks the EU, so John goes along with it: a DPM’s gotta do what a DPM’s gotta do. To stay in the job.
So Flog-Off lumbers like on a doomsday machine, no one willing it, no one wanting it. Except of course the huge consultancy industry which battens on central and local government. It tells us (for a fee) that we have to have Flog-Off. Doing the Government’s dirty work for it.
I’ve almost come to think that the government has been so keen to inflict cruel and unusual punishment on Labour councils, to get a record number of them defeated at the last local elections because most are dragging their feet on the great council house flog off. Better, therefore, to get Labour chucked out in local government and bring in Tories who believe in “fell off the back of government” sales and the Liberals who love gimmicks as in Sheffield where they set out to pull down council housing on prime(i.e. in Sheffield hill top)sites to sell them for luxury housing.
If there was such a policy of handicapping Labour councils to get them booted out, it certainly worked in North East Lincolnshire where the incoming Con-Lib coalition are gung ho Off- Floggers
So now, after questioning the sanity of the Flog-Off as a waste of public money, and being seconded in this view by the Public Accounts Committee I am now threatened with it in my own back yard and told that I stand between tenants and the luxurious new bathrooms and kitchens and Laurence Llewellyn Bowen décor they’ll get from a housing association, if they opt for suicide-sorry-transfer. Indeed my friend David Hopkinson, former Director of Housing and Chair of the NHTPC, tells me that though he abhors Flog-Off, I’m mad to oppose it.
It’s a learning experience and I’ve been fascinated by the process. The old Labour council was in such a financial mess it nervously put its foot into the privatisation water. They took on consultants, Beha Williams Norman, manned by refugees from council housing who had rightly decided it was more profitable to offer consultancy services on it than work in it. Very successful they’ve been too, taking about a quarter of transfer consultancy fees in 200l-2 supplemented now by North East Lincolnshire’s mite. They came in, told us what government wanted, but wouldn’t say, uttered the words it wont speak “Flog-it” and gave us the figures government won't provide because they show how its punishing council tenants. Then, amazingly, they advised a LSVT.
BWN may be right, they may be as wrong as they were in Braintree. I don’t know and government wont say, but on the strength of this consultancy report yet another consultancy, TP21, was appointed as “Independent” Tenants Adviser. Like all such “Tenant’s Friends” they ended up telling tenants they’ll be better off privatised, though at least TP21 did have the decency to warn that the tenants are dead against Flog-Off.
Here’s the new division of labour. The government loads the odds to privatisation by punishing tenants and councils which don’t want it. The consultants then give them the bum’s rush. North East Lincolnshire’s stock is in reasonable condition. The council can meet the decent housing target by 20l0, though unspecified other benefits which the money men may or may not provide will cost £50 million. So their advice is, don’t take any account of the better deal to come with borrowing powers, more money the new deal on housing benefits and sales and the new importance given to regeneration in regional housing policy-which would suggest putting a lot more people back to work in Grimsby by renovating and building. Ignore all that and go for “Flog Off”
So what does North East Lincolnshire do? Learn from the government’s approach to its own monumentous decision on the Euro. Kick it into the long grass while saying warm words about it by a policy of wait and see, preferably with a lot of wait and not much see. Why decide now when the deadline isn’t until July 2005? If a week is a long time in politics eighteen months are an eternity They even include an election.
So why rush into anything? You can sell minor decisions like invading Iraq on a bums rush justified by a litany of lies. But that’s not good enough for Council Housing. |
