Examination of Witnesses (Questions 219-239)
16 DECEMBER 2003
MR COLIN
MEECH, MR
ALAN WALTER
AND MS
EILEEN SHORT
Q219 Chairman: May I welcome you to the
second session this morning and ask you to identify yourselves
for the record.
Mr Meech: My name is Colin Meech.
I am National Officer with Unison.
Mr Walter: Alan Walter from Defend
Council Housing.
Ms Short: Eileen Short. I am a
tenant in Tower Hamlets and part of the National Committee of
Defend Council Housing.
Q220 Chairman: Does anybody want to say
anything by way of introduction or are you happy for us to go
straight to questions?
Ms Short: May I say very briefly
that we urgently need help to defend the right of tenants to a
real choice in the process of what is going on on our estates.
In order to have any kind of choice we have to have some kind
of level playing field, with a real option of investment in council
housing. It is what we do not have at the minute. We also need
your help to highlight and to put an end to the abuse of what
is supposed to be local democracy that is going on at the moment
in order to lever tenants out of council housing.
Chairman: Thank you very much. Christine
Russell.
Q221 Christine Russell: Could I ask you
at the outset to comment on the Decent Homes Standard and whether
or not your two organisations believe it is an acceptable benchmark
to deliver decent homes in Britain.
Ms Short: We are very clear, tenants
want whatever improvements we can get. There is a real backlog
of them, there is a lot of urgent work that needs doing. Decent
Homes, on the one hand, does not sort out the lifts or the estates
or the paths. On the other hand, it has sometimes been used to
force people to have new bathrooms when they are perfectly happy
with the ones they have. We think the problem is that it is being
used as a big top-down stick instead of being applied locally.
Q222 Christine Russell: You think it
is not flexible.
Ms Short: Yes.
Q223 Christine Russell: We have had evidence
from groups representing people with disabilities that there are
no proper access standards incorporated.
Ms Short: I think that is what
you get if you do not talk to people locally in the right way
and allow local democracy to work with tenants and say what they
need. If you apply top-down standard, you must do.
Mr Meech: I think that is the
real issue. The real issue is that tenants are being railroaded
into making decisions without having effective local independent
support to understand what is required to improve their home to
a reasonable standard, and then, above that, what they consider
they want extra. Too often we see consultants and local authorities
pushing tenants down a particular route in order to achieve a
particular investment outcome. Lots of local authorities we believe
have undertaken stock transfers, for example, simply to gain a
capital receipt, not to improve tenants' homes. That is one of
the real issues.
Q224 Christine Russell: Surely the reality
is that those tenants' homes have been improved.
Mr Meech: Where is the evidence
to suggest that is the case?
Q225 Christine Russell: We have received
plenty of evidence that the landlords have delivered on promises.
Mr Meech: That is not what the
National Audit Office said. As far as we are concerned they saw
intangible benefits, they said that tenants were paying a high
price for that investment in higher housing benefit costs and
higher service charges and a higher cost to the tax payer in housing
benefit.
Q226 Christine Russell: Could I ask you
about Unison's definition of a decent home. It does not actually
include the current fitness standard.
Mr Meech: With all due respect,
we are not that technical an organisation. We are an organisation
that represents workers at the work place and, from a citizenship
point of view, policy issues. We believe tenants should determine
what a decent home is within civilised parameters, particularly
the ones that support their educational and health attainment.
Q227 Christine Russell: Therefore, you
are saying that if someone wants to live in a slum, that is their
right, to live in a slum.
Mr Meech: No, we never said that
at all.
Q228 Christine Russell: Even though that
may have a detrimental effect—
Mr Meech: We never said that.
Q229 Christine Russell: You are.
Mr Meech: No, we are saying that
tenants should decide the quality of their homes with guidance
from their local authority.
Mr Walter: It is pretty amazing
that top-down standard has been applied to council tenants, when,
with respect, I do not think government would be walking down
the leafy streets in the suburbs and applying a similar top-down
mandatory standard to home owners. I think there has to be a question
about why one gets treated one way and one gets treated the other
way. Tenants are capable of making real judgments about what is
important to them. In all of these issues there is more than just
whether you have a new bathroom. There are bigger issues involved.
The trouble is that tenants are being force-fed in one particular
way and that is not choice.
Q230 Christine Russell: You do not think
in any way it reflects the aspirations of tenants.
Mr Walter: I think if you asked
tenants on a particular estate what they wanted you would end
up with a list of demands and there would be a significant overlap
with Decent Homes. When it is then put into the equation that
as a condition of Decent Homes you will have stock transfer, you
will probably find on most estates that the response you get completely
changes. There is not the subtlety for tenants to be able to decide
what they can have without the penalties of privatisation. That
is just a monolithic blackmail which is not necessary in economic
terms, and you have to ask the question why has it happened in
political terms. In terms of bathrooms, whilst tenants want nice
bathrooms (my bathroom is 20-odd years old and there is no problem,
the bath is not cracked, the tiles are not cracked)—and
it may be that the building industry would rather strip out bathrooms
than put in bathrooms wholesale—tenants who have got perfectly
good bathrooms might be quite happy to keep them and have some
other improvement externally. Then they want to know what is the
price in terms of the other bigger issues.
Q231 Mr Sanders: If tenants are not satisfied
that their current landlord can deliver decent homes by the target
set—accepting it is a top-down target, nevertheless that
is the target that landlords have to meet—should tenants
not be given the choice of another landlord if their existing
landlord is failing to meet their targets?
Ms Short: Actually that is not
the choice we face. I live in Tower Hamlets. We are being told
that because of the pressure of Decent Homes you have to go through
the stock transfer process. The borough has been split into 84
areas and face up to 60-odd stock transfer ballots, and the borough
will not meet Decent Homes. Partly what we have come to bring
urgently to your attention is that there is a game going on outside
here, on the estates—and it is not just in Tower Hamlets
or Camden, it is all over the country. In Wakefield and Grimsby,
where I was last week, tenants are being told—or not being
told—"The council can meet Decent Homes Standards but
we have upped the standard. You cannot meet that, so you need
a stock transfer." We are being levered out using Decent
Homes target as the stick.
Mr Meech: We can give many examples
of that situation. I understand in Sedgefield, where 96% of council
tenants had registered satisfaction with their landlord, the local
authority has still taken a decision against their wishes to explore
stock transfer—against the express wishes of the tenants,
96%. If tenants had a level playing field, if they had equality
of information available, independent information—not from
consultants employed by the local authority to give a particular
direction or from tenants' friends who are employed by the local
authority to give a particular direction, but thoroughly independent
analysis—with different investment vehicles in front of
them, and they knew the consequences of taking each investment
vehicle, then I think we would be hard pressed to say that tenants
were not right in choosing a type of landlord. But it is not the
case.
Q232 Mr Sanders: The ODPM specialist
and independent advice should have been made available to tenants
in these circumstances. You are saying that is not the case.
Mr Walter: No, it is not the case.
The record is that you have, as Colin has said, a consultant who
is employed by the local authority. There is a very small number
of them and it is a very internalised and monopolised market.
They are neither independent—because they are paid by the
council—and I have not yet met one who is a tenant—and
they are not friends, in the sense of being invited by tenants
into our homes or into our area. Usually tenants are given a choice
of two or three by the local authority. In my authority, Camden,
we have just been going through an ALMO ballot and tenants' representatives
in the official tenant forum voted democratically to ask the council
to employ an independent financial expert of our choice to model
the council's existing finances and what the various different
government proposals might mean. The council refused that. You
have to ask why that is. There is a very proud tradition in the
tenants' movement of tenants fighting for repairs and improvements
to their homes. We are not inundated with lots of examples of
lobbies at town halls and demonstrations on estates with tenants
demanding that councils do something. That is not to say there
are not problems, because there are, but this whole process has
been driven by a government which wants to privatise. That is
a very different context.
Q233 Mr Sanders: Do you think the Government's
prioritisation on the Decent Homes target is actually diverting
attention away from other important housing issues such as estate
and neighbourhood management?
Ms Short: Just by sending out
one email to the tenants' organisations on our list saying that
we were coming here today, we were sent tons in response, tenants
pleading really with the arguments they want to put in front of
you. I will give you a copy later, but I think it just touches
the surface of the need that is out there. The example I would
like to put is Birmingham, where the tenants overwhelmingly said,
"We do not want stock transfer." This year, because
the Audit Commission is breathing down their necks, money has
been put into the repair budget to address what they call a stack
of 48,000 or 49,000 outstanding repairs, and they are saying that
money has been taken away from the money put aside to do Decent
Homes. To me that says that the Decent Homes part of it and doing
repairs have become two different things. What does that mean?
Does it mean that tenants cannot have taps fixed or running overflows
sorted out because the money is in another pot to do Decent Homes?
That is madness.
Q234 Christine Russell: You have just
mentioned taps. You talk about the "gold tap effect"
in your submission. Could you explain what you mean by that?
Ms Short: I am using it as a shorthand.
Stock transfer targets investment fairly randomly, I would say.
Where you get a yes vote, it targets a concentrated amount of
investment for which, because it is privately financed and because
the people who lend it want their return copper bottomed or gold
tapped or whatever, they set quite high standards on the amount
of money which has to go in, in order to make their asset effectively
pay back in a fixed, short period of time.
Q235 Christine Russell: When my local
authority transferred its stock—and that was done seven
years ago—there have been a number of assessments done since
and they have honour their pledge to tenants to do worst first,
upgrading properties. You are saying that Unison have evidence
from around the country that that has not happened.
Ms Short: I am definitely not
an expert on this.
Q236 Christine Russell: You have put
it in your submission that this is what happens.
Ms Short: I am saying two things.
One is over the country the greatest need has not been addressed
first. Where I live—-
Q237 Christine Russell: Give us some
examples.
Ms Short: In Tower Hamlets there
are families of eight and ten living in two bedroom flats.
Q238 Christine Russell: And they have
transferred their stock?
Ms Short: No, they have not transferred
their stock.
Q239 Christine Russell: Give us examples
of where it has happened.
Mr Meech: I can.
Ms Short: Could I just make the
point that areas of greatest need are not only within where stock
has been transferred. We are talking about council housing as
a national asset, and some sane, rational decisions taken about
where investment is needed.
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