Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320
- 323)
TUESDAY 18 JANUARY 2005
MR VIC
SMITH, MS
HELEN MARSON,
MS CAROLYN
PALMER-FAGAN
AND MS
REVINDER JOHAL
Q320 Mr Heyes: Vic has almost anticipated
my question. I wondered whether, if it is true that managing things
like motivation and morale and planning for the future were an
issue for you, that fed back into the tenants' view, which, as
Vic articulated earlier, is "we want the Council at all costs
to carry on managing our housing because we trust them"?
Is it beginning to undermine that trust? Is it becoming a self-fulfilling
prophesy? "Why should we stay with the Council when they
are not doing a very good job for us?" Is there any of that
going on?
Ms Marson: I would say that in
general the staff does a good job in difficult circumstances for
all sorts of reasons—difficult for all sorts of reasons.
What did come back through the stock transfer issue was that there
was quite a lot of support from tenants for the housing service
and the staff that provided that service. Again, it is only one
factor in the overall ballot result, and maybe that is part of
the issue about why tenants feel that it is not just about bricks
and mortar but about who is their landlord—people they know,
it is part of the Council. It is that trust and security issue
again.
Ms Palmer-Fagan: We cannot forget
that the City Council is the biggest employer, employing 50,000
staff, proportionate in the tenants as well.
Mr Smith: When they were going
through the stock transfer the tenants who were on the shadow
boards and whatever kept asking, "why aren't there any members
of the housing staff?" They could not see why—not why
they should be at the meeting they knew why they should be there,
but why there should not be any members of the housing staff going
through the same procedure and knowing the same facts and knowing
what the tenants were saying at the meeting—because there
was some contradiction between what the staff were being told
and what the tenants were actually saying.
Q321 Chairman: Can I just bring you
back to the question I asked right at the beginning because in
a way I cannot understand why you are not crosser about choice,
particularly as housing professionals, because whatever view we
all might take about who should run council housing and who should
run social housing in general, the fact that the decision was
to be made through this mechanism called "choice" was
a problem from the start because it was not a genuine choice,
was it? If it was a choice that said "it is the government's
policy—not just this Government but the previous government—to
have stock transfer; if you do not do it, you will not have the
money for `decent homes'."
Ms Marson: Perhaps what I was
trying to say earlier and maybe did not do very well was that
it was not choice that I would be cross about. I would say that
choice is absolutely the right thing but on a level playing-field.
I would be cross about the fact that the finances do not work
in a way that makes it a level playing-field. If tenants were
expressing choice amongst options on a level playing-field, that
to me would be fine because that is about choice.
Chairman: That is what I was really asking
you.
Mr Hopkins: Does it not make their decision
even more significant that on a non level playing-field, with
things stacked against them, they still voted to stay with the
Council? Seeing you here today it is quite understandable why
they would want to do so.
Q322 Chairman: Or did they score
an own goal?
Ms Marson: They are going to be
expressing their choice again over the next 18 months all across
the City. It is not really possible to anticipate the outcome
of that, so we will see.
Q323 Chairman: We have had a very
interesting session with you. I know that we have only scratched
the surface, but we have got a lot of out it. We are particularly
interested in what you are doing on the tenant involvement side,
which we shall certainly pick up on. If there is anything on that
which you would like to let us see, we would particularly like
to see it to reflect it in what we say about the ways in which
local authorities are trying to give people more say over services.
You are doing some very interesting and innovative things here.
Ms Palmer-Fagan: If we look at
some of our other organisations, they are following public services
like local authorities where patients are involved in health,
and a variety of things. It is the only way really if you want
to deliver a proper and a true service.
Chairman: Democracy works! We had an
interesting moment this morning when we went to a school. They
have a school council and we asked how they found people to go
on the school council. They said: "Oh, well, we used to elect
people, but then the pupils asked us to change that because it
was only the popular people who were being elected and they were
not suitable enough, so we asked the teachers to do it instead."
You have given us a clarion call for democracy which has cheered
us up again after that. Thank you very much indeed.
| 
