Well, I've been a tenant of the relatively OK** Southwark Council for a long time now, but if there's one issue that REALLY agitates me at the moment, enough even to come into P and P and start a thread about it, enough -- EVEN! MAYBE! -- to get off my arse and start being active again, it's current Government policy on investment in/refurbishment of estates.
**As landlords they're acceptable, anyway
To put it simply : if you're a tenant and want to stay with the Council and you want investment in your estate, tough shit.
Here is a link to a pretty good article in a certain mainstream newspaper today
by Austin Mitchell --- not bad at all at summing up the basic facts and politics.
Sold for the sake of it : this government's knee-jerk drive to privatise public housing reveals a contempt for choice
(In other words - tenants who choose to stay with the Council rather than have their housing 'devolved' have in effect no choice if they want any hope of getting their estate fixed).
Not sure what AM's general record is since Blair, but on housing at least, I think that article is pretty much spot on (at least as far as it goes).
He sticks a good sideswipe boot into Polly Toynbee's utterly crap article of a few Fridays ago, too -- she was supporting the transfer of housing to Arms Length Management Organisations. She made several crass mistakes of fact as well as wittering offensively about rows of identical monochrome doors on drab estates -- usual cliches. May get back to that aspect later.
I wanted to start a bit of a discussion on this as there must be some Urban 75ers who are lucky enough (like me) to be councilly housed .... or have (informed) views for various reasons -- maybe you're a housing worker?? Or have friends, or oldie relatives, or whoever, in council hosuing??
I have lots to say on all sorts of aspects of this, including several recent successful anti-privatisation campaigns by tenants that Mitchell referred to, that in many places WORKED at fightng off privatisation, for the moment at least. Some of those campaigns the Defend Council Housing organisation** was involved in, others not. There was a fairly recent campaign on a neighbouring estate to mine, the Aylesbury. It was an odd one that. My own (small) estate is for technical reasons counted as 'Fringe Aylesbury' but I didn't have a vote because we were never going to be privatised -- even though if the tenants on the main Aylesbury had voted for an ALMO and the money had been released to invest, we'd have benefitted .... but despite that I was RIGHT BEHIND the 'No' campaign and helped out peripherally .... the vote was massively against.
Result : lots of money available to invest in a huge, crumbling estate. But it won't be released, as punishment for voting against!
**And I couldn't give more than the smallest of trivial shits about whether or not DCH is 'Trot', or whether IWCA, or other people,
waved the biggest willies about it -- I have no idea about the sectarian stuff and don't want to
Anyway, there's your topic, the first thread I've started on this part of the forums for bloody ages.
Views please!!
**As landlords they're acceptable, anyway
To put it simply : if you're a tenant and want to stay with the Council and you want investment in your estate, tough shit.
Here is a link to a pretty good article in a certain mainstream newspaper today
by Austin Mitchell --- not bad at all at summing up the basic facts and politics.Sold for the sake of it : this government's knee-jerk drive to privatise public housing reveals a contempt for choice
(In other words - tenants who choose to stay with the Council rather than have their housing 'devolved' have in effect no choice if they want any hope of getting their estate fixed).
Not sure what AM's general record is since Blair, but on housing at least, I think that article is pretty much spot on (at least as far as it goes).
He sticks a good sideswipe boot into Polly Toynbee's utterly crap article of a few Fridays ago, too -- she was supporting the transfer of housing to Arms Length Management Organisations. She made several crass mistakes of fact as well as wittering offensively about rows of identical monochrome doors on drab estates -- usual cliches. May get back to that aspect later.
I wanted to start a bit of a discussion on this as there must be some Urban 75ers who are lucky enough (like me) to be councilly housed .... or have (informed) views for various reasons -- maybe you're a housing worker?? Or have friends, or oldie relatives, or whoever, in council hosuing??
I have lots to say on all sorts of aspects of this, including several recent successful anti-privatisation campaigns by tenants that Mitchell referred to, that in many places WORKED at fightng off privatisation, for the moment at least. Some of those campaigns the Defend Council Housing organisation** was involved in, others not. There was a fairly recent campaign on a neighbouring estate to mine, the Aylesbury. It was an odd one that. My own (small) estate is for technical reasons counted as 'Fringe Aylesbury' but I didn't have a vote because we were never going to be privatised -- even though if the tenants on the main Aylesbury had voted for an ALMO and the money had been released to invest, we'd have benefitted .... but despite that I was RIGHT BEHIND the 'No' campaign and helped out peripherally .... the vote was massively against.
Result : lots of money available to invest in a huge, crumbling estate. But it won't be released, as punishment for voting against!
**And I couldn't give more than the smallest of trivial shits about whether or not DCH is 'Trot', or whether IWCA, or other people,
waved the biggest willies about it -- I have no idea about the sectarian stuff and don't want toAnyway, there's your topic, the first thread I've started on this part of the forums for bloody ages.
Views please!!
)
