CCH Bulletin Summer 2000
Have the Housing Corporation failed again?
Housing Corporation officials stunned CCH and other housing co-op representatives at a recent meeting by indicating that they had ditched all the commitments they had previously made as part of the ongoing dialogue that led to the publication of the Corporation's consultation paper "Options for Community Housing".
The Corporation's U-Turn on resident control comes despite the responses to the Corporation's consultation being broadly positive about resident control; despite the government's clear commitment to making it possible for tenants to choose from a range of resident control options; and despite a Housing Corporation board member indicating at a recent CDS Liverpool conference that the Corporation agrees with the majority of the CCH's proposals to them!
The key commitments that the Corporation currently appear to have reneged on include:
- to develop a strategy for resident control at all - despite our working in partnership with the Corporation over the last two years in a Resident Control Advisory Group, it appears that the Corporation does not intend to publish a resident control strategy - at this time, we are unsure what they do intend to publish, but their current refusal to consider issues relating to resident control would appear to fly in the face of the government's agenda
- to include weighting in development bids for tenant controlled projects - proposed by the Office for Public Management in research commissioned by the Corporation themselves
- to develop an equivalent to "Section 16" funding (funding for council tenants to look at options and set up tenant management organisations) and to provide funding for tenants groups wanting to establish tenant controlled organisations through their "new" Community Training & Enabling (CTE) Grant.
The U-Turn is particularly disappointing because it appeared previously that the dialogue that had been building up between the housing co-op movement and the Corporation had been at its most constructive and positive for many years, and the Corporation's current attitude seems very bewildering.
At this stage, we hope that this is a temporary glitch caused by the departure of the Housing Corporation's member of staff who had experience on tenant related issues, and we trust that common sense will prevail once again when they present us with a draft of the strategy they do intend to publish (whatever that will be!).
